Caliphate Dreaming: Georgetown Panel Reveals ISIS’s Appeal to the Faithful

Emad Shahin

Attempts by apologists to distance the Islamic State (ISIS)'s caliphate declaration from its moorings in Islamic history and to deny its appeal to modern Muslims received a blow when a recent Georgetown University panel on the subject unwittingly demonstrated the opposite. Andrew Harrod’s report for Campus Watch appears today at Jihad Watch:

The caliphate “is not something bad . . . for the majority of Muslims,” concluded visiting professor Emad Shahin during a recent briefing titled “Boko Haram, ISIS, and the Caliphate Today” at Georgetown University’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU). A small conference room housed around twenty people, as panelists pledged to “help explain” the allegedly “confusing phenomena” of Nigeria’s Boko Haram and the Islamic State (ISIS)'s “overlapping language of political Islam” and the “caliphate and . . . sharia.” The panel, however, merely reinforced that ISIS’s brutal “caliphate” has ample justification in Islamic history and appeal among modern Muslims.

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Cinnamon Stillwell analyzes Middle East studies academia in West Coast colleges and universities for Campus Watch. A San Francisco Bay Area native and graduate of San Francisco State University, she is a columnist, blogger, and social media analyst. Ms. Stillwell, a former contributing political columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, has written on a wide variety of topics, including the political atmosphere in American higher education, and has appeared as a guest on television and talk radio.
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