The Seven Demands

A demand needs an address and a method. Addressed to a billion believers who wrote none of the law and can change none of it, it is only an insult. Addressed to the few hundred men who hold the authority, in the form their own tradition recognizes, it becomes a program.

The Letter

In September 2014, three months after the Islamic State proclaimed its caliphate, a letter was published in Arabic and English and addressed to its leader by name.

It ran to more than twenty pages. It was signed by over a hundred and twenty of the most senior Sunni scholars in the world: the Grand Mufti of Egypt, jurists from Nigeria and Indonesia, professors from al-Azhar. It was a work of law. Point by point, with citations, it told the self-declared caliph that he had no right to kill the innocent, to kill emissaries, to torture, to deny women and children their rights, to declare other Muslims unbelievers, or to revive slavery.

As a refutation it was complete. And it shows two things at once.

It shows that the machinery exists. The scholars of Islam can act together, across borders, in a matter of weeks, and speak with one voice on the gravest questions of the law.

It also shows what the machinery has never yet been used for. The letter argued that the Islamic State had misapplied the classical rules of war, of apostasy, and of punishment. It did not say that those rules were finished. On slavery alone it took the decisive step and declared the old permission closed by consensus. On everything else it left the old law standing and accused the militants only of applying it without the proper conditions.

The scholars took the detonator out of one man's hand, and left the charge in the wall.