Anthropology
Black Pilgrimage to Islam
By Robert Dannin
Photographs by Jolie Stahl
This book offers a comprehensive ethnographic study of African-American Muslims. Drawing on hundreds of interviews conducted over a period of several years, Dannin provides an unprecedented look inside the fascinating and little understood world of black Muslims. He discovers that the well-known and cult-like Nation of Islam represents only a small part of the picture. Many more African-Americans are drawn to Islamic orthodoxy, with its strict adherence to the Qur'an. Dannin takes us to the First Cleveland Mosque, the oldest continuing Muslim institution in America, on to a permanent Muslim village in Buffalo, and then inside New York's maximum-security prisons to hear the testimony of the powerful attraction of Islam for individuals in desperate situations. He looks at the aftermath of the assassination of Malcolm X, and the ongoing warfare between the Nation of Islam and orthodox Muslims. Accessibly written, filled with gripping first-hand testimony, and featuring superb illustrations by photographer Jolie Stahl, this book will be the best available guide to the beliefs and culture of African-American Muslims.
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Muslim Minorities in the West
Contributions by Robert Dannin
Although they are typically portrayed by the media as dangerous extremists in distant lands, Muslims in fact form a permanent, peaceful and growing population in nearly every Western country. While Westerners are now more commonly seeing mosques in their neighborhoods or scarved Muslim women in their streets, misperceptions and stereotypes remain. With expanding numbers and desires to protect their rights and identities, Muslims are coming more and more into the public view. In Muslim Minorities in the West noted scholars Haddad and Smith bring together outstanding essays on the distinct experiences of minority Muslim communities from Detroit, Michigan to Perth, Australia and the wide range of issues facing them. Haddad and Smith in their introduction trace the broad contours of the Muslim experience in Europe, America and other areas of European settlement and shed light on the common questions minority Muslims face of assimilation, discrimination, evangelism, and politics. Muslim Minorities in the West provide a welcome introduction to these increasingly visible citizens of Western nations.
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Robert Dannin reviews Patrick D. Bowen’s The African American Islamic Renaissance, 1920-1975
Marginalia - Los Angeles Review of Books
Twenty-five years ago I undertook similar research, and I felt like an usher prowling the aisles of a darkened theater. Its seats were filled, but the cavernous space was silent. Flashlight in hand I peered from side to side, asking questions, trying to identify names and faces, soliciting conversion narratives, teasing confessions of faith from a hazy past, and formulating and testing ideas about historical networks connecting the members of this enigmatic audience. I had authored a dozen papers from ethnographic and documentary data, and eventually published Black Pilgrimage to Islam, but my book raised more questions than it answered. Historians of religion followed with their own contributions, assembled in much the same way. Unfortunately, a systematic field of inquiry concerning Islamic conversion among African Americans never materialized. Read the full review