Toward the Realization of Ummah

Abstract

I The domain of Islam embraces some one billion people, 20 percent of the world’s population, distributed across the globe in virtually every political unit and geographical context. Ideologically, the Muslim world senses a profound communion in the deeply embedded Islamic concept of a territorially dispersed but spiritually unified global Islamic commonwealth - ummah. Oswald Spengler, in his monumental Decline ofthe West, reminds us that the Islamic community “embraces the whole of the world-cavern, here and beyond, the orthodox and the good angels and spirits, and within the community the State only formed a smaller unit of the visible side, a unit, therefore, of which the operations were governed by the major whole." This relationship between the modern nation-state and the ummah, now suppressed by the force of modern nationalism, continues to exist as a powerful primordial sentiment of transcendent importance. That its dimensions, contours, and strength cannot be assessed by empirical social science analysis does not make it less real as a critical component of the Muslim psyche. This impulse towards Islamic unity, charged with emotion, religious fervor, and ideology, canonically sustained by the concept of ummah, is also nurtured by a vivid memory of Islamic imperial grandeur and by a vibrant dynamic of missionary zeal. The latter, carrying out the Qur’anic proclamation of the universality of Islam and the command for global dispensation of the Qur’anic message, has lost little of its original impetus. The force of ummah is the tacit dimension, the psychic indwelling nature of Islam. Nor can this compelling centrifugal thrust be lightly dismissed as the transitory phase of a historical process. No other religion has quite so powerful an impetus for global expansion - neither Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism nor Christianity ...