ABSTRACT
This chapter engages with Armando Salvatore and Mark Levine's call, in the context of Muslim-majority societies, to "give voice to—and at the same time, properly contextualize—these politically and socially marginalized public spheres". Salvatore and Levine argue for the need to recognize that even where certain categories of people such as women, minorities, or colonized populations were excluded from the dominant public sphere they did not sit idly by, but rather they created alternative parallel public spheres that must be uncovered and investigated. Public articulations of the non-Muslim faith in a dominant Islamic order were interpreted by many Muslim jurists and legal arbiters as a potential form of religious proselytism. As Emon writes with reference to the medieval period, "Public displays of religious ritual [could] challenge Muslims in their faith commitments [and] at the very least had to be punished and at most were security threats against the polity.".
