The global community of all Muslims is called the umma. Anyone who utters the testimony of faith—the Shahada or monotheistic creed— is a member of this umma whether by virtue of culture or Islamic practice. Since Muhammad’s time, the umma has grown in size and geographical spread during the last 1,400 years. This growth and expansion, leading to the creation of the empire of faith embracing territories in Europe, Africa, and Asia, was accompanied by transformations in governing structure and also by religious, political, and ethnic divisions.
Umma is derived from the Arabic word meaning “people.” It is used in different contexts in the Qur’an. Abraham, an individual of high status in Islam, is distinguished by being described as an umma of one person (Qur’an 16:120). In pre-Islamic Arabia, up to the early period of Muhammad’s calling as a Prophet in Mecca, the word had not yet been invested with new Islamic meanings suggestive of a new spiritual order. It was in Medina, after the hijra (migration), that the new community of believers—under the leadership of Muhammad —began to take shape and came to be known as the umma. This umma, or the new commonwealth of believers, was religiously and ideologically defined in contradistinction to the tribal and polytheistic values of jahiliyya (pre-Islamic) Arabia. This community that Muhammad established in Medina forged a unique bond of brotherhood between Meccan Muslim immigrants (muhajirs) and Medinan Muslim hosts/helpers (Ansar) that served as the basis of Muslim unity. The community was unified politically under Muhammad, who worked to create a new society—transcending the traditional social structure based on families, clans, and tribes; instead, he focused on shared Islamic beliefs, ceremonies, ethics and laws. Through Qur’anic revelation, he defined the norms of the new community to include its ritual practices of prayer, tax/almsgiving, fasting, and pilgrimage. These practices reinforced collective awareness of membership in this new community and forged a religious consciousness that emphasized individual and collective responsibilities. This individual responsibility was realized within the ideal of the family whose members had a moral duty to live a life of witnessing or testifying to the oneness of God.
What Muhammad had succeeded in doing in his life time was to replace the fragmented society of divided Arab clans with a new vision of the universal umma—the commonwealth of all believers over time and space. The nascent Islamic state that he established had an incipient imperial framework whose details were worked out by his successors. Yet, the larger umma, encompassing lands on three continents, faced challenges and political differences in the subsequent centuries. By the latter part of the Abbasid dynastic rule (7501258 CE), the umma had fragmented along political and sectarian lines. Further breakup of the umma took place during the period of European worldwide imperialistic expansion and the concomitant weakening of the Ottoman Empire through its dissolution in the early decades of the twentieth century. Today the umma, while still fragmented, is not necessarily identified with a particular state or place, but with a vision of a global community whose members share a certain religious identity. This umma manifests itself in different places as, for instance, the Muslim communities of India, Indonesia, Morocco, Zanzibar, London, and so on. The community serves as a locus of identity even when this identity may be weak for some and is mediated through the cultural prism of American life—as is the case for the subsequent generations of American Muslims born in the United States. Yet, the umma persists over time and space as evidenced by the presence of Muslims in far-flung areas of the world.
