Islam and the Islamic State's Magazine, Dabiq

Address correspondence and reprint requests to: Tim Jacoby, University of Manchester, Global Development Institute, Room 1.014 Arthur Lewis Building, Oxford Road, M13 9PL, UK. E-mail: [email protected]

INTRODUCTION

Named after the eponymous town in Syria mentioned by the prophet as a location for an eschatological battle between the best of Muslims and the worst of disbelievers, the first issue of Dabiq appeared in July 2014, the week after the Islamic State (ad-Dawlah al-Islamiyah—or simply ad-Dawlah to its citizens) captured the country's largest oilfield (Weiss and Hassan 2015, xi). It was accompanied by the announcement that it had re-established the khilafah with the intention of returning Muslims’ “dignity, might, rights, and leadership” (Issue 1: 7). Continuing for another 2 years during ad-Dawlah’s expansion and consolidation (before being re-titled Rumiyah in September 2016), 14 more editions followed in Spanish, German, Russian as well as English, constituting a corpus of 942 pages and over 400,000 words (summarized in Table 1). A number of analyses of its content have now appeared. Some commentators, such as Celine Marie Novenario (2016), have, for instance, compared Dabiq with other militant magazines, while Brandon Colas (2017) and Haroro Ingram (2016) have considered, respectively, how it fosters its various potential audiences and a sense of in-group identity. Although its “religious” content has generally been noted in these (as well as in the burgeoning literature on ad-Dawlah generally (Alexander and Alexander 2015; Stern and Berger 2015; Gerges 2016; Wood 2017 etcetera), there are currently no studies seeking to understand Dabiq's particular approach to Islamic exegeses. I seek to address this by focusing on three areas of Dabiq’s content (1) its analysis of the Qur'an (2) its use of classical scholarship, and (3) its engagement with contemporary readings of Islam.

Table 1. Dabiq

Issue	Issue Title	Date of Publication	Number of Pages	Number of Words
1	The Return of Khilafah	July 5, 2014	50	10,105
2	The Flood	July 27, 2014	44	12,585
3	A Call to Hijrah	September 10, 2014	42	14,045
4	The Failed Crusade	October 11, 2014	56	20,261
5	Remaining and Expanding	November 21, 2014	40	12,914
6	Al Qa'idah of Waziristan: A Testimony from Within	December 29, 2014	63	28,397
7	From Hypocrisy to Apostasy: The Extinction of...