Dar al-harb and Dar al-islam in al-Tabari's Tafsir

This bulky volume edited by Vanna Calasso and Giuliano Lancioni aims to investigate the various meanings and uses of the expressions dār al-islām and dār al-ḥarb (commonly translated as 'the abode of Islam' and 'the abode of war') in a variety of sources, regions, and periods of the long and complex history of Muslim societies. These expressions, or better 'categories,' began to appear in late eighth-century legal discourse, when the Arab conquests had reached their peak; they were placed in circulation by jurists who were close to Baghdad, the center of the Abbasid caliphate.

In memory of my ham-pīrah and friend, the late Professor Mushīr al-Ḥaqq I Classical Muslim religious literature reflects an inclination to classify religions, human beings and geographical areas. The Qurʾān divides humanity into believers, "The People of the Book" (ahl al-kitāb), infidels and polytheists; it also mentions Sabeans and Zoroastrians. The jurisprudents expand and refine this classification: they speak about believers, infidels, polytheists (Arab and non-Arab), Arab Christians and Arab Jews (naṣārā al-ʿarab wa yahūduhum), "the protected communities" (ahl al-dhimma), "the people of war" (ahl al-ḥarb), "the people of contract" (ahl al-ʿahd) and "the people who have been given safe conduct (ahl al-amān)" and reside temporarily in the Muslim world 1 . There is no classification of geographical areas in the Qurʾān. In the Ṣaḥīḥ of Bukhārī, the expressions dār al-islām and dār al-ḥarb appear only in the ḥadīth headlines, not in the matn of the ḥadīth. 2 The situation is different in the classical geographical literature. In an important article, Giovanna Calasso analyzed the ways in which the geographers describe the various parts of the world. 3 They use for non-Muslim areas terms such as bilād al-kufr, bilād al-shirk, mulk al-Naṣārā, diyār Fāris wa al-Rūm, or Ifranja. The regions inhabited by Muslims are usually called mamlakat al-islām, bilād al-islām, or diyār al-ʿArab. Dār al-islām and dār al-ḥarb are less frequent. 4 When al-1 .[] Friedmann, Tolerance and coercion, pp. 54-86 (="Classification of unbelievers in Sunnī Muslim law and tradition " in

2007

RSIS Commentaries are intended to provide timely and, where appropriate, policy relevant background and analysis of contemporary developments. The views of the authors are their own and do not represent the official position of RSIS.

Dār al-islām / dār al-ḥarb. Territories, People, Identities, edited by Giovanna Calasso and Giuliano Lancioni , Leiden-Boston, Brill , 2017

Behind the construction of the world vision expressed in the dār al-islām / dār al-ḥarb dichotomy there is a historical path which is worth briefly returning to. The foundation of garrison cities by the Arabs during their military conquests was the initial way in which they left their mark on the newly conquered territories, seized from other political powers, removed from other laws, long before Islamic law had become a new well-defined legal system: as described by Muslim historians and geographers, they were cities without walls, having "mimetic" names just referring-as the Arab lexicographers explained them1-to certain features of the ground where they were located-Basra, Kufa-or referring to their military function, as in the case of Fusṭāṭ. Although they had no walls, these garrison cities functioned as fortresses for the new faith, not yet firmly established, that of an army mostly composed of nomads, insofar as they protected them from being exposed to contact with local populations, at a time when Islamic identity was in the making, as we would now say. Then, for centuries after the conquests, the Islamization process followed, and with it the slow and lengthy movement of crossing the frontier between different religious belongings. An Arabic equivalent of the word "conversion" actually doesn't exist in sources such as Ibn Saʿd Ṭabaqāt-recording biographical notes about individuals of the earliest Muslim generations-where the concept is only expressed by the verbal forms aslama or daḫala fī 'l-islām, "to enter Islam,"2 an action which entails crossing a threshold, be it into a physical space or a community. As documented in the Jamharat ansāb al-ʿarab by 1 See Giovanna Calasso, "Les remparts et la loi, les talismans et les saints. La protection de la ville dans les sources musulmanes médiévales," Bulletin d'Etudes Orientales 44 (1993): 93-104, in particular p. 92-93 and relating bibliography. 2 Giovanna Calasso, "Récits de conversion, zèle dévotionnel et instruction religieuse dans les biographies des 'gens de Basra' du Kitāb al-Ṭabaqāt d'Ibn Saʿd," in Conversions islamiques, ed.

MA Thesis, 2000

Throughout Islamic history, Muslims have lived in non-Muslim societies as minorities. In this essay, the central questions to be dealt with have to do with Islamic law and its application to Muslims living in non-Muslim societies. We will examine three aspects of the debates surrounding the issue of Muslims living under non-Muslim rule: (1 ). A historical and theoretical basis of Muslim concepts of dar al-Harb and dar al-Islam; (2). How these rules have been applied practically to cases since the early period of Islam; (3) . And the problems faced in the modern world regarding this concept.

2010

Dar al-islam is a well known conventional expression which, together with its specular opposite dar al-harb, forms a binomial which is considered to have originated in Muslim juridical thinking of “the classical period”. In the present article this is the object of a study which attempts to reconsider when it was possibly first developed, emphasize differences among Muslim scholars, besides evaluating its reception in other kinds of writings outside the juridical field, particularly in the works of Muslim geographers, or in travel literature, as well as in Arab medieval dictionaries. This preliminary investigation leads us to a less schematic and static picture than that of current definitions, a picture in which the juridical notion of dar al-islam is necessarily combined with that of belonging, with the representation of Muslim collective identity. The theme of the material and mental boundaries of dar al-islam is thus focused in its different expressions, at times explicit and at times hidden between the lines, in different types of texts which give us back a variety of thoughts present in the cultural context in which the idea of dar al-islam was formed and continued to exist

Licentiate Thesis in Arabic and Islamic Studies, 2017

Nowadays, terrorist attacks have become known worldwide and it appears that anybody anywhere can be a victim. This situation leads more than one to ask the question: ‘why do they hate us’? Based on this question, two more may be asked. Firstly, who are ‘they’? Secondly, who are ‘us’? In other words, what are the reasons that so angered ‘terrorists’ and what could be the objectives of this practice of terror? All these questions raised my desire to study the relation between the two concepts of the territory of Islam (dar al-Islam) and the territory of war (dar al-harb) and their role in the contemporary global jihad according to the understanding of professor Ridwan‎ al-Sayyid.

2000

I wish to express my gratitude to all of the people who helped and supported me during the completion of my thesis. I owe special thanks to Dr. Akel Ismail Kahera for his guidance, encouragement, and patience throughout the writing of my thesis, and studies at The University of Texas at Austin. My thanks are also given to Dr. Kamran Scot Aghaie for his valuable assistance. I would like to thank my wife and son who have always been with me, and encouraged me throughout my studies.