This may depend upon ones POV. Is the Holy Prophet truly alive in your belief or is he a dead person who left a book and some habits to follow? If alive, then so are all the people who truly followed his message.

It is indisputable that Allah is Alive and never dies. What does this tell us?

Ummah is the vessel by which Islam transports itself through time. Momenin, Believers are a subset and they are the witnesses to the reality of Islam.

Ummah may be muamin or they may only be the followers of habit. Imitation. “Are those who know and those who do not know equal?”

Part of what I am after is a definition of Ummah. Is “follower of the Prophet SAW” or “self-declared muslim” or “professes Shahada” really the commonly accepted definition of Ummah? Is it defined solely by a religious belief among individuals? That is unsatisfying to me, because I feel that an Ummah should be more.

Shouldn’t the Ummah be something concrete, with at least some well-defined common purpose? Or an idea of some sort? (like in a sense, America is an idea, and not just the collection of all people with US citizenship).

What does the Ummah mean? what does it do? what does it want? none of these questions are answered by taking the Ummah to be nothing more than “all muslims”. Surely the sum is greater than the parts?

I respectfully disagree. So long as you call yourself a Muslim and believe in the shahada, you’re part of the “Ummah”. But what that is is hard to define. I hovered between “yes as an abstract” and the last added choice. I ultimately chose the last one but now I think I should have chosen the other. Or maybe define it as “followers of Muhammad (pbuh),” though I can see problems with that too.

This is what law school does to you - makes you question everything and yet come out with no answers in the end.