How do you imagine different worlds?
According to historian Alaina Morgan, for African descended, or Black, people in the twentieth-century Atlantic–the interconnected system of Europe, Africa, and the Americas that emerged following the European colonization–it meant drawing on anti-colonial and anti-imperial discourses from within and beyond the worlds of Islam to “unify oppressed populations, remedy social ills, and achieve racial and political freedom.”
In her eponymous new book, Morgan envisions the “Atlantic Crescent” as a geography within which to understand the significance of Black Muslim geographies of resistance, occurring “at the intersection of, and influenced by” three overlapping diaspora phenomena: Black American migrant laborers who moved to the United States Northeast and Midwest in the years during and after World War I, Afro-Caribbean intellectuals and immigrants who relocated to the US in the early twentieth century, and newcomers from the Indian subcontinent who arrived in the same period.
Moving, and balancing, between particularist practices and universalist visions, “visible elites and rank-and-file practitioners,” the US and the Anglophone Caribbean, Morgan argues these diasporas merged continents, inscribed populations miles apart into the same histories, and brought communities divided by distance into intimate contact with one another through shared political visions, religious beliefs, and everyday interactions.
In a recent Q&A, Morgan talks about how she theorizes this “Atlantic Crescent” and what we might have to learn about Islam, the Black Atlantic and religion in general by thinking in, with and through it.