لا إله إلا الله محمد رسول الله ("There is no god but God and Muhammad is his prophet.") | |||||||
| Anthem | "as-Salām al-Malakiyy" | ||||||
| Capital | Mecca | ||||||
| Largest city | Damascus | ||||||
| Other cities | Riyadh, Sana'a, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Basra, Medina, Doha | ||||||
| Language official |
Arabic | ||||||
| others | Kurdish, Hebrew, Assyrian | ||||||
| Religion main |
Sunni Islam | ||||||
| others | Shi'a Islam, Catholic Christianity, Yazidism, Orthodoxy, Protestantism | ||||||
| Ethnic Groups main |
Semitic | ||||||
| others | Iranian | ||||||
| Demonym | Arabic | ||||||
| Government | Semi-constitutional monarchy | ||||||
| Legislature | Royal Shūrā | ||||||
| Caliph | Abdullah II | ||||||
| Prime Minister | Abdullah bin Khalifah | ||||||
| Population | 78,000,000 | ||||||
| Established | April 1, 1918 | ||||||
| Independence | from Ottoman Empire | ||||||
| declared | April 1, 1918 | ||||||
| recognized | October 15, 1919 | ||||||
| Currency | Arab Dinar | ||||||
| Time Zone | UTC +2 to +3 | ||||||
| summer | not observed | ||||||
| Internet TLD | .is | ||||||
The Islamic State (Arabic: الدولة الإسلامية, ad-Dawlah al-Islāmiyah), also known as Da'ish, is a state in the Middle East. With its capital in the holy city of Mecca, the Islamic State is a semi-theocratic state, where the head of state (the caliph) is considered both the ruler of the temporal and spiritual ummah, or community of Muslims. This honour was bestowed upon the Hashemite dynasty, who claim direct descendance from Muhammad, in 1919, as the Arab rebels finally banded together after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the Levantine Theatre and the succeeding Mesopotamian Theatre. After the independence of the Islamic State from the Ottoman Empire and the collapse of the latter into the Republic of Turkey and succeeding states, a plurality of Muslims have acknowledged the Caliph at Mecca as the true Caliph of the Sunni world (although a very large proportion believe there is no Caliph at all, and many African muslims swear allegiance to local rulers). This and the nation's inmense oil wealth gives the Islamic State a very strong diplomatic battleground. Today, Da'ish is the world's chief exporter of petrol. Economic, military and cultural competence with the Islamic State's neighbour, the Empire of Aryanam, makes the Middle East's geopolitics a hotly contested issue today.