Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Early Muslim conquests" in English language version.
... but this jizyah was too moderate to constitute a burden, seeing that it released them from the compulsory military service that was incumbent on their Muslim fellow-subjects. Conversion to Islam was certainly attended by a certain pecuniary advantage, but his former religion could have had but little hold on a convert who abandoned it merely to gain exemption from the jizyah; and now, instead of jizyah, the convert had to pay the legal alms, zakāt, annually levied on most kinds of movable and immovable property.(online)
The (cor)relation between the payment of the poll-tax and conversion to Islam, has long been the subject of scholarly debate. At the beginning of the twentieth century scholars suggested that after the Muslim conquest the local populations converted en masse to evade the payment of the poll tax. This assumption has been challenged by subsequent research. Indeed Dennett's study clearly showed that the payment of the poll tax was not a sufficient reason to convert after the Muslim conquest and that other factors—such as the wish to retain social status—had greater influence. According to Inalcik the wish to evade payment of the jizya was an important incentive for conversion to Islam in the Balkans, but Anton Minkov has recently argued that taxation was only one of a number of motivations.