Malcolm X and, more recently, Louis Farrakhan are two of the more visible signs of Islam's influence in the lives and culture of African Americans. Yet, as Richard Brent Turner shows, the involvement of black American with Islam reaches back to the earliest days of the African presence in North America. Part I of the book explores these roots 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.

"This book explores the historical connections among jazz, African American Islam, and black internationalism from the 1940s to the 1970s. It shows that in the post-World War II era through the 1970s, the social justice values that Islam and jazz shared were key to the growth of African American Islamic communities in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. This book argues that it was jazz musicians who led the way in shaping encounters with Islam as they developed a black-Atlantic cool that shaped both black religion, jazz styles, and black masculinity and femininity during the Cold War and continuing up to the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements in the 1960s"--

Islam is a vital, growing religion in America. Little is known, however, about the religion except through the biased lens of media reports which brand African American Muslims as "Black Muslims" and portray their communities as places of social protest. African American Islam challenges these myths by contextualizing the experience and history of African American Islamic life. This is the first book to investigate the diverse African American Islamic community on its own terms, in its own language and through its own synthesis of Islamic history and philosophy.

Examines a facet of African history and blackness that often goes unexamined: a substantial portion of its roots lie in Islam. This publication analyzes the effect of Islamic blackness upon African America, from slavery to pop culture and its evolution in between.

Africana Islamic Studies highlights the diverse contributions that African Americans have made to the formation of Islam in the United States. It specifically focuses on the Nation of Islam and its patriarch Elijah Muhammad with regards to the African American Islamic experience. Contributors explore topics such as gender, education, politics, and sociology from the African American perspective on Islam. This volume offers a unique view of the longstanding Islamic discourse in the United States and its impact on the American cultural landscape.

The Islamic community boasts of being one united community. Its cornerstone belief is Tawheed (Oneness of G-d). Its fundamental principle is the Unity of G-d, and this speaks to the unity of humanity. Yet when you look at the Islamic community over its almost fifteen century history; racism, prejudice, bias, and discrimination have continued to prevail. I argue that the Islamic community has suffered fragmentation, as a result of this artificial divide. Therefore, the one united community has been more of an ideal than reality. I contend that really understanding the concept of Tawheed is the true answer--the bridge--as it were--to overcoming this artificial divide, the divide that separates the immigrant Muslim from the African American Muslim.