Early Mamluk scholarship in the Islamic State’s magazine

This paper traces out all the references to classical Islamic scholarship with the Islamic State’s flagship, English-language magazine. It finds that more than one-third of these relate to one man and two of his students, living in Damascus during the early part of the fourteenth century. This, it is argued, can be explained in four ways. Firstly, the Islamic State uses their work as a basis for its own governance agenda, especially its search for legitimacy and authority. Secondly, it points to their struggles against the authorities of the day as grounds for its more general call-to-arms, notably its focus on recruitment. Thirdly, the Islamic State develops a wider narrative of diachronic comparison to ‘Mongolise’ its opponents and place itself at the vanguard of opposition to Western hegemony more broadly, and to its military policy in the Middle East in particular. Fourthly, it uses the internal divisions of the tumultuous early Mamluk period as a basis for the separatist claim that lies at the heart of the putative Caliphate’s strategy.