Article
Licensed
Unlicensed
Requires Authentication
The Arabs and the Ummah of Muḥammad
-
Sean W. Anthony
Published/Copyright:
October 1, 2025
Abstract
This essay starts from a somewhat simple question: What was the ummah of Muḥammad? It has become commonplace in the historiography of early Islam to understand the ummah of Muḥammad as primarily the “religious community” that he founded – “a community of believers” in modern scholarly parlance. But this received scholarly wisdom sits ill at ease with the Qurʾān, which more often asserts that its messenger was called from, and sent to, an ummah that pre-existed his mission. This ummah is never given an explicit name in the Qurʾān, but the Qurʾān does convey several interesting facts about it: most notably, this ummah speaks the same language as the messenger, the Arabic language. May one conclude, therefore, that the ummah to which the messenger was initially sent is merely the Arabs? Many early authors of the first and second Islamic centuries certainly do follow this line of reasoning, but are they correct or mistaken? This essay cross-examines their reasoning, as well as the warrant ostensibly behind it, and follows the development of the conviction that Arabs were the ummah of Muḥammad into its full bloom in the Arabic epistolography of the Umayyad period.
Published Online: 2025-10-01
Published in Print: 2025-09-30
© 2025 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
You are currently not able to access this content.
You are currently not able to access this content.
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Articles
- Sealing and the Root kh-t-m in the Qurʾān and pre-Islamic Christian Literature: On the “Seal of the Prophets” and Disbelievers Having “Seals on Their Hearts and Hearing”
- The Arabs and the Ummah of Muḥammad
- The Gubernatorial Correspondence in Late Umayyad Egypt: A Letter by al-Ḥurr b. Yūsuf
- When Taxes Tell Stories: A Document Cluster of Tax Registers from the Southern Fayyūm
- Bandar al-Ṭūr. A Port on the Red Sea and Its Development in the Ninth/Fifteenth Century
- Firewood Provisioning in the 17th-Century Ottoman State
- Reviews
- Annotated Bibliography “Arabic Papyrology: Taxes and Taxpayers”
- Denise Aigle, Saints hommes de Chiraz et du Fārs. Pouvoir, société et lieux de sacralité (Xe–XVe s.), Leiden: Brill 2023. Xviii, 990 pp., 21 Illustrationen, 3 Karten, ISBN (Hardback) 978-90-04-54273-0.
- Edmund Hayes, Agents of the Hidden Imam. Forging Twelver Shiʿism, 850–950 CE, Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2024 [paperback edition], VII–XIII+247 pp., ISBN 978-1-108-99498-9.
- Kaplony, Andreas, Hg., Geschichte der arabischen Welt, München: C.H. Beck 2024, xiv+904 S., 5 Karten, ISBN (Hardcover) 978 3 406 82244 5 // Cook, Michael: A History of the Muslim World from its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity, Princeton, Oxford (Princeton University Press) 2024. lxi, 895 pp. 35 £. ISBN (Hardcover) 978 0 691 23657 5.
- Gábor Kármán (ed.), Tributaries and Peripheries of the Ottoman Empire, Leiden: Brill 2020, xii, 336 pp., ISBN: 978-90-04-43054-9.
- Boris Liebrenz and Kristina Richardson (eds.), The Notebook of Kamāl al-Dīn the Weaver: Aleppine Notes from the End of the 16th Century. Edition, Notes and Study = Ayyām Kamāl-al-Dīn al-Ḥāʾik: Ḥalab fī awākhir al-qarn al-ʿāshir, Berlin: De Gruyter/Beirut: Dār al-Farābī, 2021 (Bibliotheca Islamica, vol. 59), 100 + 140 (Arabic) pp. (including bibliography and indices), ISBN 9783110688924; ISBN 9786144850886.
- Liana Saif, Francesca Leoni, Matthew Melvin-Koushki und Farouk Yahya (Hgg.), Islamicate Occult Sciences in Theory and Practice, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2020 (Handbook of Oriental Studies. Section 1 The Near and Middle East, 140); xviii, 703 pp., 49 Abb., 1 Karte, Index, ISBN: 978-90-04-42696-2 (gebundene Ausgabe), 978-90-04-42697-9 (E-book), 978-90-04-54427-7 (Taschenbuchausgabe).
- Mathieu Tillier and Naïm Vanthieghem, The Book of the Cow. An Early Qurʾānic Codex on Papyrus (P. Hamb. Arab. 68), Leiden: Brill, 2024, xv+198 pp., with two sets of manuscript images, 17 tables, 2 graphs, 7 figures, one appendix, bibliography, index, ISBN: 978-90-04-67739-5 (hardback).
- Dominique Valérian, Ports et réseaux d’échanges dans le Maghreb médiéval, Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2019, 355 pp., ISBN 9788490961766.
- Geert Jan van Gelder (Übersetzer und Hrsg.), Abū Manṣūr al-ThaꜤālibī: Contrariness in Classical Arabic Literature: Beautifying the Ugly and Uglifying the Beautiful, Brill Studies in Middle Eastern Literatures 45, Leiden: Brill 2024, XIX, 215 S., ISBN 978-90-04-69100-1.
Articles in the same Issue
- Titelseiten
- Articles
- Sealing and the Root kh-t-m in the Qurʾān and pre-Islamic Christian Literature: On the “Seal of the Prophets” and Disbelievers Having “Seals on Their Hearts and Hearing”
- The Arabs and the Ummah of Muḥammad
- The Gubernatorial Correspondence in Late Umayyad Egypt: A Letter by al-Ḥurr b. Yūsuf
- When Taxes Tell Stories: A Document Cluster of Tax Registers from the Southern Fayyūm
- Bandar al-Ṭūr. A Port on the Red Sea and Its Development in the Ninth/Fifteenth Century
- Firewood Provisioning in the 17th-Century Ottoman State
- Reviews
- Annotated Bibliography “Arabic Papyrology: Taxes and Taxpayers”
- Denise Aigle, Saints hommes de Chiraz et du Fārs. Pouvoir, société et lieux de sacralité (Xe–XVe s.), Leiden: Brill 2023. Xviii, 990 pp., 21 Illustrationen, 3 Karten, ISBN (Hardback) 978-90-04-54273-0.
- Edmund Hayes, Agents of the Hidden Imam. Forging Twelver Shiʿism, 850–950 CE, Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2024 [paperback edition], VII–XIII+247 pp., ISBN 978-1-108-99498-9.
- Kaplony, Andreas, Hg., Geschichte der arabischen Welt, München: C.H. Beck 2024, xiv+904 S., 5 Karten, ISBN (Hardcover) 978 3 406 82244 5 // Cook, Michael: A History of the Muslim World from its Origins to the Dawn of Modernity, Princeton, Oxford (Princeton University Press) 2024. lxi, 895 pp. 35 £. ISBN (Hardcover) 978 0 691 23657 5.
- Gábor Kármán (ed.), Tributaries and Peripheries of the Ottoman Empire, Leiden: Brill 2020, xii, 336 pp., ISBN: 978-90-04-43054-9.
- Boris Liebrenz and Kristina Richardson (eds.), The Notebook of Kamāl al-Dīn the Weaver: Aleppine Notes from the End of the 16th Century. Edition, Notes and Study = Ayyām Kamāl-al-Dīn al-Ḥāʾik: Ḥalab fī awākhir al-qarn al-ʿāshir, Berlin: De Gruyter/Beirut: Dār al-Farābī, 2021 (Bibliotheca Islamica, vol. 59), 100 + 140 (Arabic) pp. (including bibliography and indices), ISBN 9783110688924; ISBN 9786144850886.
- Liana Saif, Francesca Leoni, Matthew Melvin-Koushki und Farouk Yahya (Hgg.), Islamicate Occult Sciences in Theory and Practice, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2020 (Handbook of Oriental Studies. Section 1 The Near and Middle East, 140); xviii, 703 pp., 49 Abb., 1 Karte, Index, ISBN: 978-90-04-42696-2 (gebundene Ausgabe), 978-90-04-42697-9 (E-book), 978-90-04-54427-7 (Taschenbuchausgabe).
- Mathieu Tillier and Naïm Vanthieghem, The Book of the Cow. An Early Qurʾānic Codex on Papyrus (P. Hamb. Arab. 68), Leiden: Brill, 2024, xv+198 pp., with two sets of manuscript images, 17 tables, 2 graphs, 7 figures, one appendix, bibliography, index, ISBN: 978-90-04-67739-5 (hardback).
- Dominique Valérian, Ports et réseaux d’échanges dans le Maghreb médiéval, Madrid: Casa de Velázquez, 2019, 355 pp., ISBN 9788490961766.
- Geert Jan van Gelder (Übersetzer und Hrsg.), Abū Manṣūr al-ThaꜤālibī: Contrariness in Classical Arabic Literature: Beautifying the Ugly and Uglifying the Beautiful, Brill Studies in Middle Eastern Literatures 45, Leiden: Brill 2024, XIX, 215 S., ISBN 978-90-04-69100-1.
