From Paper State to Caliphate: The Ideology of the Islamic State

This paper sets forth the main lines of the ideology of the Islamic State and carefully follows its historical trajectory. Part I, Doctrines, takes up the group’s fundamental religious and political beliefs and places them in the broader context of Islamic political thought. Part II, Development, examines the ideological history of the Islamic State, includ- ing the jihadis’ own debates surrounding it, in four discernible stages. The first is that of the genesis of the Islamic State idea in what is called the Zarqawi prelude (2002–2006), the period of jihadism’s initial rise in Iraq under the leadership of Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi (d. 2006). The second is that of the Islamic State of Iraq (2006–2013), a largely failed attempt at state formation coinciding with jihadism’s decline in the country. The third is that of the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (2013–2014), which saw the much-delayed success of the Islamic State idea in the group’s expansion to Syria. The fourth is that of the Islamic State as the outright caliphate (2014–present). [The Brookings Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World, Analysis Paper, No. 19, March 2015.]