Islam in the African-American Experience

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 336 pages
• Published by: Indiana University Press
• Edition: 2nd Edition November 2003
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0253216303
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0253216304
• Book Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.6 inches
• Weighs: 15.2 ounces

Product Review
Visible in the names of athletes such as Mohammed Ali and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, African American Islam is known of, but is little known. In an exhaustive history beginning with the Islamic tradition in West Africa more than a thousand years ago and tracing its transmission to the New World through slaves and, later, Indian missionaries, Richard Brent Turner documents the historical and political circumstances that fueled Islam's growth among African Americans. These circumstances still inform the activities of its two most prominent American leaders, Warith Deen Mohammed and Louis Farrakhan. Despite the residual academic language in this reworked doctoral thesis, the rigorous documentation and illuminating commentary will likely make this book the standard text on the subject for some time to come. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal
Enslaved Africans brought Islam with them to Colonial America and made it part of the African American experience long before Islam appeared in its new guise in 20th-century U.S. cities as the Ahmadiyya Mission from India or in the teachings of Noble Drew Ali and the Moorish Science Temple of America or of W.D. Fard and what became the Nation of Islam. Using signification (the issue of naming and identity) theory in this expansion of his 1986 Princeton University Ph.D. dissertation, Turner explains how blacks have used Islam as a tool of identity formation and intellectual resistance to racism. Turner's interpretative historical narrative joins Claude Clegg's An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad (LJ 1/97) in an apparent new wave of scholarship on Islam in America and appears sure to join the works of C. Eric Lincoln, E.U. Essien-Udom, Gayraud Wilmore, and Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad as a classic in the field. Highly recommended.?Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Reader Reviews
This review is from: Islam in the African-American Experience (Paperback) I found this book to be clear and well-written, with a wealth of interesting and little-known information about the history of Muslims in the United States- not only African Americans. The first white American convert to Islam, the early communities from Eastern Europe, and the colorful Ahmadiyya movement are described in detail along with biographies of African American Muslim slaves, and black Muslim movements from the 1910s onward. He shows that just as in West Africa, Islam was spread among American blacks in a form that included local ideologies (in this case, racist nationalism). And, as in Africa, orthodox Islam was eventually adopted. With that said, this book is written from a non-Muslim perspecitive, which is occasionally too evident. One may argue that concepts that the author claims were precedented in the late 1800s- (like the "jihad of words," Islam as a force to unify the oppressed), were actually present in the religion from the beginning. In addition, Turner's "myth of a race-blind Islam," takes a great deal of consideration...Basically, although this is a great book, it is time for American Muslims to begin writing their own history.