1. John B. Henderson, The Construction of Orthodoxy and Heresy: Neo-Confucianism, Islamic, Jewish, and Early Christian Patterns (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 1. In this essay, the use of the diacritic symbols for hamza (’) and ‘ayn (‘) follows The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th ed. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010). However, a number of works referred to and quoted in this chapter follow different conventions. In such cases, accuracy has been given preference over consistency.
2. Larry Catá Backer, “Theocratic Constitutionalism: An Introduction to a New Global Legal Ordering,” Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 16 (2009), 133.
3. The connection between religious orthodoxy and legitimacy in premodern times may seem evident. However, this connection remains of some relevance in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In 1974, for instance, President Hafiz al-Assad of Syria, a member of the Alawi branch of Islam, was under political pressure because Syrian Islamists asserted that the Alawis were apostates. In the same year, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, under pressure from the Sunni ulema, declared the Ahmadiyas to be nonbelievers. See P. R. Kumaraswamy, “Islam and Minorities: Feed for a Liberal Framework,” Mediterranean Quarterly 18 (2007): 108–9.
4. Omid Safi, The Politics of Knowledge in Pre-modern Islam: Negotiating Ideology and Religious Inquiry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 47.
5. Rudolph Peters, “Apostasy in Islam,” Die Welt des Islams 17 (1977): 17. The significance of al-Ghazali for the doctrine on apostasy, however,