Too often Westerners have made assumptions that turned out not to apply in parts of the Muslim world such as the idea that religion could be divided from politics or that the prime focus of identity was the nation state and not the umma.
He called it "a crime against religion and the entire Muslim umma [community]".
The notion of federalism is generally disliked, at least by the Arab world's predominant Sunni majority, as an old imperial device to divide and rule and undermine the umma, the community of Muslim nations particularly, of late, in Iraq.
Not a country with borders but an umma [worldwide Islamic community of believers] of all the Muslim people.
The problem of the umma Islam in the West Whose war is it anyway?
In Islamic tradition, they argue, the ambitions of any individual are set aside for the common good of the umma, or community.
Islam, which means "submission", teaches that the primary unit of society is the umma, the brotherhood of believers, and it provides a system of laws—sharia for people to live by.
But in the Middle East recently, the opposite has been happening: secular Arab nationalism seems to be in decline, and the umma or world community of Muslims is regaining importance.
"Islam does not recognise geographical boundaries, nor does it acknowledge racial and blood differences, considering all Muslims as one umma [community]," declared Mr Banna, who enlisted hundreds of thousands of followers in six countries by the time of his assassination in 1949.
For many years the Muslim Brotherhood contemplated a grand alliance with Shia Iran, and most Islamists still harbour lingering dreams of a united Muslim umma (nation).
Many feel more loyal to the global Muslim community, the umma, than to the relatively young nation-states of which they are citizens.But however much they may have borrowed from the Arab world, black African Muslims remain African.
