Society, al-mujtamaʿ

Mujtamaʿ has established itself as the Arabic key concept for society since about the 1940s. Before, various terms were competing over the semantic field of society. Most notably among these are al-haʾa al-ijtimāʿiyya (the social sphere/cosmos), jamʿiyya (association), and umma, which, during the Arabic Sattelzeit, connotated a range of meanings. Next to ‘community’ and ‘nation’ (the two central meanings today), this included ‘the people’, ‘society’, and in some iterations even ‘race’. These different terms suggested by different actors tended to go together with different normative connotations, e.g. for umma, often referring to common morals based on religion that held together society and its individual members. Mujtamaʿ seemingly was favored and popularized by actors orienting themselves more at secular French concepts of society. After the establishment of mujtamaʿ as a basic concept, the term however came to be used by a wide range of actors and in order to advance quite different conceptions of society, among these secular-liberal and Islamic-conservative. The classical meanings of mujtamaʿ had centrally been ‘gathering’ and ‘meeting place’, but extended to connote anything where several parts came together, e.g. the confluence of two rivers or a certain constellation of stars.