Toward the Realization of Ummah The Relevance of the Philippine Dar al-Harb

Abstract

I
The domain of Islam embraces some one billion people, 20 percent of
the world’s population, distributed across the globe in virtually every
political unit and geographical context. Ideologically, the Muslim world
senses a profound communion in the deeply embedded Islamic concept of
a territorially dispersed but spiritually unified global Islamic
commonwealth - ummah. Oswald Spengler, in his monumental Decline
ofthe West, reminds us that the Islamic community “embraces the whole
of the world-cavern, here and beyond, the orthodox and the good angels
and spirits, and within the community the State only formed a smaller
unit of the visible side, a unit, therefore, of which the operations were
governed by the major whole." This relationship between the modern
nation-state and the ummah, now suppressed by the force of modern
nationalism, continues to exist as a powerful primordial sentiment of
transcendent importance. That its dimensions, contours, and strength
cannot be assessed by empirical social science analysis does not make it
less real as a critical component of the Muslim psyche. This impulse
towards Islamic unity, charged with emotion, religious fervor, and
ideology, canonically sustained by the concept of ummah, is also
nurtured by a vivid memory of Islamic imperial grandeur and by a
vibrant dynamic of missionary zeal. The latter, carrying out the Qur’anic
proclamation of the universality of Islam and the command for global
dispensation of the Qur’anic message, has lost little of its original
impetus. The force of ummah is the tacit dimension, the psychic
indwelling nature of Islam. Nor can this compelling centrifugal thrust
be lightly dismissed as the transitory phase of a historical process.
No other religion has quite so powerful an impetus for global
expansion - neither Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism nor Christianity ...