What is the ummah and its significance for Islamic life? From the class readings, Karen Armstrong, Islam: A Short History--Chapters 1 and 2.

Armstrong defines ummah as a community having "practical compassion and in which there was a fair distribution of wealth."  She argues that ummah was a "crucial virtue of Islam."

Armstrong's study outlines the lack of community in the Arab world, which Muhammad saw in 610 C.E.  The landscape she depicts was at nothing short of a "crisis."  Mecca had lost its spiritual focus because of thriving commercialism. The disenfranchised were not protected but rather seen...

Armstrong defines ummah as a community having "practical compassion and in which there was a fair distribution of wealth."  She argues that ummah was a "crucial virtue of Islam."

Armstrong's study outlines the lack of community in the Arab world, which Muhammad saw in 610 C.E.  The landscape she depicts was at nothing short of a "crisis."  Mecca had lost its spiritual focus because of thriving commercialism. The disenfranchised were not protected but rather seen as sources of income wealth that could be exploited.  The result of rising materialistic individualism was a "spiritual restlessness" where people did not acknowledge sources of convergence but rather intense divergence in the form of tribal cycles of "vendetta and counter- vendetta."  Armstrong suggests that the Arabs "were a lost people, exiled forever from the civilized world and ignored by God himself."  

Armstrong argues that one of Muhammad's first practices was to replace this fragmented condition with a communitarian one.  In "bringing the old faith in the One God to the Arabs," Muhammad taught that the reciting of the Quran was to be a collective experience highlighted by publicly reading chapters (surahs) to its followers.  He prescribed public prostrations to the divine at least three times a day in order to emphasize an "egalitarian" approach to spirituality and the idea that all followers are equal in the eyes of the divine.  Similarly, Armstrong's research affirms that Muhammad instructed Muslims "to give a regular proportion of their income to the poor in alms (zakat.)"  Muhammad believed that the emphasis on social justice was an essential required component of building a community, or ummah.

The ummah was significant to Islamic life because it represented the alternative to the materialistic world that confronted Muhammad and other Arabs.  The ummah was designed to restore social bonds and supplant commercial individualism.  Muhammad's idea of ummah directed Muslims to see themselves as an element of a larger unified community that was bound by both divine reverence and social compassion.