Full Description
Who defines right belief, and how does it acquire authority? Illusions of Orthodoxy explores these questions in the Islamic world of the tenth and eleventh centuries, when rival caliphates, expanding empires, and developing legal and theological traditions competed to shape religious life. Across Sunni, Shi'i, and Ibāḍī contexts, its contributors draw on legal and theological writings, historiography, poetry, and epigraphy to examine how boundaries between orthodoxy and heresy were drawn, challenged, and negotiated.
Together, these studies challenge the assumption that orthodoxy constituted a stable consensus against which heresy could be measured. They investigate struggles over scholarly authority, political legitimacy, and communal belonging, revealing multiple claims to right belief fashioned through controversy, exclusion, and accommodation. The "illusions" of orthodoxy lie in the apparent unity and permanence of boundaries whose histories were contested.
