This paper reconsiders commonly-held assumptions about the existence of a causal relationship between religious orthodoxy and intolerance towards religious minorities. It does so by analyzing the notion of tolerance in the social imaginary of the Nur community in Turkey; that is, the way in which Nur students understand, internalize and practice toleration. The Nur are followers of Bediüzzaman Said Nursi, a Sunni scholar who preached in the Ottoman Empire/Turkey from ca. 1890 to 1960. A growing community with roughly six million members, the Nur are staunch allies of the ruling AKP government, and they hold significant political and cultural influence. The paper draws from ethnographic research conducted between 2012 and 2014 in Turkey among the Nur community, including participant-observation, interviews, and archival sources. Methodologically, focusing the analysis on the level of imaginary (Taylor, 2003) allows the researcher to grasp the meaning attributed to tolerance by Muslims at the grassroots level of lived experiences, along with the possibilities of action offered by the surrounding political landscape. In the view of Nur students, the reasons to tolerate are ingrained in Quranic statements that make respect for the freedom of non-Muslims a religious obligation, and in Nursi’s eschatology that makes it a moral duty by attributing to non-Muslims a crucial role at the end times. At the same time, tolerance is presented as compatible with a strong belief in the superiority of Islam and with proselytizing activities among non-Muslims. Conceptualized in this way, tolerance translates into a form of legal equality that does not require, nor is sustained by, moral equality: Muslims and non-Muslims are equal in front of the law, but not in absolute terms. The paper also provides examples of how reinterpretations of tolerance among Nur students were tied to the burst of neo-Ottomanism in Turkish society over the last few decades. This political development strengthened the tendency - already existing in Nursi’s writings - to base tolerance on group rights rather than individual rights, and, consequently, reinforced intolerance towards individual dissent within the group as well as individual positioning outside of a recognized religious group. This paper’s conclusions reflect on the strengths and shortcomings of an Islamic argument for religious toleration, the possibility of reconciling orthodoxy and tolerance, and the methodological advantages of situating the inquiry into tolerance within the study of the broader Islamic social imaginary.