Islam in Black America: Identity, Liberation, and Difference in African-American Islamic Thought

Notes

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 1. See C. Eric Lincoln, The Black Muslims in America, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1994). The other classic scholarly work on the movement is E. U. EssienUdom , Black Nationalism: A Search for an Identity in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). More recent overviews of African-American Islam include Aminah Beverly McCloud, African American Islam (New York: Routledge, 1995) and Richard Brent Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). Recent monographs on more limited topics include Louis A. DeCaro, On the Side of My People: A Religious Life of Malcolm X (New York: New York University Press, 1996); Mattias Gardell, In the Name of Elijah Muhammad: Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996); and Claude Andrew Clegg III, An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997). 2. Lawrence H. Mamiya, for example, calls the book “the best social history of the Nation of Islam available” in an annotated bibliography of the movement. See “Nation of Islam,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, ed. John L. Esposito (New York: Oxford, 1995), 3:235–8. 3. See Lincoln, Black Muslims, 26, 43, 63, 210. 4. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 39, 42, 47. 5. Abdulkader Tayob, Islam in South Africa: Mosques, Imams, and Sermons (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999), 10. 6. See L. Gardet, “Din,” in the Encyclopedia of Islam (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1962), 2:293–6, and L. Gardet, “Islam,” in the Encyclopedia of Islam (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1978), 4:171–4. 7. Alisdair C. MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 222. 8. Gustave E. von Grunewald, ed., Unity and Variety in Muslim Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 17. 9. See Edmund Burke III’s conclusion to Marshall G. S. Hodgson, Rethinking World History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 302, 315. 141 Notes 10. Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 2:80–1, 83, 87. 11. Talal Asad as quoted in the introduction to Barbara D. Metcalf, ed., Making Muslim Space in North America and Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). But see also Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 18, 210–11. Asad suggests the necessity of an “historical” essentialism: “It is like saying that the constitutive rules of a game de- fine its essence—which is by no means to assert that the game can never be subverted or changed; it is merely to point to what determines its essential historical identity, to imply that certain changes (though not others) will mean that the game is no longer the same game.” This analogy helps to illuminate my distinction between Islam, which can signify anything that Muslims say it signifies, and certain traditions of Islam, like Sunni and Shi‘i Islam, which have been characterized by specific constitutive elements throughout their history. 12. Ernesto Laclau, “Universalism, Particularism, and the Question of Identity,” in The Politics of Difference, eds. E. N. Wilmsen and P. McAllister (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 52, 57. And here my approach differs from that of Hodgson, who argued that a “tradition does not lend itself indifferently to every possible opinion or practice.” See Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, 1:86. 13. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, Toward a World Theology: Faith and the Comparative History of Religion (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1981), 4–5, 27–28. 14. Hodgson, Venture of Islam, 1:26. 15. The third edition of Lincoln’s Black Muslims still insists on labeling the Nation of Islam a Moslem sect. See Lincoln, Black Muslims, 217. 16. The most comprehensive work on the presence of African Muslims in the United States during the 1800s is Allan D. Austin, African Muslims in Antebellum America: Transatlantic Stories and Spiritual Struggles (New York: Routledge, 1997). 17. See Louise Marlow, Hierarchy and Egalitarianism in Islamic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 2–3, 97. 18. See H. T. Norris, “Shu‘ubiyyah in Arabic Literature,” in ‘Abbasid Belles-Lettres, ed. J. Ashtiany et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 32; Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, 223; Roy P. Mottahedeh, “The Shu‘ubiyya Controversy and the Social History of Early Islamic Iran,” IJMES 7 (1976...