Ummah as an Imagined Community: How Islamic State Built a Nation?

IS (Islamic State), which rose to the top of the global agenda with the capture of Mosul in 2014, maintained this position for a long time. The organisation's communication strategy and pragmatic policies were effective in its rapid rise in a short period of time. Foreign fighters from all over the world flocked to Iraq and Syria to join IS, which took over the leadership of the "Global Jihad" with its propaganda activities. After the declaration of the "caliphate", the organisation focused on the goal of statehood and had to create a nation out of its members with different languages, cultures and ethnic identities. In this context, the study focuses on the discourse of “ummah” in Konstantiniyye, a Turkish-language publication of IS. In this study, which employs Foucauldian Discourse Analysis, all occurrences of the word "ummah" in the issues of Konstantiniyye magazine were scanned. Direct quotations from religious texts such as the Qur'an and Hadith, as well as usages that do not involve a discursive construction, were excluded from the analysis. According to the findings of the study, IS constructed the "ummah" in two ways: a community limited to its own members and sympathizers, and a military unit fighting together against the enemy. By doing so, the organisation has created, albeit temporarily, a nation out of a mass that cannot be united on the basis of language, ethnic identity or culture; it has positioned itself as the protector of Islam; it has united and motivated its members, who have the potential to conflict with each other, against a common enemy.