What follows is an exploration, through ethnography, of how some people have reasoned about difficult problems of law, religion, and ideals of equality in a pluralistic society, Indonesia. I examine struggles over how best to apply the legal traditions and religious norms of Islam to family life. In Indonesia and elsewhere, disputes over this issue also have been disputes about political allegiance, religious toleration, and, indeed, the very survival of pluralistic societies. Debates and conflicts in Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim-majority country, have a strong bearing on one of our most significant human debates, about how people can live together, admitting their deep differences of values and forms of life, and forging ways to tolerate and accept those differences.

In Europe and North America, philosophers and political theorists have framed this debate as a question for liberal political theory: How far can the tradition of Locke, Hobbes, Kant, and Mill be stretched to fit political communities composed of differing subcommunities, each with its own set of values and rules for social life? Some theorists have answered that all such subcommunities should agree on a core set of liberal principles; others have argued that when no such core set can be found, which is often the case, we should look instead for a modus vivendi, a way to get along without agreeing on a set of basic political principles.