The author would like to thank the following Wake Forest University departments, programs, and offices for making the conference out of which these articles were drawn possible: the Middle East and South Asia Studies, the C.H. Richards Fund of the Department of Politics and International Affairs, the Center for International Studies, the Carswell Fund of the Department of Philosophy, the Humanities Institute, and the Provost’s Global Affairs Funds. The author would further like to thank the editors of Contemporary Islam and the many anonymous reviewers whose comments and feedback contributed to the further development of these articles. In October 2012, Wake Forest University brought together 25 scholars from across the globe and across the disciplines of religion, anthropology, politics, literature, and sociology for a 3-day conference entitled “Minorities in Islam/Muslims as Minorities.” The conference theme was premised on bringing together two rich and burgeoning areas of inquiry that often seem to be working or thinking through their topic separately: one which aims to enrich our understanding of the experience of Muslims as minorities and another which examines the engagement of Muslims with minorities. The themes of this conference are central to Contemporary Islam, as it demonstrates the interaction between local and global in—and the dynamic character of-contemporary Islamic thought and practice. Some papers (such as Warren and Gilmore’s) deal more with theory, others focus a bit more on practice (such as Leichman’s), and some treat theory and practice in near equal measure (such as Shavit’s and Burhani’s). However, the four papers from that conference, published here for the first time, each speak in various ways to the intersection of Islamic thought and practice on the topic—as well as the ways in which Islamic thought and practice is today a translocal phenomenon, crossing boundaries of Sunni and Shi‘i, and expanding from the Middle East to Africa to Asia to Europe and beyond. The status of Muslim minorities residing in non-Muslim contexts is not a new topic for Islamic thinkers. Abu-Salieh’s study of “The Islamic Concept of Migration” demonstrates how such classical Islamic jurists such as Muhammad Ibn Idris al-Shafi‘i (767–820) and Muwaffaq al-Din Ibn Qudama (1147–1223) both maintained that, in general, “Muslims living in dar al-harb [the land of war; land not governed by Cont Islam (2014) 8:211–215 DOI 10.1007/s11562-014-0299-6