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This chapter outlines the history and development of the concept of the Muslim International by analyzing various political and cultural histories. It explores the history of Black Islam in the post-World War II era through the figure of Malcolm X and the ways in which the Muslim Third World became both a literal and an ideological backdrop to his unfolding narrative of resistance and internationalism. From Cairo to Harlem, Mecca to Bandung, Algiers to Palestine and beyond, the Muslim Third World played a central role in shaping Malcolm’s political vocabulary and grammar of resistance as he crafted an imaginative geography that connected Black liberation struggles in the United States of America to decolonization in Africa and the Muslim Third World.

This chapter discusses the aesthetic and political dimensions of the Muslim International through hip-hop culture during a period when the “Black criminal” and the “Muslim terrorist” were viewed as fundamental threats to U.S. national identity. Through the resurgence of Malcolm X and the embrace of Black Islam, hip-hop culture in the 1980s and 1990s tapped into Black internationalism to challenge racial domination, militarism, and mass incarceration, imagining Black freedom beyond the United States and into Africa and the Muslim Third World. The hip-hop culture—like jazz and the Black Arts Movement—became a space where Black radicalism, Islam, and Muslim Third World politics would have a strong influence, interpreted through lyrics that have been expressed by various artists such as Rakim, Public Enemy, Mos Def, Ice Cube, and many others.

This chapter investigates how, in the post-9/11 period, the U.S. security state has collapsed the figures of Black criminal and Muslim terrorist into the term “Black Muslim”. By analyzing and combining the rhetoric and logic of the “War on Crime” and the “War on Terror”, this chapter explores the collapse of the domestic and foreign realms of U.S. power and views the prison as a site of violent containment for the Muslim International, revealing the intimacies between domestic U.S. prison regimes and the emergence of imperial imprisonment in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo, and other so-called Black sites. It also discusses how Blackness, Islam, and the Muslim Third World being front and center in the current political and popular debate within the United States of America, the U.S. continues to silence and resist the history of Black Islam and those who radically resist.

This chapter explores how the Muslim Third World influenced and informed Black radical politics and culture within the Muslim International. It examines how the anticolonial struggles in the Muslim Third World of Algeria and Iraq in the 1950s and 1960s not only shaped ideas about tactics and strategy, solidarity and political possibility, but they also informed ideas about film, literature, and cultural criticism within the Black Power imagination. By examining the influence of Frantz Fanon on the Algerian War of Independence and on the novel The Battle of Algiers, and Sam Greenlee and his novel The Spook Who Sat by the Door, this chapter explores how the national liberation struggles in Algeria and Iraq became the literal and ideological backdrop for the redefinition of Black cultural practice, aesthetic developments, thematic concerns, and political orientations during the Black Power era.

This chapter explores the political and cultural history of boxer Muhammad Ali and his status as a national hero in the post-Cold War 1990s, a period when the Muslim International, through hip-hop culture, struggled to rekindle and reinvigorate the legacy of Black Islam. This post-Civil Rights fear of the “Muslim terrorist” gave way to a full-blown ideological paradigm of the “Green Menace” of Islam, replacing the “Red Scare” of communism during the Cold War elaborated in Samuel Huntington’s theory of “Clash of Civilizations.” The chapter draws from Huntington’s theory in examining Muhammad Ali’s recuperation being a symbol for the fear and containment of Black Islam within a narrative of American universalism, stripping Black Islam of its internationalist impulses.