Böcker av Aaron W. (Dean's Professor of the Humanities and the Philip S. Bernstein Professor in the Department of Religion and Classics Hughes

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 truereligion 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.