Kharaj

Kharaj is a type of individual Islamic tax on agricultural land and its produce developed under Islamic law.

With the first Muslim conquests in the 7th century, kharaj initially denoted a lump-sum duty levied upon the lands of conquered provinces, which was collected by hold-over officials of the defeated Byzantine Empire in the west and the Sassanid Empire in the east; later and more broadly, kharaj refers to the land tax levied by Muslim rulers on their non-Muslim subjects, collectively known as dhimmi. At that time, kharaj was synonymous with jizyah, which later emerged as a per head tax paid by the dhimmi. Muslim landowners, on the other hand, paid only ushr, a religious tithe on land, which carried a much lower rate of taxation, and zakat.