Chapter 6 provides an overview of the history and development of the Sunnis, emphasizing how adherence to the community (jamāʿa) and the authoritative example (sunna) of the Prophet allowed for a variety of groups to contribute to an ideal of a universal Islam. It shows how the notion of the “rightly guided” caliphs functioned to promote unity across the far-flung ʿAbbāsid Empire, and how the emergence of legal schools sat in creative tension with caliphal pretensions to absolute authority. It shows how a combination of Ahl al-Ḥadīth piety, Murjiʾite notions of faith, as well as Ashʿarite and Māturīdī theology provided the theological basis for a broadly conceived consensus on proper religion. It also shows how Seljuq promotion of the madrasa system allowed for Sunnism to become the dominant communal tendency among Muslims after the sixth/twelfth century. The chapter ends with a discussion of the Karrāmiyya as an example of a group that medieval scholars excluded from the Sunni consensus, and considers why they might have done so.

This chapter looks at the thinking and practice of international relations and world order in the Islamic world. It opens by setting Islam's complex geopolitical context. In terms of thinking it covers the umma, the realms of al-Harb, al-Islam, and al-Ahd, jihad, the work of Ibn Khaldun, and Ijtihad. In terms of practice it covers the relationship between the umma and the Islamic state, the division of Islam into rival empires, and the rivalry between Sunnis and Shias within Islam. A key theme is the contradictions between thinking and practice.

This chapter discusses the principle aim of the Kemalist nation-building project: the construction of Homo LASTus. Understood here as a Weberian ideal type, Homo LASTus refers to a new human being who is at once a laicist, Atatürkist (Kemalist), Sunni Muslim and Turk. Having determined, ethnic religious heterogeneity, Islamism and the Ottoman nostalgia as existential threats to the new secularist and Turkish nationalist state and national identity, the Kemalists were adamant to create a secular nation out of the country’s majority that happened to be Sunni Muslim and Turkish. After summarising Kemalist nation-building and its relations with Islam and minorities, the chapter briefly elaborates on the social engineering policies of the Kemalists and their securitisation of minority identities. It explains how the Kemalist state marginalised, securitised and even in some cases criminalised ethnoreligious and political minorities as well as religious Muslims; and the state’s assimilation and dissimilation policies in relation to these minorities. After discussing each parameter (Laicist, Atatürkist, Sunni Muslim, and Turk) in a separate section, this chapter discusses how the Kemalists created and made use of Atatürk’s personality cult in addition to education in creating their desired citizens.

In this chapter, I explore extensively the history of coup-proofing in Egypt beginning with the Free Officers regime in 1952. King Faruq (1936–1952) was already corrupting his generals prior to the Free Officers’ coup but Gamal ʿAbdul Nasser (1952–1970) surpassed by far whatever the monarchy did in this regard. Nasser also developed multiple security agencies charged with spying on the military, and one another. In Syria, too, corruption and counterbalancing were part of the coup-proofing panoply; and, in addition, identity politics. I show that minority reaction against Sunni hegemony in the military began in the 1960s – two decades after the French left. I trace the beginnings of Alawi ethnic stacking in the Syrian officer corps to the 1963 first Baʿathi coup. I maintain that 1963 proved to be a turning point because the Baʿathification of politics was concomitant with the progressive Alawitization of the officer corps.

Chapter 2 discusses the contested meanings of the umma, specifically in Sunni thought. It reviews the ways the concept is understood as having a classical reference point in the era of the Prophet and his immediate successors, and follows its development through medieval and modern scholars. A consistent theme has been that the community of the faith must be tied to proper leadership, but the declining and then dismissed Caliphate in the second decade of the twentieth century, stirred intellectual and political agitation. Today calls for unity, or at least solidarity, contend with debates over how extensive the umma is and how much difference is allowable within it. The chapter argues that the aspiration to both comprehensiveness and internal tolerance is commonly reaffirmed, yet challenged by normative ambivalence within the concept itself.