Islam\u27s Low Mutterings at High Tide: Enslaved African Muslims in American Literature

This dissertation traces the underexplored figure of the African Muslim slave in American literature and proposes a new way to examine Islam in American cultural texts. It introduces a methodology for reading the traces of Islam called Allahgraphy: a method of interpretation that is attentive to Islamic studies and rhetorical techniques and that takes the surface as a profound source of meaning. This interpretative practice draws on postsecular theory, Islamic epistemology, and “post-critique” scholarship. Because of this confluence of diverse theories and epistemologies, Allahgraphy blurs religious and secular categories by deploying religious concepts for literary exegesis. Through an Allahgraphic reading, the dissertation examines modes of Islamic expression in a wide range of American works spanning the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To unravel the diverse Muslim voices embedded within the American literary tradition, the dissertation proceeds chronologically through specific periods in African American culture and history, moving from slavery to post-Reconstruction to the post-civil rights era. The first two chapters focus on the nineteenth century and examine the works of ʿUmar ibn Sayyid, Bilali Muhammad, and Joel Chandler Harris. In these chapters, Allahgraphy is used to consider the material inscription of the source texts, specifically the African-Arabic manuscripts. The second half of the dissertation examines Islamic expressions in twentieth-century American texts. Through an analysis of works by Malcolm X and Toni Morrison, these two chapters explore the multiple sensory registers of Allahgraphy. The dissertation concludes by considering the appearance of the African Muslim slave in the diary of the Guantánamo prisoner, Mohamedou Ould Slahi. Ultimately, the dissertation aims to widen literary approaches to Islam in American works and to demonstrate the continuity of Muslim voices in the American literary works. In doing so, it delineates a long tradition of black Muslim Americans’ responses to Islamophobia

Situating African American Muslim Slave Narratives in American Literature

Slave narrative as a genre became popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and narratives of enslaved African American Muslims originate between 1734 and 1873. Examples of enslaved African American Muslims are Ayyub ben Suleiman (Job ben Solomon), Omar ibn Said, Abdr-Rahman Ibrahim, Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, Lamine Kebe, Mohammad Ali ben Said (Nicolas Said) and Bilali Muhammad (Ben Ali). Their narratives are not anthologized. This dissertation explores Muslim and non-Muslim African American slave narratives from a comparative perspective. It proposes the inclusion of African American Muslim slave narratives in American literature. Chapter one reviews critical approaches to canonization and discusses possible reasons for the exclusion of narratives by enslaved African American Muslims from the American canon. Chapter two defines the slave narrative genre in light of the socio-historical background on slavery in narratives by enslaved African American Muslims. Chapter three focuses on the characteristics of early African American slave narratives and analyzes Ayyub ben Suleiman\u27s account. Chapter four discusses characteristics of antebellum African American slave narratives and analyzes and compares narratives of enslaved African American Muslims with Frederick Douglass\u27s narrative. Chapter five focuses on the post-bellum slave narrative by Mohammad Ali Ben Said (Nicholas Said), and discusses characteristics of the post-Civil War slave narrative. The addition of narratives by enslaved African American Muslims would provide a more complete portrait of enslaved people and their writings at a crucial stage in American history. The study will ultimately contribute to current debates about literary canonization

Unsettling Immigration Laws: Settler Colonialism and the U.S. Immigration Legal System

This Article flows from the premise that the United States is a present-day settler colonial society whose laws and policies function to support an ongoing structure of invasion called settler colonialism, which operates through the processes of Indigenous elimination and the subordination of racialized outsiders. At a time when U.S. immigration laws continue to be used to oppress, exclude, subordinate, racialize, and dehumanize, this Article seeks to broaden the understanding of the U.S. immigration system using a settler colonialism lens. The Article analyzes contemporary U.S. immigration laws and policies such as the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) and Trump\u27s immigration policies within a settler colonialism framework in order to locate the U.S. immigration system at the heart of settler colonialism\u27s ongoing project of elimination and subordination. The Article showcases solidarity movements between Indigenous and immigrant communities that protest the enduring structures of settler colonialism and engender transformative visions that defy the boundaries of the U.S. immigration legal system. Finally, the Article offers pedagogies that disrupt traditional immigration law pedagogy and that are designed to increase awareness of settler colonialism in the immigration law classroom

Maintaining the faith: Factors that promote a Muslim religious identity

Utilizing data collected from 194 past and present members of Muslim Student Associations located across the United States, this study examined predictors of Muslim religious identity. Multivariate linear regression analysis was used to examine the relationship between Muslim religious identity and self-identification, sense of belonging, affirmation, religious involvement in ritual practices, family characteristics, peer characteristics, structured organizational involvement, area of residence, college, and the experience of a terror event such as September 11, 2001. Hierarchical regression analysis was used to assess whether the experience of a terror event explained a significant proportion of the variance in Muslim religious identity. The analyses found that self-identification, sense of belonging, affirmation, suburban area of residence, and the experience of a terror event significantly predicted Muslim religious identity. The study further found that although the experience of a terror event did explain a significant proportion of Muslim religious identity, self-identification, sense of belonging, affirmation, and area of residence were stronger predictors of Muslim religious identity. The implications of these findings are discussed

Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence of Islam as a Race

Can a religion, over time and through its social and legal resignification, come to be a race? Drawing on Critical Race Theory (“CRT”), Critical Discourse Theory, the work of Karen E. and Barbara J. Fields and Cedric Robinson, this article argues that Islam has emerged as a race and Muslims as a racial group. To support the claim, Part I examines the theoretical basis for the argument. Applying the concept of “racecraft,” the article theorizes that racism produces both the racial group and race. As many have already argued, race is not based in biology; it is not a fact but rather an artifact of racism. The appearance or specter of race, moreover, is an assemblage that coheres in response to specific racism targeted at a population with shared characteristics. Thus, there is no reason to suppose that Islam could not be a race. Islamophobia as a specific form of racism produces the Muslim as a raced people and Islam as a race through racecraft—the tools and practices of racism. However, for racism to produce a subject racialized group, it must first make racial meaning of the group members’ shared attributes. Part II offers a genealogy of Islam-as-race, arguing that Islam has always been coded as a religion of color and categorically different from European, white, Christian civilization. It is the connection to Islam that has rendered the Muslim an alien. That is the substratum of Islam-as-race. In Part III, the article goes on to examine the racecraft that was deployed in the anti-sharia law panic of the 2010s and in the current anti-CRT panic. In this section, the article applies Critical Discourse Studies to the law to demonstrate how discourses of legitimation that support the differential treatment of Muslims and Blacks is produced. Finally, the article provides examples of material discrimination and its overlap in these communities. The article shows how racism’s rituals and tools are honed and sharpened against one community and then repurposed for use against another. The central claim throughout the article is that theorists of Islamophobia have not gone far enough. They have stopped short, preferring to refer to Muslims as “racialized” depending on analogies to other races or relying on the already ethnic differences of Muslims yet struggling to explain the role of religion in the racialization. These theories are unable to account for how white or white passing Muslims become racialized once they are outed or how Muslims evade racialization while non-Muslims sometimes do not. This article suggests that it is Islam that “races” them. We should now consider Muslims a racial group, Islamophobia as a form of racism, and Islam as a race

The experiences of high school teachers in Massachusetts with the History and social science curriculum framework.

In response to the current educational reform movement that has ensued as a result of the publication of A Nation at Risk (1983), the Massachusetts legislature passed the Educational Reform Act in 1993. From this Act, an educational reform plan was developed for all public schools, and curriculum frameworks were written for the major academic areas. The frameworks recommend what should be taught, and they encourage teachers to align their curriculum with the frameworks. This dissertation describes a qualitative study based on in-depth interviews with 15 teachers throughout the state of Massachusetts, from the fall of 1999 through the fall of 2001. The study investigated the experiences these teachers had with the Massachusetts History and Social Science Curriculum framework . The teachers who were interviewed represent a cross-section of teachers diverse in geographic location, number of years teaching, gender, ethnicity, and experience with curriculum development. The extensive responses to the interviews were analyzed in light of the research questions in this study. Through the literature review, documents, and the interviews, I was able to analyze teachers\u27 experiences working specifically with the history and social science framework, and to assess the impact that the framework was having on their teaching, curriculum development, and student learning. This analysis revealed consistent patterns and themes. These included teachers\u27 common school experiences of not having an organized school curriculum prior to the framework; their perception of the lack of multiculturalism in the framework; and their concerns about the exclusion of teachers from the framework process. The information analyzed from the interviews can be used to guide school systems in the development of educational policies, as well as in the creation of curriculum. This study has the potential to assist those interested in both professional development and teacher education

Negotiating the field: American Protestant missionaries in Ottoman Syria, 1823 to 1860

This thesis examines the work of the missionaries from the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) and the rise of a Protestant community in Ottoman Syria, from the commencement of the missionary station at Beirut in 1823, to the dissolution of the community in 1860. The primary goals of this thesis are to investigate the history of this missionary encounter and the culture of the new community. This analysis is guided by the theoretical framework of Practice Theory and employs gender as a lens to explore the development of the Protestant identity. It argues that the Protestant community in Ottoman Syria emerged within the expanding port-city of Beirut and was situated within both the American and Ottoman historical contexts. The social structures that defined this community reflect the centrality of the ABCFM missionaries within the community and reveals a latent hierarchy based upon racial difference. However, tensions within the community and subversions to the missionaries’ definition of Protestantism persisted throughout the period under review, which eventually led to the fragmentation of the community in 1860. The contribution of this thesis lies in its investigation onto the activities of women and their delineation of Protestant womanhood and motherhood, as an important manifestation of Protestant culture. This work demonstrates the centrality of women to the development of the Protestant community in Ottoman Syria and reveals the complex interpersonal relationships that defined this missionary encounter

Narratives Of Islamic Self-Making: Black Muslim Youth In A Philadelphia Public School

The phenomenon I trace throughout this dissertation is how West African and African American Muslim youth navigate the complicated terrain of racial, ethnic, and religious identities within the localized context of their school, a charter school in Southwest Philadelphia named Honors Academy. I investigate the puzzle of how, given historical contestations among African immigrants and African American Black Muslims in the US, these youth, in interacting everyday with each other at school, make sense of the differences that become salient in school in their processes of becoming Black Muslims in the US. I consider the role the school and varied spaces in the school play in this process. How can we understand what sociocultural influences become salient within different contexts in the school and how these influences shape what aspects of being Black, Muslim, and ethnic become most significant within these youth’s interactions and discourses? I argue that Black Muslim youth at Honors engage in Islamic self-making, which is the process of engaging in diverse practices of religious self-fashioning, including but not limited to religious technologies. Black Muslim youth engage in Islamic self-making through praying, fasting, and dressing modestly, through making claims to public spaces, through market strategies such as selling Islamic themed products, and through creating religious material inscriptions. Islamic space-making, a form of Islamic self-making, takes place within the context of an increasingly market-driven public education and is embedded within larger social processes such as racialization, racial formations, and ethnicization. Specifically, within US Muslim communities, ethnoreligious hegemonies, a privileging of Arab, South Asian, and immigrant Islams over Black Islamic forms, operate alongside and work within US racial formations to maintain the logic of white supremacy. I note how ethnoreligious hegemonies shape Islamic self-making practices amongst Honors students and how differences between Black Muslim youth played a prominent role despite the MSA and Honor’s attempts to cultivate unity amongst their students. Islamic self-making emphasizes that there are multiple means through which Islamic selves can be cultivated and that this process is mediated differently across spaces. My spaces of investigation are identity affirming contexts, such as the Muslim Students’ Association (MSA) and African American History (AAH) class, which are grounded within a limited multicultural ideology at Honors but also occasionally creating alternative openings for religious expressions. Through each of these spaces, which include an afterschool club, classrooms, hallways, and a mosque, I consider specifically: How do religion, ethnic and family histories, and racial formations mediate forms of Islamic self-making for Black Muslim youth, within a racist, Islamophobic, and capitalist US context? This ethnographic account acknowledges the diversity of Black youth’s identities and counters the essentialization of Black experiences, while also investigating the link between religious expressions and racial formations