Article in International Studies · April 018 doi: 10. 1177/0020881718790687 citations reads 4,427 author: Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects

The Traditional Approach 

The traditional approach has been the dominant approach to defining Islamic foreign relations in 

the formative period of Islam and beyond, especially from the seventh century to the end of the 

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eighteenth century. This approach also largely informs the emergence of the jihadist perspective, 

explained below, in the early twentieth century Middle East. Abo-Kazleh (

2006, p. 42)

 identifies 

two basic assumptions that decisively shaped the traditional approach. The first is the image of a 

divided world – Dar al-Islam (the domain of peace) and Dar al-Harb

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 (domain of conflict/war). 

The Dar al-Islam refers to all territories under Islamic control, where God’s rules or Islamic 

Sharia are enforced and peace in general prevails. The Dar al-Harb, on the contrary, pertains to 

territories under the control of the non-believers, where Islam exerts no dominance, and is 

actively or potentially hostile to Dar al-Islam and the Muslims.

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 The Muslim jurist Abu Hanifah 

was the first to introduce the concept of Dar al-Harb and opined that a Dar al-Harb could turn 

into a Dar al-Islam if two conditions were met – if the said Dar al-Harb had some common 

borders with Dar al-Islam and if Muslims were able to live in peace and security in that Dar al-

Harb. The second assumption relates to the basic responsibility of the Dar al-Islam to preach the 

message of God as scribed in the Qur’an, a responsibility that must be performed peacefully, and 

by the use of force, if that becomes absolutely necessary (verse 9: 5). Fighting against the Dar 

al-Harb, what the traditionalists call ‘jihad’, to spread the Qur’anic righteous order worldwide 

appeared inevitable, as the establishment of a Pax Islamica primarily depended on the gradual 

reduction of the territorial size of the Dar al-Harb and the submission of the unbelievers to Dar 

al-Islam. Non-Islamic states could have treaty relationships with the Dar al-Islam but Islamic 

jurists had no consensus on the exact durations of such treaties or when the Islamic caliphate 

could abrogate the treaty relationships (Takim 2011, 10). However, the presumed resistance of 

the Dar al-Harb to the Islamic universal moral order must be met with force until “the word of 

God is exalted to the heights” (verse 9: 40). The Qur’an, at the same time, prohibits 

transgressions on the part of the Muslims. It specifically says (verse 2: 190): “Fight in the way of 

God against those who fight against you, but do not transgress. God does not love those who 

transgress.”  

 

The specific context behind the Qur’anic sanctions for the use of force is related to the hostilities 

Prophet Muhammad and his followers encountered in Mecca and Medina. Other than the 

believing Muslims, the prophet had two categories of people to deal with: non-believers who 

                                                           

    

 

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were at peace with the new community of Muslims, and the fearful combatants (called kha’if 

muharib) (Bsoul 2007, p. 73). It was this second group of non-believers, the hostile anti-Islam 

forces against whom Muslims were permitted to use force. After the death of the Prophet, the 

different Islamic caliphates used this principle to deal with the non-Islamic Persian, the 

Byzantine and other European empires. Specifically, in the formative years of Islam, Muslims 

saw the Persian and the Byzantine empires as mortal threats and persistent conflicts with these 

two empires also shaped Islamic thinking on international relations. This is how the world was 

divided into two opposing realms – Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, and how jihad

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 became the 

instrument to expand the world of Islam. The early Muslims saw the conquest of the Dar al-

Harb as necessary to eliminate threats to the Muslims and to secure their new Islamic Faith.       

 

This brief historical reference points out that Islam, in its earliest period, was faced with the 

specter of constant insecurities. And the nascent Muslim community, preoccupied with the task 

of ensuring the security and survival of its members, found the world much in line with 

Hobbesian ‘state of nature’. There was an instinct to expand the new Islamic Faith to achieve a 

Hegelian notion of history as an end, a notion of conquering and remaking the whole world in 

the image of Islam, that is, the diffusion of the Islamic universal moral order globally. That made 

compromise with the ‘Other’, the Dar al-Harb, extremely difficult. 

 

Two prominent Egyptian religious and political figures gave a further radical twist to the 

traditional approach in the historical context of the twentieth century Middle East. Hassan al-

Banna (1906 – 1949) and Sayyid Qutb (1906 – 1966), in response to the early debates between 

traditionalism and religious endeavor (commonly called ijtihad), initiated by the great reformist 

thinkers Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838 – 97) and his Egyptian follower Muhammad ‘Abduh 

(1849 – 1905) in the modern context,

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 and the stark realities of deep European colonial 

penetration in and cultural dominance over the Middle East, what Edward Said has called 

‘Orientalism’, came up with radical ideological defense of traditional Islam.  

 

                                                           

    

 

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Al-Banna’s political thoughts were primarily shaped by British colonial presence and rule in 

Egypt starting in the late nineteenth century, specifically after 1875 when the monarchical Ismail 

Pasha government had sold Egypt’s share of the Suez Canal to the British, and the flood of 

Western secular culture and ideas into Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries. He was at pain 

to see that the Egyptian young generation was drifting away from Islamic religious values posing 

serious threats to the survival of Islamic religion and tradition. The solution he contemplated was 

a return to Islam and the restoration of the caliphate to safeguard Muslim interests worldwide. 

His thoughts took institutional form through the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 

with two objectives to strive for: the liberation of Muslim lands from European colonial 

domination, and the establishment of a Sharia-based Islamic social and political system 

(Ikhwanweb.com 2015).  

 

In 1936, Al-Banna laid out the basic principles of an Islamic government in a letter he wrote to 

then King Faruq of Egypt and other Muslim leaders. In this letter he called for Islamic 

legislation, actions by the Islamic leaders to restore the caliphate, putting government employees 

under surveillance to strike balances between private and professional spheres, dealing serious 

blows to people who would commit moral offences, segregated education system for male and 

female students and so on (Al-Banna 1978, pp. 126–130). As it can be interpreted, he was then 

tremendously concerned with the restoration of an Islamic moral order free from European 

colonial influences. His views on European society and culture were haunted by a specter of 

European “apostasy, doubt in God, denial of the soul, obliviousness to reward or punishment in 

the world to come, and fixation within the limits of the material, tangible existence…” (Al-

Banna 1978, p. 26). Furthermore, he claimed that the Qur’an “appoints the Muslims as guardians 

over humanity in its minority, and grants them the right of suzerainty and dominion over the 

world in order to carry out this sublime commission” (Al-Banna 1978, p. 71). Finally, he 

approved jihad as a weapon “not against polytheists alone, but against all who do not embrace 

Islam” (Al-Banna 1978, p. 142), while exempting the Jews and the Christians who were not to be 

forced to convert to Islam but to pay taxes for protection by the Islamic caliphate.  

 

Sayyid Qutb further built on Al-Banna’s ideas and in many cases promoted extreme 

interpretations of Islam in the form of direct confrontations with the West. Qutb’s core ideas, 

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decisively shaped by his experiences in the US in the late 1940s as a student, are contained in his 

book Milestones, dedicated to building an ideal Islamic society by eliminating European colonial 

oppression and exploitation and eradicating Western cultural influences from the Muslim world. 

He used the concept of jahiliyyah (ignorance of Divine Guidance) to describe the West and the 

collaborating Muslim communities in the Islamic world, what some scholars have referred to as 

‘the theory of jahiliyyah’ (See, for example, Khatab 2006)

.

 In Milestones, Qutb stated 

unambiguously: “This Jahiliyya is based on rebellion against God’s sovereignty on earth. It 

transfers to man one of the greatest attributes of God, namely sovereignty and makes some men 

lords over others. …..The result of this rebellion against the authority of God is the oppression of 

His creatures” (Qutb 1966, p. 6). As a way to overcome jahiliyyah he suggested Islamic revival 

through the basic teachings of the Qur’an. He interpreted Sharia as ‘universal law’ which God 

has prescribed to guide human actions to organize harmonious lives, and asserted that: “If man 

follows this law, then his life is in harmony with his own nature. From this point of view, this 

Sharia is also a part of that universal law which governs the entire universe…..” (Qutb 1966, p. 

71). Additionally, he stressed the need for “…..physical power and jihad for abolishing the 

organizations and authorities of the jahili system which prevents people from reforming their 

ideas and beliefs but forces them to obey their erroneous ways and make them serve human lords 

instead of the Almighty Lord” (Qutb 1966, p. 42). Here, Qutb is clearly referring to his rejection 

of the human authority formed around the nation-state system and the secular institutional 

mechanisms the West and the Muslim countries use to carry out state affairs. The idea of human 

sovereignty, as he saw it, should be replaced by God’s sovereignty as the right step to establish 

God’s rule on earth. With references to the Qur’an, he emphatically declared: “In short, to 

proclaim the authority and sovereignty of God means to eliminate all human kingships and to 

announce the rule of the Sustainer of the universe over the entire earth” (Qutb 1966, p. 44).

 

 

Qutb’s radical views to dislodge the Jahiliyyah with God’s rule or an Islamic universal system 

soon drew fire from two sources – the West itself and the Pro-Western governments in the 

Muslim world, as the existences of both were seriously challenged by his ideas, at least 

theoretically. He was convinced that the use of force was ultimately necessary to defeat these 

forces of jahiliyya.  God’s laws and God’s sovereignty, according to him, depended on the 

actions of a vanguard that would fight back the jahiliyya and defend and implement Islamic 

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system of universal rule. Qutb’s epistemology, in the final analysis, discarded human sovereignty 

as the usurpation of God’s sovereignty, wholeheartedly accepted the Qur’an as the final arbiter 

on all worldly matters, and believed that the Divine text was the exclusive source of all 

knowledge (Soage 2009, 192).   

 

To put it briefly, the traditional approach, both at its classical and modern twists, at the 

epistemological level, heavily depends on textual sources and interpretations. It believes that the 

divinely bestowed texts of the Qur’an and the Hadiths are timeless; efforts to interpret the texts 

to adapt to conditions of Western secular modernity are heretical. The traditionalists also believe 

that Muslims must not be ruled by non-Muslims, they should live under a caliph (the Islamic 

ruler) who would exercise God’s sovereignty on earth. Secondly, the traditional approach is 

extremely rigid in its worldview as it maintains a firmly fixed theoretical and practical position 

to deal with the non-Islamic world – the binary division of the world into Dar al-Islam and Dar 

al-Harb. It refuses to reconcile Islam with the realities of the modern world and still holds onto 

the belief that the Islamic universal moral order must be established and upheld.