With regard to
idrar in the Ilkhanid state, a famous scholar Petrushevsky wrote as below in the volume 5 of the
Cambridge History of Iran thirty years ago:
Apart from the fief of the military nobility (
iqta') there existed conditional grants of land and rent to members of the bureaucracy and the religious bodies. The grant for life of rent in kind (corn, barley, rice) or money was called
ma'ishat (Arabic literally “livelihood”) and when granted into heredity (
mauruth) or when it was “eternal” (
abadi) it was called
idrar (literally “pension”). Often such a grant was replaced by the grant of a village of the Divan, the income (=amount of taxes) from which equalled the sum of the
ma'ishat or the
idrar.
Now we have new sources on
idrar, however. They are two large waqf endowment deeds,
Waqfnama-yi Rab'-i Rashidi of Rashid al-Din Fadlallah Hamadani, and
Jami'al-Khayrat of the Nizam family, composed by Shams al-Din Muhammad b. Rukn al-Din Muhammad, who got married with Rashid's daughter and was a
nd'ib of Rashid's son, wazir Ghiyath al-Din Muhammad.
The former deed,
Waqfnama-yi Rab'-i Rashidi, records
idrars imposed on Tabriz and many hamlets in three districts (
nahiya) around Tabriz, which were made into
waqfs: 1795 dinar from allowances (
ihtisabiyat) fixed on Tabriz and its suburb, and 1295 dinar from taxes and
qopchur tax laid on the districts.
The latter deeds,
Jami'al-Khayrat, contains forty-four
waqf endowment deeds or summaries of waqfs. Of them, seventeen deeds made
idrars into
waqfs. All of them were made
waqfs by Shams al-Din Muhammad. Only one of them, 1000 dinar, had been a bequest of his father, Rukn al-Din Muhammad, a part of which sheikhs and scholars of Yazd donated to him and the rest of which was left from generation to generation in the family. Fifteen of them was stipends which Shams al-Din Muhammad gained the profits from taxes on different hamlets or cities as Yazd, Tabriz, Qum and others, the total of which is over 8000 dinar.
According to analysis of these documents,
idrar can be clearly defined as pension or stipend for beneficiaries in cash, based on and expended from a definite tax imposed on a definite city or hamlet. It was a beneficiary's right of property which he could bequeath and transmit by sale. It was not such as ‘fief’ or ‘grant of land and rent’ as Petrushevsky defined. Nasir al-Din's tract on finance, which Petrushevsky also used as one of his sources, specifies
idrar as stipend, and the examples of deeds about
idrar contained in Nakhchiwani's
Dastur al-Katib, which he analyzed as his main source, wrote
idrar from
tamgha tax or
jizya tax of
dhimmi. The documentation of these deeds and sources makes us reconsider the feudalistic notion about the Mongol domination.
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