What is the criterion for identifying the land of Islam and the land of disbelief?

The questioner : What are the criteria for defining the land of Islam and the land of disbelief? And how does a land of Islam become a land of disbelief, and vice versa?

The Shaykh : Yes, this is a matter that the early jurists undoubtedly addressed, and they disagreed, as is their custom in many matters, and they were unable to provide a decisive answer to the disagreement that could be relied upon with confidence. So I say: any region where Muslims are the majority, even if their rulers do not rule by what Allah has revealed, whether entirely or partially, that does not harm them and does not make that people cease to be a Muslim people. It is not permissible to fight them if there is an Islamic state, because if they are called to Islam, they will respond to it and turn completely against the Muslim caller toward the government that rules them by other than what Allah has revealed. Therefore, we do not consider a Muslim people to be in a non-Islamic land, or that it is permissible to fight them and impose the rulings that apply to the abode of war rather than the abode of peace, simply because their rulers rule by other than what Allah has revealed. This is what we believe and we testify to Allah with it, and Allah knows best, because I said that they discussed this matter in the past and did not mention decisive evidence for the issue. But we know now that you may speak about any country: the Algerian people are a Muslim people, the Syrian people are a Muslim people, the Jordanian people likewise, and so on. But the laws applied to them, many of them or most of them, are not Islamic. Therefore, we do not consider these people to be non-Muslims, just as I said earlier: the Ba'ath Party in Syria does not make Muslims Ba'athists, and the Ba'ath Party in Iraq does not make Iraqis non-Muslims. And so we distinguish between the rulers and the ruled. When we say that it is obligatory to support the Iraqi people, that does not mean at all that it is obligatory to support the Ba'ath Party or the leader of the Ba'ath Party; rather, it does not mean that it is permissible to support them. It is the people who must be supported.