Sublime

Perhaps because of the distinctive ecology of the Near and Middle East, where agrarian society played second fiddle to long-distance trade, Islam was strikingly cosmopolitan. Muslims were first of all members of the umma, the great body of Islamic faithful, and only secondly subjects of their territorial ruler.

umma,

because it did not empower a priesthood as the intermediary between the faithful and their god, Islam did not bind the individual so tightly into an ordered religious community. Its clerical elite, the ulama, were teachers, judges and scholars, not priests. Sufis and pirs, or holy men, exerted spiritual leadership, not religious authority.

The Muslim position is clear. The Muslim does not claim to have a religion peculiar to himself. Islam is not a sect or an ethnic religion. In its view all Religion is one, for the Truth is one. It was the religion preached by all the earlier prophets. It was the truth taught by all the inspired Books. In essence it amounts to a consciousness of the

The point is that one can refer to Muhammad’s community in Yathrib as the Ummah, but only insofar as that term is understood to designate what the Orientalist explorer Bertram Thomas has called a “super-tribe,” or what the historian Marshall Hodgson more accurately describes as a “neo-tribe”: that is, a radically new kind of social organization, bu

As the Quran suggests over and over again, and as the Constitution of Medina explicitly affirms, Muhammad may have understood the concept of the Umm al-Kitab to mean not only that the Jews, Christians, and Muslims shared a single divine scripture but also that they constituted a single divine Ummah.

The Ummah confers meaning and purpose on the believer, whose national, ethnic, racial, and sexual identity are and always will be subordinate to his or her membership in the worldwide community of Muslims: a community not bound by any borders, geographic or temporal. Thus when one fasts during the month of Ramadan or joins in the Friday prayers, on

As far as Muhammad was concerned, the Jews and the Christians were “People of the Book” (ahl al-Kitab), spiritual cousins who, as opposed to the pagans and polytheists of Arabia, worshipped the same God, read the same scriptures, and shared the same moral values as his Muslim community. Although each faith comprised its own distinct religious commu

O you who believe! Take not the Jews and the Christians for your friends and protectors:83 they are but friends and protectors to each other. And he amongst you that turns to them (for friendship) is of them. Verily Allah guides not a people unjust.