Minorities have always played a significant role in shaping and projecting the wider policies of larger societies, nations, states, and empires. Islam is certainly no exception, especially given the fact that throughout its diverse history, Islam has always included many minority traditions (including, of course, Islamic ones). Muslim thinkers, for example, have thought about their tradition using these minorities, just as such minorities have done the same with various Islamic traditions to think about their own within the larger orbit of Islam. Too much of this work, we submit, is currently published in a variety of often specialized journals with often limited readerships. Currently, there is no one venue where those working with specific minorities—for example, Armenians, Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians—can present their work in ways that will be of relevance to those working with similar problematics but with other minority traditions. It is within this context that we came up with the idea behind the Journal of Religious Minorities under Muslim Rule. We hope it will provide a central forum where scholars accustomed to working in their own specialized subfields will be able to talk to one another through the more general topic they all have in common, namely, religious minorities who lived (and, in some cases, continue to live) within Muslim majoritarian contexts. We trust that a new journal that focuses particularly on these minorities will provide enough freedom—both historically and geographically—to both authors to publish their research and readers and to easily locate important advances in the field.

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