Jizya is not a Persian term

The "head tax" is a Persian concept, applied upon the various Aramaeans whom the Sasanians ruled. On the word they used for it: Mustafa Akyol, whose Mutazilite Islamic Moses book I've just read, really needs to quit citing Ziauddin Ahmad on some Persian etymology for "Kizyat" or whatever.

Several circumstantial problems attracted my suspicions.

For one, where both later Semitic and Iranian languages have an -ah suffix, Semitic tends to reveal that theirs came from -at. Mediaeval Iranian feminines go more to the -ag, -aj, -ak, and -aq. So I'd not expect a "kizyat" in Middle-Persian, only in mediaeval postIslamic Farsi... or in later Arabic anachronisms like in Tabari then Bal'ami.

Also, where we catch late-Antique Aramaeans mentioning the Iranian-imposed head tax, as Goldblatt cites the local Talmud: it is krg'. Take off the emphatic suffix, do some aspiration and out comes the kharaj about which we (also) hear so much under the later Umayyads. (Jews were the suckers who had to pay the thing.) Note meanwhile that -j.

Add to all this that I don't see jizya or gzitho applied to tribute (westSyriac mdatto) until, what, the Maronite Chronicle and then Theodotus of Âmid(a).

Akyol is correct on the concept but is clearly a better philosophical-historian than he is a philologist, so should be more careful when dabbling into the latter.