There is a particular kind of politics that does not argue from evidence but from longing. It does not ask what is true about the past so much as what is needed from it. Across the modern Islamic world, a version of this politics has found its most potent form in the call for a restored Ummah—a unified Muslim community governed by a single, divinely guided authority. The call is emotionally compelling, historically ancient in its imagery, and, on close inspection, almost entirely invented.
To understand why it persists, it helps to have a name for what it is doing. Call it mythotherapy: the practice of using an idealized, sanitized past as a balm for present wounds. The wound, in this case, is real enough—the humiliation of colonial subjugation, the failure of post-Ottoman secular governments to deliver dignity or prosperity, the enduring trauma of watching a civilization that once led the world reduced to a collection of dependent states whose borders were drawn in London and Paris. Mythotherapy does not deny this pain. It metabolizes it into a political program, offering a lost golden age as both diagnosis and cure. If only we return, the reasoning runs, we will be whole again.
An Islamic Golden Age that Never Existed
The problem is that the golden age being invoked never quite existed—and understanding how it has been constructed tells us as much about the present as it does about the past.
The primary historical reference point for modern Islamic movements is the era of the al-Khulafa’ar-Rashidun—the four “Rightly Guided” Caliphs who led the Muslim community following Muhammad’s death in 632 CE. In the mythology, this period appears as something close to paradise on earth: leaders who lived like commoners, courts open to the grievances of the poor, law applied with absolute equality, and a community moving as one, guided by faith rather than power. The historical record offers a considerably different picture.
The death of Muhammad barely registered before the nascent community was in crisis. Abu Bakr, the first Caliph, spent much of his brief tenure fighting the Ridda Wars—campaigns against Arab tribes that had decided, reasonably enough, that their political and financial obligations to Medina died with Muhammad. These were not theological disputes conducted through polite disagreement; they were bloody military suppressions. The “unity” of the early Ummah was, from its first moments, something that had to be enforced.
The political fragility of the era is most starkly illustrated by the fates of the four Caliphs themselves. Of the four men celebrated as paragons of just governance, only Abu Bakr died of natural causes. Umar was assassinated by a Persian captive. Uthman was besieged in his own home and killed by Muslim soldiers from the Egyptian and Iraqi provinces—a mutiny from within the community he was supposed to lead. Ali’s reign was consumed entirely by civil war: first the Battle of the Camel, in which his forces fought those loyal to Muhammad’s widow Aisha, then the protracted conflict at Siffin against Muawiya, governor of Syria, which produced the Kharijite schism—a radical splinter movement that would eventually murder Ali himself.
This is not a footnote to the era; it is the era. The foundational period of Islamic governance was one in which the very question of who had the right to lead was answered, repeatedly, by force. This is not a revisionist reading imposed from outside the tradition. Ibn Khaldun, writing in fourteenth-century Tunisia, built an entire philosophy of history around the observation that political solidarity—what he called asabiyyah, group feeling—was inherently cyclical and perishable, always subject to the corruptions of power and the entropy of success. His Muqaddimah is, among other things, a sustained argument that no political order, including Islamic ones, escapes the logic of rise and decay. He drew no golden age. He was a Muslim scholar, writing from within the tradition, and the history he saw was the same history we see now—a record of struggle, fracture, and impermanence.
To speak of it as a time of “frictionless unity” is not to recall history but to enact a collective amnesia about it.
The Myth of Muslim Unity
The second layer of the pitch draws on the Abbasid Caliphate and the later “Gunpowder Empires”—Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal—for its claims to civilizational prestige. The claim shifts from piety to power. The Islamic world, the narrative holds, was once the undisputed global superpower: leading in science, philosophy, medicine, and trade. Modern weakness is the direct consequence of fragmentation. Restore the unity; restore the glory. But political unity and civilizational achievement were never as tightly coupled as this implies. The golden age of Islamic science and philosophy flourished during a period of profound political fragmentation. The Abbasids claimed the Caliphate from Baghdad from 750 CE onward, but their authority began fracturing almost immediately—an Umayyad survivor fled to Al-Andalus and established a rival State, while by the tenth century the Shia Fatimid Caliphate had risen in Egypt, explicitly rejecting Abbasid legitimacy.
At the height of Islamic intellectual achievement, there was no unified Muslim political entity. There were competing ones.
The idea of a unified “Muslim bloc” in medieval geopolitics is, in fact, a historical fiction. Throughout the medieval period, Muslim states formed alliances with non-Muslim powers against their Muslim rivals as readily as any other polity. The Abbasids exchanged diplomatic overtures with Charlemagne against the Umayyads of Spain. During the Crusades, local emirs made arrangements with the Crusader kingdoms when doing so protected their interests against neighboring Muslim rivals. And the three great Muslim powers of the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries—Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal—were not pillars of a unified civilization but rivals engaged in sustained, often brutal conflict. The Ottoman-Safavid wars lasted over two centuries, driven by the Sunni-Shia divide and the contest for Mesopotamia.
Shared Religious Practice
What did unify the Islamic world during these centuries was real and significant: shared religious practice, the Arabic language of scholarship, the Hajj, a rich network of trade and intellectual exchange. But these were cultural and spiritual unifiers, not political ones. The history of Islamic civilization is, in large part, a history of remarkable achievement without a unified central government—a fact that modern political movements prefer not to advertise.
To understand why this mythology has such power today, it is necessary to be honest about what is driving it. Modern calls for a restored Ummah are less about history than about trauma—specifically, the political and psychological trauma of twentieth-century colonialism and its aftermath. The carving of the Middle East into mandate territories by Britain and France after the First World War left borders that did not reflect the ethnic, tribal, or religious contours of the populations within them. They were drawn to serve European imperial interests, and they left generations of Muslims in the psychically destabilizing position of living in states that felt, quite literally, foreign.
Invented Tradition
The Ummah myth offers a direct answer to this wound. The nation-state, in this framing, is not a legitimate political unit but a colonial imposition designed to keep Muslims divided and weak. The current world order is not merely flawed but illegitimate—a deviation from the divinely ordained. This move does several things at once: it delegitimizes existing governments without requiring specific critique of their failures, and it shifts responsibility for corruption, stagnation, and dysfunction away from internal governance and onto the original sin of colonial disruption.
This is not the exclusive property of fringe movements. Yusuf al-Qaradawi—president of the International Union of Muslim Scholars and for decades the most watched Islamic scholar in the Arab world—told a Muslim Brotherhood rally in El-Arish in May 2013 that Islam rejects the very existence of multiple nations: “there are Islamic peoples but not Islamic nations, because Muslims are one Ummah.” Western colonialism, he continued, had artificially fragmented a people who were one under the Caliphate. The diagnosis and the cure, in two sentences. That this was met with applause rather than controversy is precisely the point: the mythological framework it draws on is not extremist. It is the common air of mainstream Islamic political discourse. Political scientists have a useful term for this kind of maneuver: invented tradition. The concept, developed by the historian Eric Hobsbawm, describes how modern movements take historical symbols, reinterpret them through a contemporary lens, and present the result as ancient and unchanging. The “tradition” being invented here is a modern political construction—assembled from selective historical memory, genuine spiritual bonds, and present-day grievance—then dressed in the authority of antiquity.
A Dangerous Conflation
None of this is to dismiss the genuine spiritual reality of the Ummah. For nearly two billion people, Islam provides a profound sense of shared identity expressed through prayer, fasting, pilgrimage, and a felt sense of brotherhood that crosses national lines. This is a living, meaningful reality. What the political version of the pitch does, however, is collapse this spiritual community into a demand for a centralized political state—insisting that the felt experience of solidarity is incomplete, even fraudulent, unless it is expressed through a unified government. Sudanese-American legal scholar Abdullahi An-Na’im has argued from within the Islamic tradition that this conflation is not only politically dangerous but theologically incoherent—that genuine religious compliance requires freedom of conscience, which state coercion by definition destroys. His work is contested, but it exists, and it represents a serious tradition of internal Islamic critique that the political-unity narrative actively suppresses. The political version of the pitch thus conflates two very different things: feeling like one people, and living under one ruler.
The consequences of this conflation are not merely theoretical. When political movements promise to restore a conflict-free, perfectly just order, they create what might be called a utopian gap—the distance between the imagined perfection of the past and the irreducible messiness of actual governance. Because the perfect unity being promised never existed in the first place, any real attempt to implement it must deal with dissent and pluralism by suppressing them. The history being invoked as a model is, as we have seen, a history characterized by exactly the internal divisions the restored order is meant to transcend. There is also a subtler cost: the erasure of Islam’s extraordinary geographic and cultural diversity. The mythotherapy pitch treats “authentic” Islam as something expressible only through a specific, idealized Middle Eastern model, airbrushing away the rich, locally rooted traditions of West Africa, Southeast Asia, the Balkans, and Central Asia. The Javanese Muslim, the Moroccan Sufi, the Senegalese scholar—their traditions become, in this framework, deviations from an original purity that never existed.
The Antidote to Mythotherapy
Ultimately, the call for a unified Ummah is not a history lesson. It is a political product, and what it is selling is not a return to the past but something that has never existed: a future disguised as an origin. The appeal is compelling precisely because it draws on real things—genuine spiritual bonds, real civilizational achievements, the legitimate grievance of colonial humiliation, the authentic failure of many post-colonial states. But the myth itself—the perfectly unified, justly governed, divinely ordained Caliphate that Muslims need only restore to reclaim their dignity—is a construction, and a thoroughly modern one.
Islamic history, like all human history, is a record of struggle: for power, for legitimacy, for survival. Its achievements in science, philosophy, law, and art were produced not by a monolithic unity but by a civilization comfortable with internal debate, regional variation, and competitive pluralism. That messy, human record is more inspiring—and more usable—than the sanitized myth. The antidote to mythotherapy is not cynicism about the past but honesty about it—and honesty requires acknowledging what the tradition actually contains. Islamic civilization produced Ibn Khaldun’s unsentimental sociology of power, al-Biruni’s empirical curiosity, the fierce jurisprudential disagreements of the legal schools, the mystical heterodoxy of the Sufis. It produced, in other words, exactly the pluralism, internal dissent, and intellectual restlessness that the unified-Ummah myth is designed to foreclose. To invoke the tradition as a mandate for enforced conformity is to betray what the tradition actually was.
Conclusion
The question for Muslim-majority societies is not how to return to an origin that was never as clean as the myth requires. It is how to draw on fourteen centuries of genuinely contested thought and practice to build institutions adequate to the actual problems of the twenty-first century: political legitimacy, economic development, the rights of minorities and women, the governance of religiously plural societies. These are hard problems. They have no answers in the seventh century because the seventh century did not have them. They require exactly the kind of honest, rigorous engagement with the present that mythotherapy is specifically designed to prevent.
The myth endures because it is doing real emotional work. But a civilization capable of producing the achievements that Islamic history genuinely contains does not need a fabricated past. It needs to look at the actual past—take what is usable, discard what is not, and build forward. That is, in the end, what every living tradition has always had to do, otherwise it remains trapped between the twenty-first century and a seventh century that never quite existed.
Salam Almasri is a fellow at the Ideological Defense Institute.
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Interesting, but lacking. I wonder if the author has read ‘Islam and Science‘ by Pervez Hoodbhoy. And if so, why did they came to a different conclusion?