The Aching Community

For secular social science, declarative claims of Muslim unity are not tenable, and the discourse of religious community serves ideological functions. Meanwhile, contemporary discourses and practices variously register the ongoing destruction of the Islamic community (umma): assailed by vicious regimes and civil war, subjected to capital and colonial borders. This article presents two exchanges from my broader fieldwork in and around Syria to ethnographically articulate historical forms of loss named by the umma today. In the first of these dialogues, transcribed and excerpted from a debate in Damascus in 2004, two Muslim scholars argued about how to understand the postcolonial fate of Islamic political institutions. Here the umma appears interrupted and abandoned. In the second dialogue, held in 2018 with the director of an Islamic charity serving Syrian refugees in Jordan, the umma appears ruined. In place of a positive history, these forms of loss—interruption, abandonment, and ruin—offer figures for the life of the umma.