Special Guest Episode at the Maydan

Podcasts are fun.

They’re even more fun when you get to do them with a valued colleague.

A couple of months ago, Wikke Jansen and I sat down to talk about my book The Muslims of Latin America and the Caribbean. Wikke is a visiting fellow at the Berlin University Alliance Project “Global Repertoires of Living Together (RePLITO) and received her Ph.D. in Global Studies from the Institute of Asian and African Studies at Humboldt University Berlin, where we got to know one another through the Berlin Graduate School Muslim Cultures and Societies.

Wikke not only carefully read my work, but also asked some poignant and pointed questions about what its points might have to say to other themes in the study of global Islam and decolonization.

The result is a special guest episode at the Maydan, an online publication of Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University, offering expert analysis on a wide variety of issues in the field of Islamic Studies for academic and public audiences alike, and serving as a resource hub and a platform for informed conversation, featuring original articles and visual media from diverse perspectives.

Did Muslims discover the "New World?"

Don’t you know that Muslims were the first to discover the New World?”

This is how Sheikh Youssef kicked off our conversation in Vega Alta, Puerto Rico. I was conducting research on Islam and Muslims in Puerto Rico and he wanted to make sure that I knew one thing before I went any further in my investigations. He quickly followed his initial incredulous question with a bold claim: “Muslims came here long before Columbus and Cortes and all the rest,” he said,“they were the first to come here and they did not colonize or destroy the place. That’s the difference between us and them.”

Sheikh Youssef is not alone in his reading of history. Far from it. Instead, his remarks reflect a widely held belief among Muslims — in the Americas and elsewhere — that long before Europeans set foot in Latin America, the Caribbean, or elsewhere in the American hemisphere, there were Muslim navigators, explorers, and settlers who arrived on these shores and who left evidence of their presence in maps, records, language, and cultural artifacts.

In the second chapter of my recent book The Muslims of Latin America and the Caribbean, I explore the claims, stories, the supposed evidence that supports them, and the ways in which Muslims utilize them as a means of claiming space and authenticity in the Americas today. 

Based on the available evidence, there is no reason to lend theories of “Muslim first contact” any credence or historical credibility.

And yet, the claims remain historically significant because they are just that: claims.

Before we can deal with the documented historical evidence about Muslims in the Americas arriving alongside and after European colonizers, it is important to first address claims such as Sheikh Youssef’s.

As evidence of pre-Columbian Muslim “discovery” of the “New World,” various advocates of the theory raise up the following:

• Maps from the likes of Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn al-Husain al-Mas‘udi, Abu Abdullah Muhammad al-Idrisi al-Qurtubi al-Hasani as-Sabti (better known as al-Idrisi), or Ahmed Muhiddin Piri (better known as Piri Reis) that hint at lands and peoples beyond the Atlantic.

• Pre-Columbian inscriptions, explorers’ accounts, and supposed linguistic parallels that point to West African presence in the Americas.

• Secondary sources written by the likes of Leo Weiner (Africa and the Discovery of America) or Barry Fell (Saga America), neither of whom were trained historians.

Although the evidence is spurious — and the claims effectively erase the accomplishments of the Americas’ indigenous peoples and civilizations — the reference of it affords an opportunity to consider why it is that so many different cultures and countries claim that they were the ones to “discover” the Americas in in the first place.

In my book, I suggest that although the claims lack scientific proof, it is not in architecture, society, or genealogy that we should begin thinking about Islam and Muslim communities in the Americas, but in the realm of ideas, identifications, and historical claims. 

Whatever it is that is remembered in this narrative of Muslim first contact, it is not verifiable facts, or in any case not just facts. Claims of first contact are an attempt to underscore fluctuating, marginalized, and uncertain identities with historical primacy and critique those who are able to control the narrative of a region’s identity and history. In the case of the Americas, it is a means of pushing back against Eurocentric (and predominately Christian) frames that dominate our understanding of the hemisphere.

Even though the claims are not true, they illustrate the ongoing importance of the Americas in the global Muslim imagination and the ongoing importance of discussing and debating the place of Islam in the Americas. In the end, I suggest that these claims are less about confirming pre-Columbian Muslim presence in Latin America and the Caribbean and more about claiming the region as their own today.

Thus, any assessment of these claims needs to not only examine the available evidence, but perhaps more poignantly, explore the claims’ contemporary significance for Muslims across the hemisphere.

Fictions can be full of useful truths that do real work in the world, even though they are not true. To craft a sense of identity, of belonging, takes more than facts, it takes faith. To belong is, in a sense, to believe in more than what is simply historical fact. While we must distinguish between fact and fiction — and critique the myths we know we are making — we cannot dismiss fictions that take on a truth of their own in the lives of those who believe them, claim them to be true, and advance them as historical fact.

Book Review: Far From Mecca

Brenda Flanagan’s 2009 novel Allah in the Islands tells the story of the lives, dreams, and social tensions of the residents of Rosehill, a community on the fictional “Santabella Island.” The novel centers around the protagonist Beatrice Salandy and her decision whether or not to leave Santabella, a lush and tropical Caribbean island only thinly veiled as real-life Trinidad. Weaving its way through the novel is Beatrice’s relationship with an “Afro-Santabellan” Muslim community that is critical of island politics and outspoken on behalf of the poor.

Through first-hand narratives from Abdul—one of the members of the community and right-hand man to its leader, Haji—readers learn that the “Afro-Santabellan” Muslim community is planning a coup against the Santabellan government. This, in turn, is a thinly veiled reference to the real-life 1990 Jamaat al-Muslimeen coup. A key theme that runs throughout the book, and in contemporary Trinidad, is how the non-Muslim residents of Santabella view “Afro-Santabellan” Muslims. Situated between the island’s Black and Indian communities, Flanagan writes how island residents react with a mixture of awe and opprobrium to their Muslim neighbors.

While it may seem strange to start a review of one book with a discussion of another, I would not have been aware of Flanagan’s work if it were not for Aliyah Khan. Khan’s adept analysis of Flanagan’s Allah in the Islands serves as one of the primary means by which she argues that the 1990 coup is the seminal event for the Caribbean’s perception of Islam and Muslims. Combining this analysis with an interview with “Haji”—the real-life “celebrity terrorist” Imam Yasin Abu Bakr—and an exploration of popular calypso music about the coup, Khan shows how events in Trinidad in the 1990s “changed national perceptions of Muslims” (192) throughout the Anglophone Caribbean, long before 9/11.

This is just one small example of Khan’s masterful interdisciplinary treatment of the subject of Islam and Muslims in the Anglophone Caribbean.

In this regard and many others, Far From Mecca is a commendable monograph that will spark additional research in the burgeoning field of Latin American and Caribbean Islamic studies, building on previous literature on Islam and Muslims in the Anglophone Caribbean in particular. It is also a worthwhile text by which scholars in different fields—religion in the Americas, Caribbean studies, global Islamic studies, postcolonial studies, etc.—might branch beyond their main disciplines and come to learn something fresh, from a slightly different perspective. Such was the case for me as I came across Allah in the Islands in Khan’s work. It is rare for works to be able to speak to so many different fields and to do so cogently and convincingly, but Khan’s book is an exception that is enlightening for readers in multiple disciplines, critical of an array of entrenched scholarly discourses, and useful for various classroom discussions.

Overall, Khan argues that appreciating the continuous Afro- and Indo-Muslim presence and cultural influence in the Caribbean tells a different story about both global Islam and the Caribbean. Following Aisha Khan’s emphasis on Islam of the Americas, rather than Islam in the Americas, Aliyah Khan claims that Muslims are “not different from other Caribbean people in their negotiation of culture and place” and situates Islam and Muslims firmly within the history and society of the Anglophone Caribbean as a whole. At the same time, Khan also seeks to de-center the study of Islam in the Americas outside the USA, looking at the hemisphere’s “formerly colonial whole” and pinpointing events and figures beyond 9/11 and the USA’s respectively well-studied Muslim communities. Khan brings an interdisciplinary approach to the subject, weaving together literary analysis of fiction, autobiography, poetry, non-fiction, and music in Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica with interviews, media analysis, and personal connections to key events in the Anglophone Caribbean.

Khan’s work is a timely, incisive, and critical addition to the growing corpus of literature that seeks to bring the lens of Caribbean studies to bear on the study of global Islam and expanding the perspectives and paradigms scholars use to frame Islamic studies and its “literatures.”

Public lecture shines light on little known Muslim populations

From Panther Now, a publication from Florida International University: 

Muslims have had a significant impact on Latin culture, politics, and society, with 3,000 Spanish words having historical connections to Arabic, such as the words “pantalones” (pants) and “arroz” (rice). Their influence, however, has been unnoticed because of the lack of conversation around the topic, according to a professor. 

Ken Chitwood is a [religion scholar] at the University of Florida. For the past six years he’s been studying Islam in the Americas and other subjects. But like many people, there was a time he was unaware of Islam’s influence in the west, he said. 

Chitwood was writing a weekly report during a mosque visit when he met a man dressed in a tunic who told him of how he converted to Islam in New York, he said. It was then that Chitwood decided to research conversion stories, and after researching 135 conversion stories, he soon noticed a pattern: they had connections to Latin America. 

He knew there was a large amount of research done to show Islam’s ties to Latin America, but people weren’t paying attention to it. When he taught a course on the subject years later at the University of Florida, students found it difficult to research. There were plenty of documents and statistics, but it was hard to piece together an “overall narrative.”

Through the event “Islam in Latin America,” which [was] held at [Florida International] University on Tuesday, Nov. 7, Chitwood [spoke] about Islam’s heavy presence in both Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as Islam and Muslim communities’ influence in the past and present.