The physical migration (hijra) from Mecca to Medina of the first community of believers was a movement from what early Islamic jurists termed the abode of war (dār al-ḥarb) to the abode of peace (dār al-islām). The Quran uses the terminology of dār both in an eschatological sense – referring to dār al-ākhira, the “last abode”, dār al-salām, the “abode of peace”, and dār al-bawār, the “abode of perdition” – and in the sense of a physical space: “those who made their abode in the city (al-dār i.e. Madīna) and adopted the faith before them”. However, it is only in the 2nd/8th century that the dichotomy between dār al-islām and dār al-ḥarb became established as a legal concept, both in the traditional fiqh literature but also in the genre of siyar that dealt with international relations and the rules pertaining to Muslim lands. This dichotomy intersects some of the most important legal issues in Islam: those of hijra (what constitutes an “abode” to migrate from and to), jihād (the various subcategories of dār al-ḥarb that determine the validity of caliphal warfare) personal conduct (do the same rules apply to a Muslim in dār al-ḥarb as they do in dār al-islām?) and so on. Despite its importance, however, the dichotomy has received surprisingly little academic attention; whilst any such discussion has been subsumed as an ancillary addendum to related legal issues.
Thus this book Dār al-islām/dār al-ḥarb: Territories, People, Identities, published as the result of an International Colloquium held at Sapienza University in Rome, is a welcome step forward for scholarship in this field. The volume includes 19 articles, split into five sections: 1. Concepts and terminology (essays by Giovanna Calasso, Giuliano Lancioni, Yaacov Lev and Biancamaria Scarcia Amoretti); 2. Early texts (essays by Roberta Denaro, Roberto Tottoli, Raoul Villano); 3. Law: Theory and practice (essays by Eric Chaumont, Francisco Appelaniz, Nicola Melis); 4. History of specific areas (essays by Maribel Fierro, Luis Molina, Camille Rhone, Michel Balivet, Francesco Zappa); and 5. Modern and contemporary developments (essays by Alessandro Cancian, Chiara Formici, Yohanan Friedmann, Antonino Pellitteri, Francisca Romana Romani and Eleonara Vincenzo).
The essays span varying thematic, geographic and chronological spaces. However, a key common issue of contention is terminology: are the terms dār al-islām / dār al-ḥarb fixed categories representative of a single Islamic Weltanschauung, or can we instead talk of multi-layered dārs in the plural that shifted meaning depending on context? All of the essays, and indeed the concluding remarks by Giuliano Lancioni, argue for the latter. Dār al-ḥarb was primarily defined negatively, i.e. the absence of the conditions/factors that rendered a territory “Islamic” would make it the abode of ḥarb/kufr. Conditions such as the lack of Muslim political and legal authority, being unable to live in safety, along with being unable to manifest and practise the faith freely would all contribute towards designating a particular land as dār al-ḥarb. The synonyms of dār al-ḥarb, such as dār al-kufr “abode of unbelief”, and dār al-shirk or the “abode of polytheism”, imply that the definition of territories was intimately linked to confessional lines of demarcation. However, despite the fact that the application of Islamic law was, in early Islam, inevitably linked to political rule, the authors argue that jurists – such as the early Hanafis – did not overtly make Muslim political authority a prerequisite for a land to be categorized as dār al-islām.
This extended to the notion of a third territorial category, the “abode of treaty” (dār al-ʿahd), also referred to as dār al-muʿāhada or dār al-ṣulḥ, the “abode of truce”; and was used to describe any adjacent non-Muslim political entity with which the Muslims entered into a (temporary) treaty of non-aggression, and requiring a payment of tribute. Although the legal schools differed as to whether this was a subcategory subsumed under dār al-Islām or dār al-ḥarb or an independent category in and of itself, it did not lead to a tripartite model but nuanced the manifestation of the existing binary one.
It becomes apparent reading the volume that the lexicographical array utilized when speaking of dār al-islām / dār al-ḥarb is concerned with delineating the boundaries of community: either the physical boundaries of territory, power and rule, or the religious boundaries between Muslims and others. Furthermore, the juristic method of referring back to the Quran, statements of the Prophet and the early Muslim community did not force a single strain of interpretation in Islamic legal thought, neither did it shackle the ability of jurists to build novel legal solutions to new political realities. Thus the book is to be commended for introducing nuance to the concept which, far too often in the academic literature, is represented as a fixed, monolithic reality. One omission from the references is Sarah Albrecht's 2014 PhD entitled “Dār al-Islām revisited. Territoriality in contemporary Islamic legal discourse on Muslims in the West”, which deals with the use of dār al-Islām within the context of modern fiqh al-aqallīyāt approaches to law in the West. In any case, scholars and students of Islamic law, history and society, especially in the context of Muslim minority communities, will find this an invaluable starting point for further research into the dār al-islām / dār al-ḥarb paradigm.
