Conceptualizing Political Islam in the Age of Reconciliation

The problem with the term Political Islam is its failure to differentiate between transnational and national Islamic movements. This article will answer why the term Political Islam fails to accurately reflect the ideological differences that divide transnational and national Islamic movements in the Muslim world. It introduces the concept of Islamic Ummatism to differentiate the ideology of transnational Muslim movements from the ideology of Islamic Nationalism, which reflects ethno-national Islamic movements. This article coins the term (Ummatwya )—Islamic Ummatism—to illustrate the differences between the Pan-Islamic ideology of groups like the Islamic State of Iraq & Syria (ISIS) and the Islamic nationalism ideology of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. The main difference between Islamic nationalism and Islamic Ummatism we see today is the former represents a nationalist re-interpretation of Islam. In contrast, the latter represents an anti-nationalist re-interpretation of Islam, which draws on the anti-nationalist Pan-Islamism of the late nineteenth century.