others with even greater reason.

Among those who discussed the issue were some who assumed that the Prophet ﷺ had singled out the Arabs so that the jizya would never be accepted from them. Accordingly, they excluded them and said, “It is collected from every polytheist except the Arab polytheists,” as one group maintains.

Others replied, “No one at all is to be excluded. The Arab polytheists are not subject to it today only because none of them remain in a state of polytheism; all that survive have entered Islam.” This view is the soundest.

For the Prophet ﷺ did not grant the Arabs any special legal status in religion—neither by forbidding the collection of jizya from them, nor by prohibiting their enslavement, nor by giving them precedence in matters of safe-conduct, nor by declaring others unfit to marry them, nor by allowing them things they found agreeable while denying the same to others. Rather, he tied the rulings to the designations mentioned in the Quran: believer, disbeliever, righteous, and sinner ⦗1⦘—until he said: