> Further, no peace can ever be negotiated because the borders of IS have to keep expanding or the caliphate is no longer valid. That is, Muhammad says all non-

> Further, no peace can ever be negotiated because the borders of IS have to keep expanding or the caliphate is no longer valid. That is, Muhammad says all non-believers have to be converted, full stop. I think a lot of liberal media in the West tends to whitewash some of the, shall we say, more unpleasant actions of Islam's founder described in the Qu'ran (violence, child bride, etc). However, the assertion that Muhammad said that all non-believers must be converted is false, full stop. There is a very famous verse of the Quran addresses this categorically (in the words of Muhammed as supposedly dictated by God): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Baqara_256 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Baqara_256 Indeed, the entire tax base of most Muslim empires, most notably the Ottoman, was based on taxing non-Muslims (Muslims were exempt from this tax, but had to serve in the military). So the rule against forcible conversions was not only stated clearly in the Qu'ran, but there have been unbroken enforcement of this rule by Muslim empires, kingdoms, and nations from Muhammed's time to the modern era, in a large part because of the incentives those entities had in keeping a large number of non-Muslims to tax. This is not to say that Muslims never forcibly converted people, but it is/was widely recognized as being forbidden by the Quran. Now, this is a separate matter from expanding borders. The Islamic State surely would love nothing more than to establish a caliphate at the farthest historical borders, so N. African up across Spain, Europe across the Balkans up to Vienna, and all of Central Asia. That said, I can't see them ever expanding beyond the Levant, even in the worst case scenario. Even without a massive Western ground intervention (which would obviously happen if they threatened Spain, if not before), IS would have to conquer Turkey and Iran, and that seems extraordinarily unlikely.