Islam in the African-American Experience [Paperback]

Richard Brent Turner (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0253211042 | ISBN-13: 978-0253211040 | Publication Date: June 1997

"A significant contribution to our understanding of the role of individuals, Muslim groups, as well as the religion of Islam in the shaping of African-American Muslim identity...I believe that the book will be the standard text used for courses on the subject." - Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, Professor of Islamic History, University of Massachusetts. Malcolm X and, more recently, Louis Farrakhan are two of the more visible signs of the importance of Islam in the African-American community. Yet, as Richard Brent Turner shows in this fascinating book, the involvement of black Americans with Islam is not a recent phenomenon. Turner reaches back to the earliest days of the slave trade and traces the story of Islam's growing influence in the lives and culture of African-Americans. Part I of the book roots twentieth-century African-American Islam in the Middle East, West Africa, and antebellum America. Part II tells the story of the 'Prophets of the City' - the leaders of the new urban-based African-American Muslim movements in the twentieth century. Turner positions the study of Islam in a historical context of racial, ethical, and political divisions that influenced the history of slavery in America. He offers evidence that the current racial separation among Muslims in America is not entirely the result of black nationalism or a new phenomenon in Islam, but a common pattern for black people in African Islam before the Atlantic slave trade. Turner proposes to balance the weight accorded to black nationalism in shaping Islam in black America by looking at the influence of the Ahmadiyya Movement, an Islamic missionary group from India representative of a multi-racial Islam.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com 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.

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.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Indiana University Press (June 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0253211042
• ISBN-13: 978-0253211040
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,586,824 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating but..., November 6, 2002

By 

Munir "ahmad" (Cerritos, California USA) - See all my 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.

3.0 out of 5 stars The Chicago Defenders not a reputable source for consciously written manuscripts, February 4, 2006

By 

ZANZIBAR "Hotep" (Diaspora) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Islam in the African-American Experience, Second Edition, Second Edition (Paperback)

R. Turner does a fair job with book until he comes to Noble Drew Ali his entire frame of referrence comes from the Chicago Defender. A paper known for it's sensationalizing untrue stories of lurid sex and perverted crimes to sell more papers. Unfortunately it has been 70 years since D Ali's death and over a 100 since his birth and the Defenders articles are some of the only remaining sources of the time of D Ali on the earth plane, therefore the Defender unfortunately is one of the sources to satisfy the public's hunger for knowledge of this mysterious and great man. I would recommend the book "The Huevolution of Sacred Muur Science Past and Present" by Noble Timothy Myers-EL for a more objective commentary on the life of Drew Ali in chapter v.

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars trapped in an enigma, October 11, 2000

By 

Robert M. Dannin (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Islam in the African-American Experience (Hardcover)

Turner has produced a fairly interesting book which expands on his superior 1988 article, The Ahmadiyya Mission to Blacks in the United States in the 1920s" (_The Journal of Religious Thought_, Vol 44, No 2, Pp. 50-66). Although based entirely upon secondary sources, he presents some information that will be new to students of African-American Islam. His efforts unravel however when he becomes trapped in the enigma of W. D. Fard's identity. Fard, the mysterious founder of the Nation of Islam who knighted Elijah Muhammad as his successor, fled from Detroit in 1934 creating one of those apocryphal riddles that has distracted serious scholars of religion ever since. Rather than explore the alternative development of orthodox Islam in America - a subject badly in need of publishers' attention - Turner jumps from Fard to Farrakhan, another sensationalist personality who hardly represents the sentiments of contemporary African American Muslims. The concluding chapter deals with the interesting notion of religion as a cultural commodity, but it seems like an afterthought unrelated to the text.