Dhimmi comes from the word "Dhumma", meaning "Ward". From the earliest days of Muslim expansion, Muslims were a minority ruling over a non-Muslim majority. These majority communities were Dhimmis, protected people who were generally left alone in their daily affairs and governance, except they paid a tax in exchange for military protection, instead of the charity tax Muslims paid. On one famous Occasion, a Muslim governor returned a city's Jizya tax money because he couldn't defend it from the Byzantines. The city leaders refused it, and told the governor to use their tax money elsewhere to defeat the Byzantines. Nonetheless, he returned it out of religious obligation.

Treatment and rights of Dhimmis varied from dynasty to dynasty and century to century. A fabricated text called the "pact of Umar" was enforced by some rulers who thought it was written by the Prophet Muhammad's friend and heir. This pact between Muslims and non-Muslims gave them rights and security, but also imposed several petty restrictions on them meant to make them feel like second class status. Sometimes dress codes made mandatory as well, because religious identity was important in some dynasties. Depending on whether he's from an earlier Arab dynasty, or a later ottoman one, the yellow turban means he's a Christian or Jew respectively.

Unbeknownst to most people including Muslims, in the 19th century the last Muslim empire in existence, the Ottoman empire, finally ended the idea of Dhimmi. Their scholars determined that non-Muslim Ottomans were full citizens, and that Dhimmi status was an outdated practice for integrating recently conquered people.