Surnames and a Theory of Social Mobility - University of Chicago ...

achievements of Ashkenazi Jews could just be the result of strong selecting for
innate abilities from an ancestral population that was average in its characteristics.
Evidence for the role just of selective affinity with minority populations can also
potentially explain the emergence of Christians, Jews, and Parsis as elites within
many Muslim societies. This mechanism is laid out for Egypt in an interesting study
of Coptic Christians by Mohammed Saleh. 31 All Muslim societies had two
characteristics. First, subject populations were not typically forced to convert to
Islam. Muslim societies were, from their inception, tolerant of religious minorities. 32
But non-Muslim minorities, under Islamic law, were subject to a head tax (on adult
males) called the Jizya(h), which was a fee for permission to practice another religion,
and designed as an inducement for them to convert.
The head tax was sometimes levied at variable rates. Thus Abu Yusuf, the chief
justice of Baghdad in the eighth century, in his treatise on Tazation and Public
Finance, Kitab al-Kharaj, noted that the Jizya should be 48 dirhams for the richest
men, 24 for those of moderate wealth, and 12 for craftsmen and laborers. But this
would still imply that the tax was much more burdensome on the poorest, laborers,
than on wealthier members of religious minorities. 33
Saleh shows how in Egypt, Coptic Christians who formed the vast majority of
Egyptian society on the eve of the Arab Muslim conquest, selectively converted to
Islam in the centuries following the Arab conquest of 641 AD. He finds evidence
that under the pressure of the poll tax on non-Muslims, the poorest of the Copts
were much more likely to convert. Saleh is able to show that the conversion rate was
greater in areas where heavier taxes were imposed. Also in areas where the
conversions were the greatest, the remaining Coptic population was more elite by the
nineteenth century. From being a group under the Byzantine Empire which had the
lowest status in the society, after the Jews and upper class Greek speaking Greek
Orthodox Christians, the Copts joined these two other minorities as the elites of the
new Muslim Egypt. In the nineteenth century both in urban and rural areas Copts
had higher occupational status than Muslims, despite being a political minority.
31 Saleh, 2012.
32 Though once someone converted, or was born Muslim, conversion to another religion
was forbidden, and punishable by death.
33 Muslims had their own taxes to pay under Islamic Law, though these were generally, by
design, less burdensome than the Jizya.