ISIS’ Appropriation of Classical Islamic International Law

May 08

Brookings’ 2015 US-Islamic World Forum invited me recently to contribute to Will McCants’ series of discussions regarding ISIS’s relationship to the Islamic tradition which he initiated in response to the now (in)famous Atlantic piece by Graeme Wood, “What ISIS Really Wants“. I wrote about ISIS’s appropriation of classical concepts such as dar al-islam and dar al-harb to justify their actions against their enemies, domestic and foreign, while ignoring over 1200 years of the concepts’ evolution, including, in the post-World War II era where leading Muslim jurists have concluded that the distinction is irrelevant in the modern world.

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