Harun al-Rashid imposes on Jews and Christians distinctive clothing and belts, first attested ghiyar

The Abbasid caliph Haroun al-Rachid imposed upon the *dhimmis* of Baghdad a garment and a belt to distinguish them from Muslims. The measure has a name in Islamic law: the *ghiyar*, the "differentiation." It referred back to the pact attributed to the caliph Omar, a late-formed text that enumerated what the protected peoples were forbidden — constructing new places of worship, riding horses, bearing arms, imitating the dress of the believer.

What Haroun establishes in Baghdad is therefore not an invention: it is the first attested application, in the capital of the caliphate, of a rule that had until then remained theoretical. Jews and Christians retained the protection of the sovereign, the freedom of their worship, and the autonomy of their tribunals; they paid for it with a visible status of inferiority.

The *ghiyar* was subsequently abandoned, then reinstated according to the inclinations of successive reigns — a sign that it depended less on law than on each sovereign's will to affirm his zeal. The Lateran Council would take up the same idea in the West, four centuries later, without there being any need to see in this a borrowing: both worlds were seeking the same thing, to render visible a boundary that daily life had blurred.