BLACK MUSLIM ATLANTIC
Thursday and Friday, January 30-31, 2020
“The Ruby” Arts Center
2020 Campus Drive
Duke University
This symposium was envisioned and organized with Imam AbdulHafeez Waheed to honor the Black Muslim community in North Carolina and beyond, its culture, literature, history, and legacy from slavery until the present. Black Muslim Atlantic pays tribute to the work and writings of Omar ibn Sayyid through a pioneering project by Professors Carl Ernst and Mbaye Lo to translate his writings and create a digital archive. The symposium showcases the work of these professors and their students from their course “Arabic and the Writings of Enslaved Muslims.” The term Black Muslim Atlantic was coined by Margari Aziza, the co-founder and program director of the Muslim Anti-Racism Collaborative, as “an endeavor of transnationalism through literature, intellectual exchange, visual and performance art.” This work expands Paul Gilroy’s understanding of the Black Atlantic toward acknowledging the powerful role played by Islam in forging cultural and political solidarities across the global south.
Scholarship that followed Gilroy’s text, by seminal thinkers like Sylviane Diouf, focused on the role of enslaved Muslims in sustaining the roots and routes severed by the middle passage and by brutal suppression. Yet as so many acknowledge, black Muslim cultural forms continued and continue to flourish, even under condition of duress—musical, poetic, linguistic, literary, artistic, and religious. Although popular perception sees music and poetry as outside Islamic orthodoxy, these forms have long functioned in intimate relation to the Islamic tradition. This symposium explores its more recent instantiations as reflective of that longer history of Islamic civilization, as much a renewing and reviving it for contemporary contexts.
This symposium focuses on these cultural forms as a way of fore-fronting the powerful role played by Islam and Muslims in a shared culture of the black Atlantic. Islam so often occupies a marginal position in the study of the black Atlantic, just as the study of the black intellectual tradition occupies a marginal position in Islamic studies. This symposium focuses on the intersection of these shared cultural traditions, bringing its rich history and thriving present into detailed focus. The symposium is in memoriam of C. Eric Lincoln, professor of Religious Studies at Duke—whose work on both black Muslims and race and religion helped pioneer the field and raise more nuanced consciousness about these subjects. This symposium explores how far the field has come from this earlier moment.
The project is jointly sponsored by Duke Islamic Studies Center, African and African American Studies, Asian and Middle East Studies, Forum for Scholars and Publics, Religious Studies, the Franklin Humanities Institute, and by the After Malcolm Project at the Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University.
THURSDAY, January 30th 6 p.m.
WELCOME WORDS
Brother Joshua Salaam
Muslim Chaplain
Center for Muslim Life
Duke University
“Islam and the Blues”
Sylviane Diouf, Visiting Professor, Brown University, Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice
Author of: Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (1998)
Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies (2003)
Dreams of Africa in Alabama: Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America (2007)
Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons (2014)
RESPONDENT:
Omar Ali, Dean of Lloyd International Honors College and Professor of Comparative African Diaspora History, University of North Carolina, Greensboro
Author of: In the Lion’s Mouth: Black Populism in the New South, 1886-1900 (2010)
Malik Ambar: Power and Slavery across the Indian Ocean (2016)
Islam in the Indian Ocean World: A Brief History with Documents (2016)
Poetry Reading
Marvin X Jackmon
FRIDAY, January 31st
9 a.m. coffee/breakfast
WELCOME WORDS
Mrs. Lucy Lincoln, Educator
C. Eric Lincoln’s widow
9:30-11:30 a.m.
“Islam and Race”
Zain Abdullah, Associate Professor of Religion, Temple University
Author of: Black Mecca: The African Muslims of Harlem (2010)
A God of Our Own: Malcolm X and His Battle for the Soul of America (forthcoming)
Temple 25: Black Religiosity and the Rise of American Islam (forthcoming)
“Islam and Jazz”
Richard Brent Turner
Author of: Islam in the African American Experience
Jazz Religion, the Second Line, and Black New Orleans
“Islamic Sounds: The Politics of Listening”
Jeanette Jouili, Associate Professor of Religious Studies
Author of: Pious Practice and Secular Constraints: Women in the Islamic Revival in Europe (2015)
The Islamic Artistic Scene in the UK: Between Religious Ethics and State Discipline (new project)
RESPONDENT:
Mark Anthony Neal
James B. Duke Distinguished Professor and Chair of African and African American Studies, Duke
Author of: Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic (2013)
Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation (2003)
What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1998)
BREAK 11:30 to noon
12:00 p.m. to 1
“A Sea Without Shore”
Youssef Carter, College Fellow, Social Anthropology, Harvard University
The Vast Oceans: Remembering God and Self in Mustafawi Sufi Order (in progress)
& Rashida James-Saadiya, Arts and Culture editor for Sapelo
1 p.m. to 2 jumaa led by Imam AbdulHafeez Waheed & lunch
2 p.m.-3:30
“Ahmad Karim & the Black Consciousness Movement at Morehouse:
Black Women Scholars Archiving Their Radical Parents”
Dr. Jamillah Karim
Professor of Religious Studies emerita, Spelman College
Author of: American Muslim Women
Women of the Nation: Between Black Protest and Sunni Islam with Dawn-Marie Gibson
“Omar ibn Sayyid: Arabic and the Writings of Enslaved Muslims” course
Professor Carl Ernst, Religious Studies, UNC
Professor Mbaye Lo, Asian and Middle East Studies, Duke
Bryan Rusch, student
3:30 p.m.
CLOSING WORDS
Imam Ronald Shaheed
Assistant Imam, Masjid Ash Shaheed
Charlotte, NC
SPONSORS
Duke Islamic Studies Center, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Department, Franklin Humanities Institute, Forums for Scholars and Publics, African and African American Studies Department, Religious Studies Department
