In my paper, I argue that the conflation of heresy and racial difference in 8th-9th century Iraq affected the usage of the category of zandaqa. As Georges Vajda noted, the meaning of zandaqa is ambiguous. This ambiguity has been compounded by the transformation of zandaqa over time: the Manichaeans of Kerdir’s inscription in the 3rd century are not the same as the clandestine apostates of al-Ghazali’s Faysal al-Tafriqa in the 12th century. Even if we focus on a narrower span of time, the term zindiq could be applied to a confusing array of people. Melhem Chokr argued that, in the early ‘Abbasid period, most zanadiqa were either dualists, eternalists, or libertines. These qualities do not describe an actual coherent group of people. An intersectional approach to difference, however, makes this heresiological category more comprehensible. Instead of trying to link these disparate characteristics into a single social grouping, we should follow the heresiological gaze back to its source: Arab (or Arabized), Muslim, social elites. Averil Cameron suggested that the process of labelling certain groups as heretics tells us more about the values of heresiologists than it tells us about supposed heretics. With this in mind, in my paper, I will be focusing on how al-Jahiz used zandaqa across his corpus (in Kitab al-Hayawan, Kitab al-Bayan, and his epistles). In his work, al-Jahiz articulated a vision of normative behavior in which Arabness and Muslimness were coterminous. Zandaqa was the foil to his conception of proper piety. I further argue that al-Jahiz (and other elite intellectuals like Ibn Qutayba) were part of a conservative reaction to the disruptive effects of the ‘Abbasid imperial project. To contextualize their reactionary politics, I will draw upon texts written by Ibn al-Mu‘tazz, al-Tabari, and Abu Faraj al-Isfahani. Against this backdrop, I argue that al-Jahiz’s conception of zandaqa was crafted in opposition to those who he deemed to not have assimilated to his conceptions of Arabness and Muslimness: specifically, people of Aramaean and Iranian descent whose purported cosmologies and practices were abhorrent to him.