Introduction: Group Formation and Maintenance in the ʿAbbāsid and Fāṭimid Caliphates, 750–1000

Much of the work on the minorities of the Muslim world has been concerned with making a value judgement about the tolerance or intolerance of the caliphs. The idea of the convivencia of Umayyad Spain rests on the presumption that Muslims, Jews and Christians were treated equally in law. The converse is true for the proponents of dhimmitude, for whom the point of interest in Muslim societies is their mistreatment of religious minorities, both across history and in the present. This kind of black-or-white comparison also holds sway in popular discussions, where the “tolerance” of Islamic societies towards their minorities serves as a proxy for judgements of Islam as a religion, or for comparisons of “Islam” and the West/ Christendom. The identification of “tolerance” before the seventeenth century is a problematic feature of these comparisons: this was a world before a formal discourse of tolerance, let alone human rights. Polytheists, apostates from Islam to other religions and the followers of other Arabian prophets during the ridda wars could all be subjected to religious compulsion. And the rights that were accorded to Jews and Christians were not simply intrinsic to their status as peoples of the book, but also contingent on the contracts allegedly drawn up between their ancestors and their Muslim conquerors. Their position as dhimmīs, as protected peoples, and the rights that came from this, were dependent on their continued acknowledgement of the Islamic conquests as legitimate and upon their continued acceptance of a subordinate political relationship. A further problem with the way that the argument about Islamic tolerance is framed is that it is nomocratic. It implicitly frames Islam as a set of legal norms that Muslims are expected to abide by. We see this framing in the debate when modern commentators who seek to defend Islam acknowledge the oppression of non-Muslims by medieval Muslim