Cultural Paradigm of National Belonging: Non-political Rights “If a pregnant woman comes from the land of the enemy and gives birth in Arab land then he is considered to be her child. He inherits from her if she dies, and she inherits from him if he dies, by the Book of Allah.” With this hypothetical, Imam Mālik (d. 179/795), the renowned Madinan jurist and founder of a school of law in Islam, granted not only asylum but also a form of naturalization to non-Arab/non-native women and their progeny who sought refuge in the Muslim community during wartime. Although the comprehensive legal manual al-Muwatta dispensed the ruling, the statement extended beyond legislative decision-making. Through literary imagery, it introduced symbolic values and criteria by which a native group, both within and without the political realm, elects to accept or welcome an outsider. Since medieval caliphates did not constitute political states, this historical artifact from the Peninsula’s Islamic period introduces a cultural proposition. Because it addresses how to cultivate the social norms that knit a community together, this early literary conception invokes a universal symbolic language to ground nation-building and citizenship. Today, Saudi Arabia bases national unity on an Islamic identity (“Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques”) around which disparate tribal groups cohere. This paper analyzes an alternate cultural paradigm of citizenship--theorizing rights for disenfranchised groups--developed by a line of Muslim jurists following Mālik. Such a model is neither European in origin nor un-Islamic, and it does not root national belonging in genetics or biology. Because these interventions embedded Islam’s cultural, economic, and social rights in literary imagery, they have been obscured in the formidable shadow of Orientalist opinion on Islamic law as a bastion of orthodoxy and authoritarianism. As a result, the prevailing argument about the emergence of nationhood centers it in Europe. Despite that opinion, Islam’s legal history invites a cultural-historical reappraisal. The erudite founder of legal methodology, al-Shāfi’ī (d. 204/820), developed Mālik’s paradigm further in Egypt. At the time, the region was politically semi-autonomous and had experienced long bouts of social unrest. The proposed paper argues that Muslim jurists were able to define national belonging universally by drawing on the plight of those groups in the local geography whose non-political rights were most vulnerable.