Islamic State

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.

A reference work that covers religion has to decide what to do with a movement whose religious claims were rejected by the tradition it claimed. Omitting it would leave the rejection unexplained and would remove from the record the documents in which Muslim scholars set out what a caliphate is and is not. Including it risks reading as endorsement. The atlas takes the first risk and states the reason here.

The findings of others are recorded as theirs. The Independent International Commission of Inquiry established by the United Nations Human Rights Council reported in 2016, in a document titled They Came to Destroy, that the group's campaign against the Yazidi population of Sinjar from August 2014 constituted genocide, and set out the evidence on which it reached that conclusion. The Republic of Iraq subsequently enacted the Yazidi Female Survivors Law, which recognises the crimes and provides for reparations. Independent demographic work published in a medical journal produced estimates of those killed and taken captive. Those are the findings of a United Nations commission, of a national legislature and of academic researchers respectively, and they are cited as such.

The atlas holds the entry as a record of claims made and answered. It does not present the group's religious assertions as accepted by any body of Muslim scholarship, because they were not.