The Declaration of 2014 and How Scholars Answered It

On 29 June 2014 the group announced the restoration of the caliphate and called on Muslims everywhere to give allegiance to its leader. The claim is what brings it within the scope of a religious atlas: a caliphate is a specific institution in Islamic political thought, abolished in 1924, and asserting it is a religious as well as a military act.

The answer from Muslim scholarship was quick, public and detailed. In September 2014 more than a hundred and twenty scholars and jurists from across the Sunni world published an open letter addressed to the group's leader, setting out point by point why the declaration and the practices attached to it did not meet the requirements of Islamic law as those scholars understood them. Their objections were procedural and substantive together: that a caliphate requires the consensus of Muslims and of their scholars and cannot be self-proclaimed; that the qualifications for the office were not met; that the pronouncing of other Muslims as unbelievers is forbidden except within narrow limits; and that a long list of specific practices was contrary to established law.

Al-Azhar in Cairo, the Saudi Council of Senior Scholars, and Shia authorities issued rejections of their own. The atlas records the claim and its reception because both belong to the record, and it records the rejection as the position of the bodies that stated it.