A DEMON WITH RUBY EYES 127treatment under new regimes is based on context and is enacted
through law and taxation. The first enactment of this theory is with a
community of merchants, artisans, and laborers who are political
powerful because they are essential to the local economy. They are to
be embraced, their customs supported, and their prosperity ensured
because with them comes the prosperity of the polity. In return for the
accommodation of their religious practices, they offer the Muslim
leader, Qasim, their loyalty. The other enactment of this theory is with
a nomadic tribal community that must be regulated and punitively cir-
cumscribed such that they cannot disrupt the political regime.
Both of these cases can be read as annotations of a translation act
in the Chachnama-they treat the polity's new subjects as legal and
moral agents. In both cases, Chachnama posits a legal or historical pre-
cedent from the Hindu polity of Chach and the early Muslim polities
of Syria. Chachnama as political theory engages difference from the
perspective of achieving an ordered city and demonstrating the con-
tours and limits of that exercise with examples, edicts, and declara-
tions. The political model for understanding difference in Chachnama
is not based on a mutually recognizable theology but on a political and
legal understanding of governance.