Turkey's enthusiastic embrace of the Arab Spring set in motion a dynamic that fundamentally altered its relations with the United States, Russia, Qatar, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Iran, and transformed Turkey from a soft power to a hard power in the tangled geopolitics of the Middle East. Birol Başkan and Ömer Taşpınar argue that the ruling Justice and Development Party's (AKP) Islamist background played a significant role in the country's decision to embrace the uprisings and the subsequent foreign policy direction the country has pursued. They demonstrate that religious ideology is endogenous to—shaping and in turn being shaped by—Turkey's various engagements in the Middle East. The Nation or the Ummah emphasizes that while Islamist religious ideology does not provide specific policy prescriptions, it does shape the way the ruling elite sees and interprets the context and the structural boundaries they operate within.

How can we live together without alienation, avoidance, and fear? How can we complement one another such that each of us can uniquely contribute to the making of our societies? To address these and other questions, Katrin A. Jomaa examines the moral, political, and spiritual understanding of the Qur'anic term ummah, which is commonly used to refer to the worldwide Muslim community but is employed more broadly in the Qur'an itself. Drawing on theology, history, philosophy, and political science, Jomaa argues that ummah, while often defined as a group of people united by ethnicity or religion, is, in its ideal sense, a community that demands active commitment and a conscious and continuous dedication to the highest moral ideals of that community rather than mere affiliation with a particular set of religious doctrines and practices. Jomaa begins by chronologically and thematically analyzing the word "ummah" in the Qur'an, a comprehensive study currently missing from Islamic scholarship, in order to propose a novel understanding of the term that connects all its different meanings. She then compares this new definition to the Aristotelean polis, which highlights the political features of ummah, thereby situating it within contemporary discourses on liberal politics and community and creating the space for an alternative sociopolitical order to the nation-state, both as a local unit and a global system.

This survey of the literature on the development of nationalism in Muslim countries also examines the status of the ummah in Muslim nation states as well as activities of Muslim nations through the OIC.

This book argues that the Arab states in the Middle East have failed to provide security for their citizens or define themselves along the lines of traditional nation states. Due to continuous war, they have been unable to foster development and prosperity. The author argues that these failures have led to the development of an Islamic political theory that is based around the non-territorial concepts of the Umma and Dawla. Each concept is explored in detail and the author explains how crucial they are in explaining the difference between Western policy and the priorities and the identity of the Arab world. This unique book should be required reading for students of Middle East international relations and Islamic political theory.

Cesari argues that both religious and national communities are defined by the three Bs: belief, behaviour and belonging. By focusing on the ways in which these three Bs intersect, overlap or clash, she identifies the patterns of the politicization of religion, and vice versa, in any given context. Her approach has four advantages: firstly, it combines an exploration of institutional and ideational changes across time, which are usually separated by disciplinary boundaries. Secondly, it illustrates the heuristic value of combining qualitative and quantitative methods by statistically testing the validity of the patterns identified in the qualitative historical phase of the research. Thirdly, it avoids reducing religion to beliefs by investigating the significance of the institution-ideas connections, and fourthly, it broadens the political approach beyond state-religion relations to take into account actions and ideas conveyed in other arenas such as education, welfare, and culture.

This book examines Muslim women's creative strategies of deploying religious concepts such as ummah, or community, to solve problems of domestic and communal violence, polygamous abuse, sterility, and heteronormativity. By closely reading and examining examples of ummah-building strategies in interfaith dialogues, exchanges, and encounters between Muslim and non-Muslim women in a selection of African and Southeast Asian fictions and essays, this book highlights women's assertive activisms to redefine transnationalism, understood as relationships across national boundaries, as transgeography. Ummah-building strategies shift the space of, or respatialize, transnational relationships, focusing on connections between communities, groups, and affiliations within the same nation. Such a respatialization also enables a more equitable and inclusive remediation of the citizenship of gendered and religious citizens to the nation-state and the transnational sphere of relationships.

Considers the question: what does it mean to be Muslim and American? In Islam Is a Foreign Country, Zareena Grewal explores some of the most pressing debates about and among American Muslims: what does it mean to be Muslim and American? Who has the authority to speak for Islam and to lead the stunningly diverse population of American Muslims? Do their ties to the larger Muslim world undermine their efforts to make Islam an American religion? Offering rich insights into these questions and more, Grewal follows the journeys of American Muslim youth who travel in global, underground Islamic networks. Devoutly religious and often politically disaffected, these young men and women are in search of a home for themselves and their tradition. Through their stories, Grewal captures the multiple directions of the global flows of people, practices, and ideas that connect U.S. mosques to the Muslim world. By examining the tension between American Muslims’ ambivalence toward the American mainstream and their desire to enter it, Grewal puts contemporary debates about Islam in the context of a long history of American racial and religious exclusions. Probing the competing obligations of American Muslims to the nation and to the umma (the global community of Muslim believers), Islam is a Foreign Country investigates the meaning of American citizenship and the place of Islam in a global age.