Ruaya

(singular raiyat), in Muslim countries of the Middle East, originally, all subjects; from the ninth century, members of the tax-paying classes of peasants and townspeople. In the late Middle Ages, the may a were primarily payers of the land tax, the kharaj, hence feudally dependent peasants; juridically they were considered free, but in fact they were deprived of the right to move to another place (in contrast to the ranjbaran in Azerbaijan and Armenia of the 16th to mid-19th centuries, who were attached to the person of the landowner). The prohibition forbidding the ruaya to move was abolished in Iran in the early 20th century. In the Ottoman Empire from the 18th century, the Turks applied the term ruaya only to the non-Muslim population, regardless of social positon.