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Dr John Strawson,University of East London

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Location: Warwick Law School, S2.12

'ISIS, the Caliphate and Islamic Law'

Abstract

From September 11 2001 to 2014 first Al Qa’ida and now ISIS have been able to project a particular narrative of Islamic history and Islamic history and Islamic law. While Osama bin Laden made do with video recordings, Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi utilizes twitter and Facebook to circulate the image of an essentialist struggle between the forces of Islam and the forces of injustice. In attempting to draw on Islamic history and jurisprudence these modern political organizations do violence to both. This paper will argue that this modernist discourse reflects major divisions within Islamic responses to modernity, which dates from the Islamic revival movement on the 19th century. It is from this period that political myths about the Caliphate and the idea of an Islamic state date. This paper will argue that the there never a caliphate not an Islamic state. It will suggest that Ali Abd al-Raziq was correct when he wrote in response to the Khilafat Movement in the 1920’s that Islam is a “religion not a state.”

John Strawson is Reader in Law at the University where he is Co-director of the Centre on Human Rights in Conflict. He works on the intersection of law and Middle East studies with particular interest in colonial history and postcolonialism. He was visiting professor of law at the International Islamic University Malaysia in 2008 and gave the annual oration on law and religion at the University of Adelaide in 2013. His publications in include (ed.) Law after Ground Zero (2002) and Partitioning Palestine: Legal Fundamentalism in the Palestinian Israeli Conflict (2010).

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