This paper attempts to theorize what IS’s discursive articulations of the umma and caliphate entail in terms of an ideological vision of political community and statehood and what consequences this has for the prevalent modern normative ideology of nationalism, and its products of the nation and nation state. I contend that IS articulates a unique vision of political community and state that I term umma-caliphalism whose (counter-)hegemonic, universalistic, and expansionist nature entails a thorough process of what I call de-nationization. Theoretically counterposed to nationalism ideology on the grounds of sovereignty, membership, territoriality, and temporality, this umma-caliphalist vision mandates materially dismantling the very institutional structure of the nation state and eliminating its symbols and apparatus of sovereign authority. Symbolically, having rejected nationalism and stripped the nation off its sovereignty (i.e. state), IS envisions undoing the nation as a form of imagined political community by officially treating it as an ethnie or a mode of ethnic cultural unit. This entails rejecting the politicization of ethnic cultural symbols and identity and their utilization for political mobilization and collective pursuit of sovereign institutional realization, either as a fully-fledged state or autonomous self-rule on the basis of ethnic particularism within IS’s imagined caliphate. The argument I make here is distinct from the prior scholarship that either lays out the general characteristics of IS’s vision of political community and statehood, conflates it with nationalism, explores its un-Islamicness, or despite affirming its opposition to nationalism falls short of thoroughly explaining this on theoretical grounds (Kaneva & Stanton, 2020; Low 2016; Mikami, 2019; Nagata, 2019; Piscatori & Saikal, 2019). I organize the paper’s investigation on the difference(s) between IS’s discourse of the umma and caliphate with the nation and nation state around four analytical categories: membership (the symbolic boundaries of the community and the form of solidarity it is built upon); sovereignty (the locus and scope of exercise of power); territoriality (the physical boundaries of the political community and the state to be established); and temporality (the time and historical trajectory of the political community). I conduct a multi-perspectival discourse analysis (combining Wodak et al.’s Discourse-Historical Analysis with Laclau and Mouffe’s Discourse Theory) of a large corpus of IS communication output—115 print-style articles and 17 audio and video messages in various languages such as English, Arabic, Kurdish, and Turkish—released between 2013 and June 2019.