This chapter discusses and translates the Kitāb al-Umma or Ṣaḥīfat al-Madīna, also known as the ‘Umma-document’ or the ‘Constitution of Medina,’ exploring its place in modern historiography and in particular its controversial possible implications for the study of the emergence of Islam as a distinct religious tradition. The Kitāb al-Umma is one of the oldest documentary sources of Islamic history, and its historicity is almost universally accepted in modern scholarship. The Kitāb belongs to the period shortly after the migration (hijra) of the Prophet to Medina, specifically to c. 1/622, when the Prophet concluded a series of treaties between the Emigrants (muhājirūn), the Helpers (anṣār), and the main Arab and Jewish tribes of Medina, to establish one Umma, ‘a community of believers.’

Muḥammad is usually known among Muslims simply as the Prophet or Messenger, but he was by no means the only prominent prophet in his own lifetime, although the others were eventually overtaken by him. This chapter attempts to place Muḥammad in the prophetic milieu of his own lifetime and to identify his leading rivals, which included at least one with a Qurʾān of his own.

Chapter 2 discusses the contested meanings of the umma, specifically in Sunni thought. It reviews the ways the concept is understood as having a classical reference point in the era of the Prophet and his immediate successors, and follows its development through medieval and modern scholars. A consistent theme has been that the community of the faith must be tied to proper leadership, but the declining and then dismissed Caliphate in the second decade of the twentieth century, stirred intellectual and political agitation. Today calls for unity, or at least solidarity, contend with debates over how extensive the umma is and how much difference is allowable within it. The chapter argues that the aspiration to both comprehensiveness and internal tolerance is commonly reaffirmed, yet challenged by normative ambivalence within the concept itself.