Believers Like an Aching Body
Contemporary Muslim humanitarian practices are suffused with the language of religious solidarity. Yet historians and political scientists have shown that declarative claims of Islamic unity are not tenable and that the discourse of religious community (umma) serves ideological functions. More broadly, social-scientific attempts to understand the umma often founder on its theological repudiation of modern political categories (nation–state–territory). In contrast, drawing on fieldwork conducted with relief efforts in Jordan and as a contribution to the political anthropology of religion, this paper argues for another way of understanding the umma: not exposing the difference between ideal and reality but rather considering religious community through the form of its loss.