ABSTRACT
This chapter presents issue with the use of ‘tolerance’ to inform debates about the dhimmi rules. It addresses the dhimmi legal doctrines both to illuminate their internal logic and to situate them more broadly in contemporary debates about tolerance, pluralism, and the challenge of governing a diverse polity. There are two different and distinct ways to address the legal other in Islamic law. The first, which is animated by the concept of ‘jurisdiction’, concerns the place of other legal traditions within Islamic law. The second concerns the ‘religious other’ living in Islamic lands governed by Islamic law. In both cases, premodern Muslim jurists imagined the foreign law and the religious other as appearing before a ‘domestic’ court in Islamic lands. The chapter examines both approaches to the ‘legal other’ in Islamic law. It shows in the Islamic and liberal constitutional case, both legal systems address anxieties about the public good by targeting those who are different and, powerless to resist.
