Islam and the Islamic State

At its zenith, the Islamic State was one of the most developed and powerful of the various militant organisations that have emerged within the Middle East in recent decades. Not limiting its objectives to organising mass casualty attacks, it constructed a complex system of administration, including an outreach department, which produced a large body of film, social media and literature. Of these, its flagship publication, Dabiq (later renamed Rumiyah), has been its most significant English-language output, and has the potential to tell us a great deal its ideas and those of other non-state armed actors that claim to maintain some kind of relationship with Islam.

Islam and the Islamic State begins by tracing out the emergence of the Islamic State. It locates its separatist appeal within the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion and the early years of the occupation--particularly the Coalition's successful efforts to prevent the formation of a unified national resistance movement. It then goes on to position the West's efforts to reveal its "true nature" within established narratives on the relationship between Islam and violence. This campaign of "ideological delegitimisation" lay at the heart of the military campaign to denude the so-called Caliphate and was, Tim Jacoby argues, central to a global attempt to downplay its quintessentially political motives.

Within this context in mind, this book seeks to understand what the Islamic State says about itself. Attempting to get beyond the moral opprobrium that characterises many other studies, it looks in detail at Dabiq/Rumiyah. The objective here is to analyse how this vital corpus of literature engages with Islamic exegeses--in terms of references to the Qur'an, classical scholarship and contemporary Muslims intellectuals. This reveals a complex and highly instrumental approach to the faith that was fundamentally driven by a determined claim to statehood.