The Dissemination and Implementation of Islam within the African American Community

The United States may be the most racially diverse and religiously pluralistic nation-state today. However, it is also arguably the most societally biased, one where many religious communities are frequently divided along distinct lines predicated upon race, color, ethnicity, and faith tradition. The sociohistorical displacement and dissemination of Islamic power away from indigenous African American Muslims to the newly disembarked post-1965 immigrant Muslims underscore the nascent religio-racial origins of how Islamic identity, membership, community, and consciousness within America has now become unusually conflated with race, culture, and ethnicity within our nation’s social imaginary. That is, what it contextually means to be a Muslim in the United States has now become a highly contested, problematic, and racialized category within American Islam—a segregated Islamic reality and existence that is being renegotiated and challenged by modern-day Black Muslims dissatisfied with their oppressed, marginalized and subaltern condition as Muslim Americans within the umma.

Ethnic Identity of Black Muslims and Resilience from Criminal Risk Factors

The overrepresentation of Black males in the criminal justice system is well-established in the literature, linking individual factors to criminal engagement of Black men. Compared to literature seeking to understand why Black males offend, there remain gaps in the literature exploring resilience in Black males from criminality. Religion is a major influence in Black communities, providing moral and ethnic socialization, and serving as a protective factor against criminal involvement. For Black Muslims, ethno-religious teachings play a significant role in one’s self-accountability, Black identity, and moral decision-making, including decisions to resist or desist from crime. The Nation of Islam, a Black ethnic, political and religious movement, is characterized as a racist and revolutionary organization, despite work done in the community to improve the social and economic conditions for Black Americans. The focus on self-reliance and self-accountability is the nexus of the prevailing worldview shared by members; and how to navigate racial discrimination, especially in the criminal justice system. This study presents the results of a focus group with Black males in the Nation of Islam. The men discussed the influence of ethno-religious teachings on non-offending, their worldview, and racial pride. Implications for future studies are provided.

Muslim Community of the Present-Day USA: Looking for SelfIdentity in the Multicultural Society

This article is devoted to the current socio- political processes experienced by the Muslim community in the United States of America. The author studies the process of harmonious integration by Muslim Americans into American society, the search for possible correlations between the religious and secular parts of society, and the requirements of Islam in the face of demo cratic values. The author pays special attention to the issues of self-determination for Islam adherents, including their political search, and attempts to gain a powerful voice in the most important political events. The article analyzes such aspects of American Muslims life as, interaction with representatives of other faiths, discrimination and Islamophobia, and the Islamic religious worldview of black Muslims. The author focuses on problematic discourse. Using methods of analysis, deduction, as well as methods of included observation, the author shows a modern picture of American Muslim life, and also makes important conclusions and predictions regarding their future in a rapidly changing multicultural American society.

Reversible Human

This article explores the history and practice of rectal feeding, an anachronistic obstetric practice used recently as a form of medical rape in US Central Intelligence Agency prisons. The article outlines how racialized themes of counterterrorist interrogation intersect with behavioralist logics of torture in CIA uses of rectal feeding on Muslim prisoners captured in Pakistan and Afghanistan, linking these prisoners to US security state fears of domestic Black Muslims. Exploring how fantasies of the plastic reorientation of prisoners’ bodies and minds frames state conceptions of rectal feeding and other forms of torture, the article further argues that understanding the racialization of Islam in the current wars requires analysis of the racial materiality of interventions that exploit the plastic potentials of the body.

The Making of the “Black Muslims”

The idea of the “Black Muslims” as a hate group, or an example of the emergent falsehood of reverse racism, was facilitated and propagated by carceral officials. It was pliable enough that law enforcement could suppress Muslim practice in prisons and police local mosques by claim- ing that the NOI was a subversive political group in the guise of religion while offering civil rights organizations the language to dismiss it within the Black freedom struggle. But this suppression and surveillance often helped grow the organization, and Muslims found creative ways to practice Islam and express Black self-determination and anticolonial solidarity, even in the state’s most repressive spaces.

The Living Stations of the Cross

This chapter introduces “the Living Stations of the Cross,” a Black Catholic reenactment of the passion and death of Jesus performed annually by parishioners of Chicago’s largest Black Catholic church from 1937 to 1968. This devotional practice serves as a lens through which to better understand the ways in which Catholic ritual life and relationships distinguished Catholic converts from the Protestant churches proliferating around them in the midst of the Great Migrations. It argues that Black Catholics should be understood as sharing in the same impulse as other new religious movements or “religio-racial movements,” such as the Black Hebrews and Black Muslims, who adopted religious practices and bodily disciplines that marked them as different from the assorted Black evangelical practices that were quickly coming to be understood as normative for Black religious life (known by the shorthand “the Black Church”).