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Reviewed by:
  • Black Star Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America by Sohail Daulatzai
  • Ian Johnson, Independent Scholar and Foreign Correspondent
Sohail Daulatzai , Black Star Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 257 pp. $22.50 paperback, $67.50 cloth.

This is a fun book to read, full of rhetorical flourishes and swing-for-the-fences statements. It is a book aimed at like-minded people, readers who do not need careful [End Page 141] formulations and solid research to be convinced of an idea but who instead want to be thrilled by what a blurb on the back cover describes as "rebel reading for right now."

The topic of the book is the interaction of black elites and cultural figures from the United States with global Islam in the post-1945 era. The overall theme is that, faced with racism at home, some in the U.S. black community found fulfillment and inspiration through affiliation with overseas Muslim organizations, or even through conversion. This is not an original theme, having been explored by scholars such as Michael L. Krenn and James L. Roark, but Sohail Daulatzai's work is not meant to be an original work of scholarship. Instead (and despite the publisher's suggestion that it be catalogued as a book of history), it must be seen as an essay meant to rouse the troops. The author is forthright about this. In the introduction he says he wants to use these tales from the past to illuminate U.S. racism today, especially in the post-9/11 era. In the conclusion, he says he hopes that immigrants will not buy into conventional U.S. values but will keep a critical and radical distance from the mainstream.

Works of opinion are fine (although in today's society we seem to be overwhelmed by them), but it is a pity that the author and his academic backers cloak this pamphlet as an academic work—published by a university press with a grant from another university (University of California, Irvine) and featuring the full scholarly apparatus of endnotes and an index—all of which might give the unsuspecting reader the impression that the book will offer a comprehensive or fair treatment of the topic. (Daulatzai, who teaches in the subjective world of film studies, might question the idea that any work can or should try to be even-handed or fair.)

Instead, we have superimposed on an unremarkable thesis a barrage of clever-sounding phrases. We learn that from the 1960s to the 21st century, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton (although apparently not Jimmy Carter) launched policies that "gave birth to an urban police state" (p. 90). It is probably priggish to point out that the United States is not actually a police state. The book contains the de rigueur use of "empire" or "imperial" to describe the United States (pp. ix, xiii, 1), without any attempt at a definition. Unargued, these words and phrases are empty and might turn off people who care about scholarly or linguistic precision.

Other choices belie a disturbing smugness. Although probably meant to be playful, making fun of people's accents seems at best juvenile. Discussing Ohio voters and the issue of Barack Obama's education in a madrassa, Daulatzai parodies their pronunciation of the word "Muslim" as "Muzz-lum" (p. xiv). Unmentioned is the fact that Ohio during that same 2008 campaign voted for Obama by a hefty 4.6 percent margin, indicating that a majority of Ohioans overcame the underlying racism supposedly indicated by their thick accents.

In this genre of writing, the breezy terminology and mockery are meant to show the author's insight and ability to see beyond the veil. The idea is that the author and reader share the same beliefs and suppositions and thus do not need to go down the [End Page 142] silly road of having to define terms and trying to present the already discredited side of an argument. One can have a good time and laugh at the people in the flyover zone.

The problem is that...

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