IQTA'

in the Islamic empire of the Caliphate, land granted to army officials for limited periods in lieu of a regular wage. It has sometimes been erroneously compared to the fief of medieval Europe. The iqta' system was established in the 9th century AD to relieve the state treasury when insufficient tax revenue and little booty from campaigns made it difficult for the government to pay army salaries. Land subject to the iqta' was originally owned by non-Muslims and thus was subject to a special property tax, the kharaj. While the land remained legally the property of its owner, the iqta' was a grant of appropriation to a Muslim officer entitling him to collect the kharaj from the owner. Out of this the officer was expected to pay the smaller 'ushr, or tithe, on income, but was allowed to keep the balance as his salary. However, it proved difficult for the government to extract any payments from the officers, and the Buyids, an Iranian dynasty (reigned 9321062), made the iqta' a grant of usufruct by which the muqta' (recipient officer) collected taxes from the landcalculated to approximate his usual pay. As the officer usually lived in a city remote from his iqta', he had little interest in the land or its cultivators. The grant was merely a wage, and as soon as the land or its people were depleted, it was exchanged for a more productive area. By the time that the Seljuq regime (10381194) ended, the iqta' had been introduced into the provinces and the number and size of iqt'at had proliferated drastically, accounting for as much as half the land of the state, while the term of ownership also had grown, occasionally leading to hereditary succession. With this new permanence muqta's began to show an interest in the land and its maintenance, buying up neighbouring territory and binding the peasants to the soil by refusing to let them leave without having paid their taxes. The system survived the Mongol invasion of the 13th century but during subsequent Ottoman rule was replaced by an essentially similar arrangement that was called the timar. The iqta' reappeared under the Il-Khans in Iran (reigned 12561353), where it was granted either as a hereditary allotment or for a specified period. In Ayyubid (11691250) Egypt, the iqta' approximated the muqata'ah system, common in the caliphal domains, under which certain districts or peoples, such as Bedouins, Kurds, or Turkmen, paid a fixed tax directly to the state treasury, bypassing any intermediary tax collector. Thus, the Egyptian iqta', primarily agricultural land, was leased for a limited time for a contracted sum of money. The power of the muqta' was strictly limited by extensive state controls and a deliberate distribution of land so as to avoid monopoly by any one muqta'.