Naming the enemy’s land. Definitions of dār al-ḥarb in Ibn al-Mubārak’s Kitāb al-Jihād

The well-known oppositional pair dār al-ḥarb/dār al-islām is closely related to the concept of jihād. From this perspective Ibn al-Mubārak’s Kitāb al-Jihād, one of the very first texts entirely devoted to the subject, can be considered a good starting point to observe such oppositional pair at an early stage of its development, during the formative period of Islamic theory of war and peace. This is due to Kitāb al-Jihād ’s early date (late 8 th century) and particularly to the environment in which the text originated and circulated, i. e. the community of ‘scholar-ascetics’ (to quote Michael Bonner’s definition) dwelling on the borders with and waging ğihād against the Byzantine empire, among whom Ibn al-Mubārak was arguably the most renowned example. On the basis of a systematic study of the ḥadīṯs collected in the Kitāb al-Jihād the article attempts to assess the extent to which the concept of dār al-ḥarb (and its counterpart dār al-islām) had already been defined and described in such a seminal and fundamental text.