Al-walā’ w’ al-barā’ (Loyalty and Disavowal): Reconstructing a ‘Creed’ in the Muslim Hermeneutics of ‘Otherness’

It did not take long in the early history of Islam before the Islamic legal theorists felt the need to articulate the relation between Muslims and non-Muslims in terms that were not always theological. Already at the very emergence of the new geopolitical entity in Medina, a charter (Ṣaḥīfa) was signed between the Prophet and non-Muslim parties. We find there a genuine paradigm of an Islamic Contrat Social in which civil and political inter-relations of loyalty and disloyalty are set beyond religious and tribal adherence. It was, however, under this very label of loyalty and disloyalty that some Muslim classical