The decree of al-Mutawakkil: a distinguishing mark on the dress

The standing of Jews and Christians in the caliphate was called dhimma: protection in exchange for subordination. Behind it lay a body of conditions ascribed to the caliph Umar—what non-Muslims might and might not do. For two hundred years it was applied loosely.

The caliph al-Mutawakkil turned the state towards strictness and in the year 235 of the Hijra, that is in 850, gave those conditions the force of a decree. Jews and Christians were to wear the taylasan hood and the zunnar belt in honey colour; to ride with wooden stirrups and two balls on the saddle; to sew on the garments of their slaves two patches of the same colour, four fingers wide. They were not to be employed in the government offices; Muslim teachers were not to teach their children; no crosses were to be carried on their feast, no Jewish chanting to be raised in the streets. A tenth of their houses was to be confiscated; houses of worship built after the coming of Islam were to be pulled down or turned into mosques; their graves were to be levelled with the ground so as not to resemble the graves of Muslims.

All this was set down by al-Tabari, a Baghdad historian of the next generation, in his History of the Prophets and Kings under the year 235.

How far the decree was carried out is another question. Orders of this kind were repeated in the caliphate, and what is repeated is usually what is not kept. The academies of Sura and Pumbedita went on working, the Geonim sent out answers from Spain to Persia, and twenty-five years later Rav Amram Gaon sent his prayer book to Barcelona.

But the rule had been put on paper: the difference must be visible to the eye. Europe would reach the same thought at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.