To Be Black And Muslim: Struggling for Freedom

Sohail Daulatzai’s Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America ambitiously addresses a highly impactful topic in African American culture that has been largely ignored by the US academy. Islam has greatly affected Black popular cultural production (as in the case of the hip hop that Daulatzai explores in his book), it has inspired the Third World internationalism of giants such as Malcolm X and Jamil Al-Amin, and it has contributed to the politicization of figures such as boxer Muhammad Ali. Daulatzai traces the widespread influence of Islam through African American cinema, literature, popular culture, and global politics. With an admirably wide-ranging scope, he examines African Americans’ imaginative, social, and political participation in what he terms a “Muslim International,” which he takes great pains to explain is “not monolithic; it even resists homogeneity and encourages radical difference…. [It] is not universalist, nor is it cosmopolitan in the European humanist tradition” (xxiv). Instead, Daulatzai argues that the Muslim International “represents a shape-shifting and fluid demand for subjectivity in the face of modernity’s horror” (xxiv). Black Star, Crescent Moon argues that African Americans have both significantly shaped and been shaped by the Muslim International.

Daulatzai’s project is grounded in an exploration of the political culture of the postwar period, in which, he argues, “the Cold War was a coded race war against Black and Third World liberation movements” (191). States Daulatzai in his introduction, “Part of my interest has to do with exploring the ideological similarities between the current ‘War on Terror’ and the emergence of the Cold War in the late 1940s, both of which have radically altered domestic and international politics” (xvi). Indeed, one of the book’s major contributions is to explicitly chart out the historical as well as the ideological interconnectedness of the figures of the “Black criminal” and the “Muslim terrorist,” which Daulatzai calls “the twin pillars of U.S. state formation in the post-Civil Rights era” (97). As Daulatzai writes, “to be Black is one thing in America that marks you as un-American, but to be Black and Muslim is quite another, as it marks you as anti-American” (xiv).

Impressively far-reaching as it is, Black Star, Crescent Moon touches many other subjects, locations, and perspectives. Beginning with a chapter entitled, “‘You Remember Dien Bien Phu!’: Malcolm X and the Third World Rising,” Daulatzai opens with the figure of Malcolm X, whose work had a broad cultural and political impact. Daulatzai will later argue that Malcolm X “emerges in this narrative as having arguably the most defining influence on the politics and art of the nexus of Black radicalism and the Muslim Third World” (190–91). Like the work of Malcolm X, Black Star, Crescent Moon straddles the divide between the cultural and political, seeking the generative space within which the two overlap. In “To the East, Blackwards: Black Power, Radical Cinema, and the Muslim Third World,” Daulatzai explores the joint roles of the Muslim International, Third Cinema, and the Black Arts movement in the creation of a radical cinematic language in the US. In “Return of the Mecca: Public Enemies, Reaganism, and the Birth of Hip Hop,” he provides one of the most complete academic accounts of the role of Islam in the formation of the ethos and aesthetics of hip hop culture. “‘Ghost in the House’: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of the ‘Green Menace’” gives a fascinating account of boxer Muhammad Ali’s transformation from a social and cultural pariah of mainstream US culture in the 1960s and 70s, into a celebrity embraced by the likes of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama in recent years. Daulatzai ends this examination by juxtaposing Barack Obama’s 2009 trip to Egypt with Malcolm X’s 1964 visit to the country, during which he sought support for his newly created Organization of Afro-American Unity. This comparative analysis highlights the contradictory position of the notion of Black...