This paper examines the notion of the Islamic State and explores the development of thought surrounding its conceptualization within the discourse of Islamic Wasatiyah. The author seeks to elucidate the ambiguity inherent in related concepts such as: the modern state, the caliphate, the imamate, and governance. To this end, the analysis necessitated a reexamination of both the historical and conceptual contexts giving rise to the theory of an Islamic state, with the aim of revealing the challenges facing Centrist Islamist discourse (wasatiyah) throughout its conception. According to al-Khatib, the conceptualization of wasatiyah was characterized by discord, a lack of consistency and its proponents’ inaccurate reliance on their own theological founding texts. In his analysis, the author explores some Islamic procedures that featured conflicting theories and which disabled the possibility of theological interpretative judgment (ijtihad). These procedures, according to al-Khatib, are selective, include distortion and are subject to adaptation— responding both to the pressure of historical evolution and to the demands of a changing fiqh and its inherent debates. It is this form of fiqh and its implicit debates that led to a number of both traditionalist and modernist propositions in the construction of its vision of a state. In this vision, the centrality of the Islamic state gives it precedence over society and in some cases over Islamic sharia, to the extent that those who do not have faith in such principles are considered to lack in Islam.