Neither House of War nor House of Peace

Classical Islamic legal theory offered jurists a clean binary for classifying any territory: dar al-Islam, land under Muslim rule where Islamic law held sway, and dar al-harb, land outside it, treated as a domain of active or potential conflict. Mardin, a town in the Jazira region under the rule of the Ilkhanate, the Mongol dynasty that governed much of the region after the conquests of the thirteenth century, did not fit either box comfortably by the time a questioner asked the Hanbali jurist Ibn Taymiyya how it should be classified. Its rulers were Mongols; its population remained substantially Muslim; and by Ibn Taymiyya's own lifetime the Ilkhanate's rulers had themselves converted to Islam, further scrambling a distinction built for a starker division between Muslim and non-Muslim power.

Ibn Taymiyya's answer refused the binary rather than forcing Mardin into one side of it. He ruled that the town was neither straightforwardly dar al-Islam nor dar al-harb but a third, composite condition, dar murakkaba, in which residents were to be dealt with according to their own individual status and conduct rather than by a single sweeping classification applied to the territory as a whole. It was a narrow, careful piece of jurisprudence addressed to one town's unusual circumstances, not a general theory of how Muslims should regard mixed or contested territories everywhere.