الشروط العمرية : دراسة نقد-تاريخية

Abstract EN

The so-called Omar’s Terms of Peace have been used by several ancient Arab sources to denote the conditions to which the people of either Bilad al- Sham or al-Jazira Province have surrendered to the second Rashidi caliph Omar ibn al- Khattab.

In light of this document, a body of jurisprudence (fiqh) was composed to formulate the kind of religious, as well as social status of the non-Muslims (Ahl al-Dhimma) in the framework of the Islamic community.

Yet, serious questions about how much these terms are historically factual arise from the fact that they have never appeared in many of the reliable books of fiqh, nor in any of the most authoritative sources of history.

The present paper examines these questions.

Chains of traditionalists who transmitted the document are thoroughly scrutinized to evaluate their reliability.

So also its themes are investigated in depth to find out whether they really belong to Omar himself.

The conclusion reached in the paper is that the document lacks historical grounds to be attributed to the caliph, and that it was composed some three centuries after his death.