Much of the popular picture of dhimmi status rests on a document known as the Pact of Umar (Shurut Umar), traditionally presented as an agreement imposed by the caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab on the Christians of Syria in the seventh century, and the document's actual history is more complicated than its traditional attribution.
The pact, as it survives, has the Christian population itself proposing an extensive list of self-imposed restrictions in exchange for protection: not to build new churches, not to display crosses publicly, not to ride horses, to wear distinguishing dress, to rise in the presence of Muslims, and similar provisions governing dress, behavior and the visibility of religious practice. Historians of early Islam, working from the document's language and citation history, generally regard the text in its complete form as a later compilation, likely dating well after Umar's own caliphate, possibly assembled over the eighth and ninth centuries and retrospectively attributed to his authority to lend it greater weight.
Whatever its precise date, the Pact of Umar became hugely influential as a reference point for later jurists codifying dhimmi status, and its provisions were enforced with real variation, sometimes strictly, often loosely or not at all, across the centuries and regions in which Muslim rulers governed non-Muslim populations, which is why historians caution against treating the Pact as a description of lived conditions anywhere in particular rather than an idealized legal template whose enforcement is a separate empirical question.