One of many ways used by ISIS in order to provide religious legitimacy to its cause and appeal to the young and impressionable Muslims is by using symbols associated with Islam.

Some of the symbols used is based on fabricated sources i.e. hadith that can be classified as myth. One example of this is the use of the black flag as the group’s symbol.

We have written on this in an article titled The Black Flag Myth: An Analysis from Hadith Studies, published in Counter-Terrorist Trends and Analysis, September 2014.

…Muhammad Haniff Hassan is Research Fellow and Mustazah Bahari is Associate Research Fellow at S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.