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This chapter reinterprets the rise of black radicalism as a moment of competing “voices” across competing mass medias amid rapid changes in the black freedom struggle and media landscape of the 1960s. It also reinterprets Malcolm X as a newspaper publisher, a rather underanalyzed side of Malcolm. Black publishers had long considered their papers the “voice” of the race, and Malcolm’s founding of Muhammad Speaks in 1960 to amplify the voice of Elijah Muhammad signified this. Yet, the paper’s founding also marked the beginning of the Nation of Islam’s (NOI) robust media campaign to use various medias—radio, books, and albums of Muhammad’s speeches—to promote Muhammad’s vision for racial advancement over others. His vision promised to redeem black manhood by renewing their lives, a vision displayed through salesmen for Muhammad Speaks. Thus, readers could read both the paper and their bodies. Malcolm, however, made his display through television. But when he began to gain a voice through television that rivaled that of Muhammad’s in print, the NOI’s media campaign turned from promising to renew the lives of black men to promising to take it away. Malcolm became a newspaperman cut short of his full publishing potential.

The idea of the “Black Muslims” as a hate group, or an example of the emergent falsehood of reverse racism, was facilitated and propagated by carceral officials. It was pliable enough that law enforcement could suppress Muslim practice in prisons and police local mosques by claim- ing that the NOI was a subversive political group in the guise of religion while offering civil rights organizations the language to dismiss it within the Black freedom struggle. But this suppression and surveillance often helped grow the organization, and Muslims found creative ways to practice Islam and express Black self-determination and anticolonial solidarity, even in the state’s most repressive spaces.

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 traces the emergence and political role of Islam in American prisons, as well as the intersections between race and religion, beginning with Noble Drew Ali's revolutionary Moorish Science doctrine. From thence arose the Nation of Islam, which spread among prison inmates when its proponents were jailed and later grew into a stabilizing force in many prisons. As Muslim identities intensified among black prisoners in the years ahead, the trend spilled over into the massive racial ghettos of Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, affecting a symbiosis between prison and street culture. Meanwhile a different story was unfolding on the West Coast, one that would ultimately reverse the achievements of Islam behind bars and create a form of prison-based terrorism.

Veronica L. Womack argues that white land control, an impoverished working class, and violent race relations resulted in a distinctive form of Black Power in Alabama. African Americans purchased land despite this, but Alabama still had the second lowest rate of black landownership among black farmers in the South in 1900. Most black farmers in the state operated farms on the cash-rent system. Sharecroppers likewise farmed, and they along with agricultural laborers suffered at the hands of merciless landlords. Sharecroppers and laborers briefly allied with the Communist Party during the 1930s and challenged the capitalist system that entrapped them in exploitive monoculture through participation in sharecropper unions. White supremacists responded with violence. These competing agendas between black landowners, cash- and share-rent tenants, and laborers created fertile ground for the emergence of militant Black Power and overtly separatist goals pursued by Black Muslims through the Nation of Islam in the aftermath of the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

This chapter gives a brief historical tour of Muslim America to provide a context for situating the younger generations of Muslims— the second and third generations of immigrants and of convert Muslims— in both intra-community and societal dynamics. It shows the ethno-racial and class diversity of this group, then provides a detailed profile of the participants in this ethnographic study. The two study areas—Chicagoland and Phoenix-valley—are also described in regard to their Muslim residents. This chapter argues that though immigrant and convert Muslim Americas are often presented as having parallel histories, theirs is a shared history in which they have coauthored each chapter, in spite of their divergent origins and internal tensions.

This introductory chapter presents three vignettes that illustrate the four narratives that frame this book: the notion of an identity crisis among young Muslims, the purported conflict between a “pure or true” Islam and a “cultural” Islam, an alleged “Islamization of America,” and the imperative for creating an American Muslim community and culture. It also sketches the methodology employed in the book, detailing the centrality of a narrative framework from the inception of this project to its methods, the challenges encountered, the analysis, and ultimately to the production of this ethnographic narrative. This beginning chapter argues that narrative is a particularly useful way to examine identity.

The phenomenon of hijabis has been mostly treated as an issue having to do with the compatibility of one’s religious beliefs with a secular society. However, there is another dimension of the regulation of the hijab that has rarely been discussed, namely the differential ways that Muslim women are treated by race—specifically Black Muslim women. Because of their Blackness, Black Muslim women are received negatively in a way that is singularly, if ineffably distinct from non-Black Muslim women. This chapter explores, through a range of transcripts and judicial opinions, how the courts engage in a racial dismissal of Black women hijabis. Given the racial and political history of the United States, along with the U.S. publicly legislated Islamophobic public policies (from the War on Terror to national security policies), there are few ways for Muslim hijabis—Black or non-Black—to be acceptable in the public spotlight. Moreover, the cumulative effect of being Black, visibly Muslim, and publicly assertive often results in visceral and violent responses from a neocolonial public that resists the visible, flourishing presence of women of color.

This chapter explores women's encounters with the Black Muslims, women's experiences of life within the Nation of Islam (NOI), and their collective and individual contributions to building and sustaining the Nation's structures. While the chapter is not focused on the inner power struggles and leadership abuses that engulfed the Chicago and New York branches of the movement, it does consider women's responses to leadership crises within the group. The majority of the women highlighted are former members of the Nation, currently in the Warith Deen Mohammed (WDM) community, who joined the Nation in the 1960s and 1970s. Topics discussed include the women's first encounters with the NOI; life in the NOI; Nation women's dress code, diet, marriage, education, work, and activism; and NOI politics.

The author recounts the details of the burglary that struck the apartment in which he lived twice which completely shattered his sense of security. He observes that crime and violence were not uncommon in this area, but they always seemed to happen elsewhere and could be avoided. He realizes that break-ins were not a common occurrence for most families in America and that having bars on the windows was not normal. He studied karate and took lessons from a black Muslim sensei named Rahim, formerly Robert, with the express purpose of becoming tough enough to feel secure. He had moved up a rank in the karate hierarchy, his association with Rahim did not achieve the intended goal of feeling safe and secure in the neighborhood, and for a simple reason: within a year Rahim was shot and killed.

This chapter gives an overview of how “visibly” Muslim women are treated and regulated in the United States by exploring the racial-cultural aesthetics of power through the ontopolitics and technologies of race such as court opinions, anti-discrimination, and judicial procedures. Women’s bodies are always read and judged, but in the case of dark, foreign, or marginalized women, these judgments are made in light of a prior history of colonialism and globalism. On this understanding, the sartorial aesthetic that reflects the cultural hegemony of Europe or the United States demarcates and highlights the backwardness of the sartorial aesthetic of Muslim women, through an enduring culture of neocolonialism and liberatory liberal discourse.

In this chapter an attempt is made, in the light of evidence from the United States and Canada, to explain in general terms the ebb and flow of private school options. Both public and private school growth and decline are affected by demography. Thus, a massive drop in Catholic school enrollment from 1966 to 1981 reflects, in part, a birthrate decline and a migration of Catholics from central cities, where many Catholic schools existed, to suburbs, where there were few Catholic schools. But unlike public school attendance, which rarely involves user fees and is considered normal if not laudatory in the United States and parts of Canada, private school attendance generally occurs when parents decide to depart from normal practice, incurring extra cost, extra effort (many private school patrons must drive their children considerable distances to school), disruption of their children’s friendships (many private school students are not in the schools which most of their neighborhood friends attend), and sometimes social disapproval. To a far greater extent than public school enrollment, then, private school enrollment depends on patron motivations. To return to the Catholic example: Even if the Catholic birthrate were high and Catholic schools were universally accessible, those schools would soon collapse unless many Catholic parents considered them worth extra expense and effort. Also, while public schools are everywhere available, parents often cannot find the private schools they prefer. Some schools exist primarily for certain religious and ethnic groups. Schools of some types are available only in a few major cities. Some schools are beyond the fiscal reach of most people. It is no accident, in this regard, that religious options are more plentiful in private schools than curricular or pedagogical options. Most religiously oriented schools enjoy subsidies from religious groups. Many schools open in the facilities of churches and synagogues, thus avoiding major expense. Sometimes churches and other denominational agencies directly sponsor schools. Even when they do not, they often assist by taking special collections, or their members provide free labor. Many Jewish day schools are subsidized through Jewish community funds.