Toward the Realization of Ummah

Abstract

IThe domain of Islam embraces some one billion people, 20 percent ofthe world’s population, distributed across the globe in virtually everypolitical unit and geographical context. Ideologically, the Muslim worldsenses a profound communion in the deeply embedded Islamic concept ofa territorially dispersed but spiritually unified global Islamiccommonwealth - ummah. Oswald Spengler, in his monumental Declineofthe West, reminds us that the Islamic community “embraces the wholeof the world-cavern, here and beyond, the orthodox and the good angelsand spirits, and within the community the State only formed a smallerunit of the visible side, a unit, therefore, of which the operations weregoverned by the major whole." This relationship between the modernnation-state and the ummah, now suppressed by the force of modernnationalism, continues to exist as a powerful primordial sentiment oftranscendent importance. That its dimensions, contours, and strengthcannot be assessed by empirical social science analysis does not make itless real as a critical component of the Muslim psyche. This impulsetowards Islamic unity, charged with emotion, religious fervor, andideology, canonically sustained by the concept of ummah, is alsonurtured by a vivid memory of Islamic imperial grandeur and by avibrant dynamic of missionary zeal. The latter, carrying out the Qur’anicproclamation of the universality of Islam and the command for globaldispensation of the Qur’anic message, has lost little of its originalimpetus. The force of ummah is the tacit dimension, the psychicindwelling nature of Islam. Nor can this compelling centrifugal thrustbe lightly dismissed as the transitory phase of a historical process.No other religion has quite so powerful an impetus for globalexpansion - neither Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism nor Christianity ...