This chapter looks at the thinking and practice of international relations and world order in the Islamic world. It opens by setting Islam's complex geopolitical context. In terms of thinking it covers the umma, the realms of al-Harb, al-Islam, and al-Ahd, jihad, the work of Ibn Khaldun, and Ijtihad. In terms of practice it covers the relationship between the umma and the Islamic state, the division of Islam into rival empires, and the rivalry between Sunnis and Shias within Islam. A key theme is the contradictions between thinking and practice.

The early caliphate adopted the political organisation predominant in the late antique Middle East – imperial monarchy, sanctioned by divine power – but with a distinctively Islamic ideology of leadership involving kinship, piety, victory and justice. The prime location for the performance of royal power was the court, particularly for caliphal accessions or successions. The warrior rulers filling the caliphal vacuum after 945 adopted Islamic means of legitimisation, including oaths of loyalty, honorific titles, robes of honour, and being named on coinage and in Friday prayers; while the ʿulamaʾ increasingly claimed spiritual authority as ‘heirs of the Prophet’. The new Turco-Mongol elites from the thirteenth century on found a role for military strongmen, incorporating the nomadic virtues of strong leadership, good fortune and royal genealogy into a fluid mixture of ideologies. Performance of power encompassed the hajj, hunting parties, public sessions dispensing justice and rituals designed to bind the palaces of the court more closely to the towns wherever they were based.

“I’ll never forgive myself,” laments Professor Henry Jones Senior after hitting Junior with a large vase on the head. The subsequent scenes in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade clarify that the Professor’s concern was not directed at his son – who had, after all, come to save him from Nazi captivity – but at the damage inflicted on what appeared to be a fine exemplar of blue-and-white Chinese porcelain.

Chapter 4 demonstrates how the umma in Saudi Arabia follows a similar path as the Shi'a in the previous chapter. The Saudi state’s evolution is tied to a Sunni-Wahhabist ideology underpinning the interconnected political and religious establishments. Control of the Holy Places of Mecca and Medina and of the annual pilgrimage — one of the core pillars of the faith — have inflated the regime’s claim to speak for universal Islam, but the hostility of the religious authorities to the Shi‘a and ‘unbelievers’ has diminished its credibility to do so. The institutions that have been developed and supported ostensibly to encourage umma-wide solidarity have seemed more adept at advancing Saudi interests than pan-Islamic ones. Islamic sentiment from below, stimulated, for example, by the Palestinian, Afghan, Iraqi, and Syrian conflicts, has influenced Saudi policy positions. Yet, both the promotion of Wahhabi ideas — although not univocal or unchanging — and the competition with Iran, and even Sunni Egypt and Turkey, have constrained the realisation of the Kingdom’s sense of umma entitlement.

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.

Chapter 1 introduces the focus of this book, which is to elucidate the degree to which the affective symbol of the umma shapes Muslim identities today and inspires social and political action. It notes that the discussion to follow will explore the ‘pull’ of the umma on Muslims. The volume will explore the ways in which the latent sense of attachment to a great enterprise of the faith is omnipresent, but, like other affiliations, seems more pronounced when facing opposition. A kind of societal pan-Islam — grassroots empathy with Muslims worldwide — has undergirded identification with the Palestinians or Rohingyas, for example. Even when this popular sentiment is expressed, however, Muslim states may find economic and political interests more important than support for Muslim victims. It is proposed that the identity that the umma provides must thus be contextualised and seen as open to widely divergent interpretations and self-interested political concerns. The chapter also explains that the book will investigate the effects of the ‘push’ of the umma on Muslims. It will demonstrates that states, such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, seek to foster a sense of the umma and its importance through various means. So, too, collective non-state actors, such as ISIS, which attempt to harness the symbolic power of the umma in order to pressure individuals and groups into taking action. Chapter 1 concludes by outlining the structure of the book and observes that manipulation of the idea of the umma forms part of the pursuit of authentication and influence in today’s Muslim world.

The Conclusion highlights the simultaneity of forces — the transnational and local, the pan-Islamic and national — in keeping with much of the theoretical literature on transnationalism and globalisation. It affirms that pan-Islam has an enduring appeal that has resonance at the popular level and thereby serves as an influence on Muslim identities. Moreover, because of this very ground-level effect on self-understandings and affective attachments, it also prompts governments and Islamist groups to fulfil what is deemed to be an Islamic mission. Political actors instrumentalise the pan-Islamic sentiment as well, serving as self-appointed patrons of the umma and hoping thereby for legitimacy, especially at home, and the extension of influence abroad. These factors reveal, the chapter argues, a built-in territorial dimension that, without denying the emergence of cosmopolitan discourses and networks, suggests that, to find the umma today, we need to take into account rooted contestations.

Chapter 3 provides a complementary discussion of the umma in Shi‘i thought and practice. While religious authority is central, as with the Sunni conception, the Shi‘i conceptualisation of the Imams elevates genealogical descent and theological erudition to essential ingredients of leadership. It follows that their absence from this world created a dilemma with religious and political significance: who would guide the community until the return of the redeeming Imam Mahdi (Guided One)? From the medieval centuries to the modern period, a rough consensus emerged that the clerical class would fill the void of religious guidance. The minority view that they should also have a political role found its full articulation, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, in Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini’s theory of clerical rule and its institutionalisation in the Islamic Republic. The chapter shows that the Khomeinist-revolutionary Iranian appeal to lead the universal umma has, however, been undermined by an assertive sectarian interpretation and geopolitical rivalries.

Chapter 5 deals with the creation of the Islamic State and of the movement ISIS. Their literalist and expressly politicised interpretations of doctrine have led it to espouse exclusionary and aggressive notions of the umma. The community of the faith becomes identifiable with a revived Caliphate, based on territorial dimensions and purist standards of community membership. The chapter elaborates on the trajectory of radical Islamism and points to areas of difference with al-Qa‘ida. It also argues that the brutality of ISIS against the Shi‘a and others subverts its avowed expansionist aim, as many within the Muslim world as well as non-Muslim powers have sought to destroy it. But, as the chapter demonstrates, military defeat and territorial retrenchment are unlikely to exorcise the allure, in receptive quarters, of a purportedly ‘authentic’ but highly romanticised umma.