iqṭāʿ, in the Islāmic 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 iqṭāʿ 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 iqṭāʿ was originally owned by non-Muslims and thus was subject to a special property tax, the kharāj. While the land remained legally the property of its owner, the iqṭāʿ was a grant of appropriation to a Muslim officer entitling him to collect the kharāj from the owner. Out of this the officer was expected to pay the smaller ʿushr, 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 Būyids, an Iranian dynasty (reigned 932–1062), made the iqṭāʿ a grant of usufruct by which the muqṭaʿ (recipient officer) collected taxes from the land—calculated to approximate his usual pay. As the officer usually lived in a city remote from his iqṭāʿ, 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 (1038–1194) ended, the iqṭāʿ had been introduced into the provinces and the number and size of iqṭʿat 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 muqṭaʿs 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 iqṭāʿ reappeared under the Il-Khans in Iran (reigned 1256–1353), where it was granted either as a hereditary allotment or for a specified period.
In Ayyūbid (1169–1250) Egypt, the iqṭāʿ approximated the muqāṭaʿah 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 iqṭāʿ, primarily agricultural land, was leased for a limited time for a contracted sum of money. The power of the muqṭaʿ was strictly limited by extensive state controls and a deliberate distribution of land so as to avoid monopoly by any one muqṭaʿ.