, "gift", the term most commonly employed to denote, in the early days of Islam, the pension of Muslims, and, later, the pay of the troops. It is impossible to give here the history of the system of pay throughout the Muslim world, and this article will be confined to a general outline. The traditional starting-point is the organisation of the pensions by ʿUmar b. al-Ḵh̲aṭṭāb. The first Muslims had derived no material advantage except their share of the booty from successful expeditions. The flow of taxes into the coffers of the nascent caliphate …

, a word derived, via Syriac, from Greek χορηϒία, but attached by the Arabs to the native root k̲h̲ . r. d̲j̲ . Contrary to its original meaning, the word seems, in the current usage of the Near East, to have denoted “tax” in general, and is in fact found with reference to various specific taxes, thus causing considerable confusion [see d̲j̲izya ]. Arabic technical and legal literature uses it more specifically, at least in the period before the formation of Turkish states, in the sense of land tax, and it is this sense which is exclusively discussed in the present article. For other taxes, see bayt…