48 Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. [N.S., XIII, 



the denomination, the weight and the legend were all borrowed 

 from the practice . and associated with the sacred memory of 

 those Apostolic rulers, 'Umar the Discriminator, and 'Usman 

 the Lord of the Two Lights. The opposition he met with from 

 his own children, and probably also the vis inerlioz of a con- 

 servative and obscurantist priesthood, appear to have speedily 

 convinced him of the futility of his efforts. In our own days, 

 the Amir 'Abdu-r- Rahman of Afghanistan, finding that ' ' some 

 important and influential families used to get their sons- 

 in-law to sign such large amounts of dowry for their wives 

 against their wish that it was impossible for them to pay," 

 fixed the maximum amount even for princes of the royal 



family at Rs. 3,000 and the minimum at Rs. 300. (Life, Eng 

 Trans. II, 67.) 



Indeed, this case of the Bijapur Princess is the only one that 

 I have been able to find, and I feel that I should be conveying 

 an absolutely misleading idea of its real significance, if I did not 

 add the following facts of collateral interest. These are that there 

 are no less than thirty-six other notices of the marriages of Royal 

 Princes or great nobles within the covers of the Mdasir-i- 

 'Alamgiri itself, that in eight of these cases, the various 

 amounts of the dowry stipulated are expressly mentioned in 

 Rupees only (fifty- thousand to six lacs), that the above in- 

 stance was the only one in which it was fixed in dirhams, and 

 that a marriage is recorded only four days afterwards, in which 

 the Kabin or Mahr was fifty-thousand Rupees. [For these 

 notices, see the Bibliotheca Indica Text, pp. 29, 37, 73 

 (Rs. 1,80,000), 74, 78 (six lacsof Rupees), 110, 112, 114, 119 (five 

 lacs of Rupees), 120, 124 (two lacs of Rupees), 125 (four lacs of 

 Rupees), 148, 152, 155, 158, 166 (two lacs of Rupees), 167, 211 

 (fifty thousand Rupees), 221, 225, 247, 248, 250 274, 284 (two 

 lacs of Rupees), 312, 347, 372, 374, 473, 479, 480, 482, 496.] 



Let us now see if these dirhams are referred to in connec- 

 tion with any other tax or due sanctioned by Musalman jurists. 

 Our thoughts at once turn to the Jizya or Poll-tax, the payment 

 ot which was obligatory on all Zimmis, and which Aurang- 

 zeb re-imposed on the Hindus and others of his non-Moslem 

 subjects, after the lapse of more than a century. I will now 

 proceed, accordingly, to quote an illuminative passage which 

 occurs m regard thereto in the M irat-i- Ahmadi of 'Ali Muham- 

 mad pan. The author was Diwan of Gujarat in the reign 

 of Muhammad Shah, and he has written a history of the Pro- 

 vince under Mughal rule, which is truly remarkable for the 

 wealth o statistical detail that is buried in its pages. 

 Amo Qg other things, he informs us that no less than five lacs 

 of Rupees were annually realized by the Jizya in this single 

 province, and he quotes extracts from the Imperial Farnian 

 by which it was re- imposed. 



After defining the Ahl-i-Zimma, as the People of the Book 



