The Islamic State Black Flag
The flag motif is a representation of territory control, a marking of the organization’s territory, advertisement and an announcement of the presence of its forces in a specific location (Ostovar 2017, 87-88).

Ostovar refers to McCants, who states that this choice represents the Islamic State’s Manichean worldview, which accepts only the duality of right and wrong/believers and non-believers (Ostovar 2017, 90).

Furthermore, “Jihadi flags, which are generally black, are meant to represent the battle standards carried by Muslim forces in some of the earliest armed conflict in Islamic history” (Ostovar 2017, 88), even though Ostovar (2017) claims that historical description of the colours of banners used by the earliest Muslims differ from white, green, yellow or black, and sometimes included the Muslim proclamation of faith (88). Moreover, he suggests that jihadist groups interpret history for themselves. Therefore, the flag a jihadi organization adopts manifests this interpretation revealing the group’s sensibilities towards historical purity (Ostovar 2017, 88).

However, in the Islamic traditional and historical context, the black flag evokes the black battle standards used in the eighteenth century Abbasid Revolution that overthrew the corrupt rule of the Umayyad replacing it with a new caliphate based in Iraq (Ostovar 2017, 90). It is noteworthy to mention that the Abbasid not only lead to the Golden Age of Islam but their revolt also played a prophetic expectation of the coming of the Mahdi, the Muslim saviour, who is expected to arrive before the apocalypse to restore justice for Muslims (Ostovar 2017, 91). Ostovar (2017) refers to McCants, a former U.S State Department senior advisor for countering violent extremism from 2009 to 2011 (The Brookings Institution), who argues that the Islamic State deliberately chose the colour black for its flag to connotes this apocalyptic expectation of the prophecy (100).

Moreover, the Islamic State flag depicts the first phrase of the Shahada (at the top) “La Illah Ilallah”, means “No God but Allah”. And the white circle represents the second phrase of the Shahada, “Mohammad rasulullah” which means “Mohammed, the Messenger of Allah”, in the form that according to a statement by the Islamic State in jihadi discussion forums about the design of the flag is the historically accurate seal of Mohammed as contained in the Ottoman records, and the order of the words (from top to bottom: god, messenger, Mohammed) developed by following Islamic oral traditions describing the seal of Mohammad (Ostovar 2017, 89-90). In addition, Ostovar (2017) refers also to Will McCants, who claims that the white circle is deliberately ragged suggesting an era before Photoshop regardless of the fact that the flag was designed by using a computer (Ostovar 2017, 90).