Islamic State as a Legal Order; To Have No law but Islam, between Shar??a and Globalisation

Federico Lorenzo Ramaioli

Routledge, Oxfordshire, 2022, 212 pp.

ISBN 9781003262916

Faizan Akbar

 

The book under review tries to tackle a problem that is rather complicated. As a word of caution, the book is not about the concept of Islamic State, but the spectacle of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, henceforth ISIS, which gained notoriety in 2014 after declaring the establishment of a global caliphate based on Prophetic principles (khilafah ‘ala minhaj al-nubuwwah).1 Although, this spectacle was short-lived but its influence, extending across borders, had caused shockwaves throughout the international system. Since the group’s influence and reach was quite expansive, it naturally evoked analysis and responses from the global academia and media alike, aiming at fathoming and explaining it.2 Nonetheless, the current book entails a uniquity in its approach; it tries to capture “ISIS as an expression of a legal order”, not just in its actuality but also in terms of “what it wanted to be” (p. 07). So, put simply, Ramaioli undertakes a juridical analysis of ISIS with an aim to answer the question “what is law for ISIS?” (p. 04). Pertinent to mention, the category of “legal order” is not understood as a mere structure of laws but in a quite comprehensive manner, including both the idea of all-encompassing law and a structure of normativity that sustains any social order (p 06). In narrating the ISIS’ side of the story, the book relies largely on two sources, Dabiq and Rumiyah.