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This chapter covers relations between longtime Black residents and newly arrived West African Muslims. During their settlement, African immigrants try to reconcile their Black identity with their Muslim identity, but relations between them and their Black counterparts are often strained. Blacks view them as scornful invaders, and Africans see American-born Blacks as incorrigible slackers. Although Harlem residents have held a positive view of Muslims over the years, the Islamic identity of Africans is disregarded in their ongoing conflict. Some Africans are embraced as role models or cultural brokers, while other Blacks see their African clothing and religious practices as an opportunity to reclaim their African heritage.

For more than twenty years, West African Muslims from the Muridiyya order, a Sufi brotherhood based in Senegal, have organized the annual Cheikh Amadou Bamba Day parade in New York City. It is a religious procession that allows them to redefine their African identities, cope with the stigma of Blackness, and counteract accusations of Islamic terrorism. But the march is not merely an event for members, because its banners often challenge common notions of Black history, and African American paraders follow a slightly different course. This chapter explores the way Murids, followers of Muridiyya, and other West African Muslims such as the Malinke and the Fulani create religious activities, networks, stores, and institutions that transform Harlem into a sacred city. It is a sacred space, however, that includes the long-standing Nation of Islam and other African American Muslim orientations.

A recent influx of West African immigrants is creating an enclave Harlem residents now call Little Africa. Because most Americans view Islam as an Arab religion, many disregard the Muslim identity of these Black immigrants. Still, Harlem is a Black space where African Muslims represent a new blues people with their own unique story to tell. After providing some background on African Muslims in New York, this chapter discusses the fieldwork, a multisited ethnography covering different locations and communities, and addresses issues of faith, struggle, and the emergence of a new Black Mecca in Harlem, U.S.A.

Thousands are making a mass exodus from West Africa. Attempting to escape perpetual unemployment in their home countries, many are taking drastic measures to reach Spain or other European nations for the promise of better economic conditions. Most die in rough seas, as they travel with human traffickers in pateras, small fishing boats ill equipped for the journey. On a catamaran, fourteen Senegalese Muslim men made an unprecedented Atlantic voyage bound for New York, and they made it, but just barely. Within the larger context of West African Muslim immigration, this chapter discusses the perilous odyssey of these Muslim sailors, the push of their familial obligations, and the pull of the American dream.

While the majority of West Africans in the United States are Anglophone with Christian leanings, today’s most recent African immigrants are Francophone or French-speaking and Muslim. Even if they did study English in their countries of origin, it was the British version, and most have great difficulty adjusting to an American accent, which also includes the Black vernacular. In the Harlem context, their Frenchness can be both a benefit and a hindrance. But while few have the money or time to take English as a second language (ESL) classes, they realize that if they are going to take advantage of the place many have viewed as heaven, they must learn the language. While most are polyglot, they are primarily conversant in local African languages such as Wolof or Djoula, and this chapter covers the linguistic challenges African Muslims face in a city like New York.

This chapter examines the so-called Third Resurrection and the transition from Black Religion to historical Islam as the basis of religious authority in American Islam. It suggests that while the basis of religious authority shifted, African American Muslims remained objects rather than subjects in this development. It compares this situation with Edward Wilmot Blyden's 19th century argument that if White European and American missionaries in Africa did not transfer religious authority to African Christians in a timely fashion, the latter would ultimately regurgitate Christianity.

This chapter examines the history of Black Orientalism and its relation to African American Muslims and American Islam. It describes and criticizes three typologies of Black Orientalism, including National Black Orientalism, Academic Black Orientalism and Religious Black Orientalism. It discusses the manifestations of Black Orientalism as seeking to cast the Arab/Muslim world as a precursor and then imitator of the West in the latter's history of anti-blackness, and as rendering the Muslim world not only as the source of anti-black racism, but also of the of the most toxic reactions to this which continued to infect the otherwise civil approach of non-Muslim Black Americans long after the propriety and usefulness of black radicalism in America had passed.

This chapter examines the historical relation between African Americans, immigrant Islam and the dominant culture in the U.S. during the 20th century. It describes African African Muslim thought during the Third Resurrection as a prescriptive ideal, and attempts to reconcile blackness, Americanness and adherence to Islam. It contends that it was not Islam but certain oversights and obsessions of Black and especially Post-Colonial Religion that impeded the African American Muslim's ability to come to terms with America.

A dominant theme that is evident in most testimonies of new Muslims entails the recognition of personal tragedies that are usually caused by sexual disorders or conflicts within their families. As Nur Ali points out, a family begins with two individuals unrelated by blood who come together to accomplish things that they could not perform as individuals, and from this basic element we can build villages, nations, and worlds. African-American Muslims are believed to have a mission concerned with advocating attempts to resolve social disorder and providing a new way of life grounded on certain Islamic values about sexuality and marriage. This chapter illustrates, through an ethnohistorical view, some common patriarchal practices practiced by Muslims and how these entail concepts that are not unfamiliar to contemporary American society.

African-American Muslims strongly believe that embracing Islamic worship and principles can help oppressed people from the lower classes triumph over instances of economic and social injustice. The Quran is believed to serve not only as a source of divine inspiration but also as a practical guide for taking on issues of deficiencies in inferior jobs, substandard housing facilities, and unequal education that usually bring about suppression and violence. As a liberation theology, Islam supposedly examines ethical conduct in the context of specific ideals that aim to surpass the status quo. Because Islam is a “simple religion”, it is believed that although one may attempt to integrate Islam into his or her life, he or she may not surpass material poverty and is at risk of human error.

The journey taken by African-American Muslims and how they persisted in situations of slavery is often ignored as a significant element of American history. Testimonies and narratives about such accounts, as the author observes, can be compared to “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” because they share certain themes regarding symbolic death and rebirth, sacrifice, heroism, redemption, and other such concepts. Also, we observe how this literature entails descriptions about slavery and how this can therefore serve as a template wherein believers may be able to associate his or her own experiences of conversion and functioning. This ethnography examines how the Muslims were considered the “home team” and, through photos, interviews, and other such documentary evidence, we look into contemporary religious practices and issues that may have greatly influenced the Muslims’ social transformation.

In this chapter, the author draws attention to the Islamic sources African American Muslims consult when organizing their households. As with their coreligionists around the world, African American Muslims revere the Qur?an and the sunna (practices of the Prophet Muhammad) as their primary and most authoritative sources for the development of Muslim family life, including polygyny. Other authorities are important for those living polygyny, including female experience as textual exegesis, and should be examined. Thus this chapters explores theological questions attendant to multiple-wife marriage, drawing specific attention to what Islam says about polygyny and how African American Muslims embody what they hear, read, and witness as they seek to understand the conditions under which polygyny is a viable form of marriage.

In 1930, Farad Muhammad, a mysterious peddler, told African Americans in Detroit that their true religion was Islam and that their original language was Arabic, stolen from them when they were brought as slaves into the New World. With few followers, he established the Lost–Found Nation of Islam in North America. When Farad disappeared in 1934, Elijah Poole, who later became known as Elijah Muhammad, emerged as the leader of this Islamic movement. This book analyzes the beliefs, practices, doctrines, and religious narratives of the Nation of Islam (NOI). It provides a profile of the rich religious landscape of African American Muslim members of NOI and illuminates the movement's impact on the relationship between religion and politics in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s.

This chapter explores the intellectual defenses of Elijah Muhammad by African American Muslim intellectuals who defended their leader as a genuine Islamic prophet. To defend their leader's authenticity, these intellectuals offered interpretations of Muhammad's message on a frequent basis in Muhammad Speaks. They also employed a variety of genres such as public speeches, foreign endorsements in newspapers, and cartoons.

This chapter unpacks the interaction between African American Muslims and South Asian and Arab American Muslims, who visited the mosque to make charitable donations. It reveals how believers at the mosque responded to perceptions their Muslim brothers and sisters from other ethnic categories looked down on them, contrasting sharply with the ideal of Islam as a religion without racial hierarchy. Such ethnic cleavages stand in stark contrast to the ideal of an inclusive ummah, but they emerge because all US Muslims live at the intersection of America’s racial and religious orders. While there is much Othering that happens among African American and immigrant Muslims, what tensions ultimately reveal is the enduring legacy of white racial dominance in the United States and its cascading impacts on the everyday lives of US Muslims.

Here the author introduces the purpose, limitations, and scope of polygyny. It reflects upon her positionality as a former Christian, now Muslim, who came to Islam through the guidance of the association of Imam Mohammed. It identifies the methodology used in the book, specifically ethnography and Muslim womanism, and revisits the social context in which African American Muslims live and worship.