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466chapter sixinto mainstream (thinking) at the bark of the shepherd’s dogs (themullahs, Imams, and leaders of sectarian groups). It will requirean intellectual revolution to change this mentality of conformityand promote individuality and originality in thought and practiceby both the men in the street and the most ordinary sharÊ#astudent.Loyalty in Islam and the Question of Personal andCollective IdentitiesCurrent public discourse about Islamic identity in the Arab-Muslimworld is marked by an enormous number of terminological inaccuraciesand deliberate conceptual mystifications. People seem to constantlyconfuse their religious identity with their ethnic, national,political, or ideological affiliations, thereby blurring the boundariesof what constitutes a religious community, a racial group, a nation,a people, a political party, or an ideological movement. However,we cannot blame these people because the same confusion of termsand identities can be found in the books of our tur§th heritage. Formany centuries, our honourable scholars have been discarding theclear distinctions that the Book made and, driven by the logic of partypolicies and sectarian strife, have concocted a religio-political amalgamthat indiscriminately fuses religious, ethnic, and political identities.In this section, we want to complete our study of the relationshipbetween religion and politics by looking at the concepts of wal§" andbar§", which are both closely linked to the other concepts so far discussedin this chapter. Identity is expressed either through a senseof likeness (wal§") or otherness (bar§"). It will therefore be necessaryto define terms that describe the (multiple) identities of a person, asmember of a family, clan, tribe, community, people, nation, andsuch, which we will do by closely adhering to the clear distinctionsthat the Book has drawn. We will, for example, examine the way theBook treats the term umma (community) as a sociological category.We will learn that a community is a group of people who share thesame ideological convictions and behave similarly according to thegroup’s shared cultural values. We notice that the followers ofMuÈammad (ß) are described as such a community, as the umma ofthe Muslim-Believers. In contrast to the community, the term ‘people’(qaum) refers to a body of persons who share the same languageand ethnicity; we say, for example, the Arab people, the Turkish