Abstract

The concept of Islamic state is highly ambiguous and controversial. It has no real bases either in Islamic history or in Islamic political thought. If the exceptional situation of the Prophet Muhammad in Medina can be considered a sort of Islamic state, in the Middle Ages theologians and philosophers developed rather an Islamic model of state that is no more an «Islamic» state. The concept of Islamic state has been renewed by the contemporary trends of radical Islam, but the applications and the theorization of the Islamic state in the Islamist movements of the so-called Arab springs as well as in the alleged Islamic caliphate of ISIL faced a global failure of the project.