Christians are referred to as the ummah...

Christians are referred to as the ummah, or community, of Christ and Jews as the ummah of Moses, as Muslims constitute the ummah of the Prophet. Abraham himself is called an ummah “obedient unto God” (16:120), and each community has a set of rites chosen for it by God, “And for every community have We appointed a ritual” (22:34).

Originally there was only one ummah: “People were only one community” (10:19), but with the passage of history, different communities came into being and many faded away or were destroyed. The Quran depicts in elaborate terms the rise, decay, and falling away of various communities, which can also be understood as nations in the biblical sense. In fact, “every community has a term, and when its term comes, they cannot put it off an hour nor yet advance [it]” (7:34).

And the decay and destruction of communities or nations has happened, according to the Quran, not because of loss of wealth or economic power or even military defeat, but because of moral corruption and straying from the religious norms willed by God for the community in question. The earth belongs to God, and He allows deserving communities or nations to rule over it as long as they deserve to do so.

Once they lose their moral authority, they are replaced by God with other communities or nations. For Islam, community implies above all a human collectivity held together by religious bonds that are themselves the foundation for social, juridical, political, economic, and ethical links between its members.

In our period of human history, there is not one, but many communities or nations, which means many religions, as mentioned in Chapter 1, and this is set in the Quran as a condition willed by God, for, “Had God willed, He could have made them one community” (42:8). It is within the context of a world with many communities, all of which Islam sees in religious terms, that the Islamic understanding of itself as an ummah must be situated and understood.

First of all, Islam emphasizes the unity of its own ummah. Although after the first few years of Islamic history various theological and political rifts began to set in and although after the end of the Umayyad caliphate in the East in the eighth century the political unity of Islam was never again realized, the ideal of the unity of the ummah has remained strong throughout Islamic history.