Islam is the fastest growing religion in the United States. There are more Muslims in America than in Kuwait, Qatar, and Libya together. Leaving aside immigration and conversion, birthrate alone ensures that in the first part of the twenty-first century Islam will replace Judaism as the nation's second largest religion. Like all religious minorities in America, Muslims must confront a host of difficult questions concerning faith and national identity. Can they become part of a pluralistic American society without sacrificing their identity? Can Muslims be Muslims in a state that is not governed by Islamic law? Will the American legal system protect Muslim religious and cultural differences? Is there a contradiction between demanding equal rights and insisting on maintaining a distinctively separate identity? Will the secular and/or Judeo-Christian values of American society inhibit the Muslim practice of religious faith? While the Muslims of America are indeed on the path to Americanization, what that means and what that will yield remains uncertain. In this thoughtful and wide-ranging volume, fourteen distinguished scholars take an in-depth look at these issues and examine the varied responses and opinions of the Muslim community.

Includes Part 1, Number 1: Books and Pamphlets, Including Serials and Contributions to Periodicals (January - June)

Jeffers delves into Masonic history to reveal the surprising and controversial truths behind this ancient and secretive order, from its mystery-shrouded origins in medieval Europe through its rise in America, where Benjamin Franklin founded the first lodge.

The just-discovered story of how two enigmatic circus performers and the cultural ferment of the Gilded Age sparked the Black Muslim movement in America Delving into new archives and uncovering fascinating biographical narratives, secret rituals, and hidden identities, historian Jacob Dorman explains why thousands of Americans were enthralled by the Islamic Orient, and why some came to see Islam as a global antiracist movement uniquely suited to people of African descent in an era of European imperialism, Jim Crow segregation, and officially sanctioned racism. The Princess and the Prophet tells the story of the Black Broadway performer who, among the world of Arabian acrobats and equestrians, Muslim fakirs, and Wild West shows, discovered in Islam a greater measure of freedom and dignity, and a rebuttal to the racism and parochialism of white America. Overturning the received wisdom that the prophet was born on the East Coast, Dorman has discovered that Noble Drew Ali was born Walter Brister in Kentucky. With the help of his wife, a former lion tamer and “Hindoo” magician herself, Brister renamed himself Prophet Noble Drew Ali and founded the predecessor of the Nation of Islam, the Moorish Science Temple of America, in the 1920s. With an array of profitable businesses, the “Moors” built a nationwide following of thousands of dues-paying members, swung Chicago elections, and embedded themselves in Chicago’s dominant Republican political machine at the height of Prohibition racketeering, only to see their sect descend into infighting in 1929 that likely claimed the prophet’s life. This fascinating untold story reveals that cultures grow as much from imagination as inheritance, and that breaking down the artificial silos around various racial and religious cultures helps to understand not only America’s hidden past but also its polycultural present.

In A History of Conversion to Islam in the United States, Volume 2: The African American Islamic Renaissance, 1920-1975 Patrick D. Bowen offers an in-depth account of African American Islam as it developed in the United States during the fifty-five years that followed World War I. Having been shaped by a wide variety of intellectual and social influences, the ‘African American Islamic Renaissance’ appears here as a movement that was characterized by both great complexity and diversity. Drawing from a wide variety of sources—including dozens of FBI files, rare books and periodicals, little-known archives and interviews, and even folktale collections—Patrick D. Bowen disentangles the myriad social and religious factors that produced this unprecedented period of religious transformation.

In this book, Mark Sedgwick shows that Western Sufism is not a recent phenomenon of the "new age" but rather is rooted in a series of intercultural transfers between the Muslim world and the West starting in the Middle Ages, and in centuries of later Western intellectual history.

In this study of American 19th-century secret orders, the author argues that religious practices and gender roles became increasingly feminized in Victorian America and that secret societies, such as the Freemasons, offered men and boys an alternative, male counterculture.