An Anxious Inheritance

An Anxious Inheritance examines the role of the ever-expandable category of "non-Muslims" in early Islam. It demonstrates how the Qur'an functioned as both a script to understand them and as a map to classify them, and this category's role in shaping (Sunni) orthodoxy. This orthodoxy was considered natural, but in fact it was based on retroactive back-projections. Non-Muslims and the "wrong" kinds of Muslims became integral to understanding what true religion was not and what it should be. These non-Muslims were rarely real individuals or groups; rather, they functioned as textual foils that could be conveniently orchestrated, and ultimately controlled, to facilitate self-definition.