The unified umma of Islamist rhetoric dissolves into a nominal label over diverse polities.

Evidence

But from here on the story unravels. The real world of Islam is internally fractured; the umma is a delta of many streams - Sunni and Shiite, clerical Islam, Sufism and folk Islam. The different forms of Islam in the Arab world, Iran and Turkey, South and Southeast Asia, Africa and Europe, are each historically and culturally articulated. “Like other religions, Islam is not a generic essence, but a nominal entity that conjoins, by means of a name, a variety of societies, cultures, histories and polities” (Al-Azmeh, 1993:60). — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 195

Categorization

• XREF: Al-Azmeh’s nominal-entity point mirrors the reader’s own handling of ‘social capital’ as an analytic placeholder — label covering heterogeneous phenomena.