The precise value of religious conversion narratives has
been an issue of minor debate in scholarly circles. Although it is agreed that
such narratives provide the scholar with useful information, just what
information they are providing is uncertain. Like all forms of narratives,
conversion narratives are crafted by an author at a particular time and place,
and, even when not consciously acknowledged, they are written for a particular
audience. Conversion narratives can therefore be influenced by a myriad of
factors: the amount of time that has passed since the conversion; the convert’s
mood when writing his or her story; what he/she has read, watched, listened to,
and discussed with others; how many times the narrative has been told; the
religion and ethnic group the audience is expected to be; the writer’s skill as
a storyteller; the amount of time the convert has spent writing the narrative;
the culture in which the narrative is given—the list could go on. To make
matters even more complicated, in cases where conversion narratives are
compiled together, since A) the authors did not follow the exact same format
and B) the reader is rarely given detailed biographical data about each author
or any information about how the narratives were selected, despite one’s desire
to compare the narratives, it is difficult to draw many strong conclusions, and
scholars are right to avoid using them uncritically. For these reasons,
although published collections of conversion narratives are generally
fascinating and informative, scholars should use them with extreme caution.
All that being said…While I was working on my books on early
white and African American Muslim converts, I had very few conversion
narratives of my subjects and in my most frustrating periods I secretly hoped I
would somehow stumble upon a previously unknown collection of first-person
stories about the religious journeys of early American Muslim converts. Such a
book would have made my research that much easier and would have provided that
much more depth to my descriptions and analyses. In the end, I was able to find
a small, little-known book of narratives written by several early members of
the Nation of Islam—although it was only of limited value for my project, due
to the book having been published nearly 60 years after the Muslims’
conversions and their narratives, as a result, lacking a great deal of
information on their religious transformations. To this day, then, I still on
occasion long for narrative collections by early Muslim converts so that I can
fill the gaps I know exist in my histories. So, despite all the limitations of
conversion narratives, especially collections, I admit that, given certain
situations, they can be a goldmine.
But what about conversion narrative collections from the contemporary
period—a time when hundreds of Muslim converts’ life stories have been
collected and published, often by scholars and grad students in ethnography,
psychology, and history departments? And what about cases where many of the
narratives had already been placed online so that anyone could freely access
them? When Juan Galvan, the editor ofLatino Muslims: Our Journeys to Islam,
approached me to get my opinion on the potential scholarly interest in such a
collection, I was up front with him concerning my doubts about it. I explained,
in short, that in today’s scholarly world, scholars would appreciate it but we
would rather have direct interviews and surveys. This, in my opinion, would be
particularly true for scholars of Latino Muslims, since there are only a
handful of them and I assume that most of them have already read and analyzed
many of the Latino Muslim narratives that are online. (I know I had analyzed 28
such narratives for a speech at a regional American Academy of Religion meeting
while I was in grad school.) Given all of this, I said, a book like the one he
was proposing would be of most value to other converts and potential converts,
not scholars. When Juan then informed me he had already completed the project
and that he’d like me to review it, I feared that I would not find much new
scholarly value in it.
It turns out, however, that I was wrong. Galvan’s collection
of conversion narratives will make an important resource for scholars who
examine Latino Muslims. As already mentioned, a number of these narratives are
presently online, but they are scattered across multiple websites and numerous
subsections within those websites—and sometimes buried as single articles in
long, one-page publications. Galvan’s book has made it significantly easier to
find these narratives. In some cases, though, the narratives were not
previously available on Galvan’s various Latino Muslim webpages—or at least
they were buried deep enough in a salad of hotlinks that I was unable to find
them. The book’s most significant contribution, though, is the sheer number of
narratives, 52, which, as far as I am aware, makes this the single largest book
collection of narratives of American Muslim converts of any ethnicity ever to
have been published, slightly edging out Steven Barboza’s important 1993
collection American Jihad: Islam after Malcolm X.
And, like Barboza’s collection, Galvan’s book features both
community leaders and “regular” people, offering the reader access to a rich
variety of stories coming from individuals whose Latino identities and
experiences vary considerably. The diversity of the converts can be appreciated
by just looking at the list of some of the countries they are from, in which
they have lived, or to which they trace their ancestors: Canada, Argentina,
Bolivia, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Germany, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Italy,
Syria, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, Mexico, England, El Salvador, Peru,
Australia, and the United States. The life experiences of these individuals are
diverse as well; the book tells the stories of immigrants and the US-born,
those from broken homes and those from loving families, ghetto dwellers and
farmers, soldiers and students, atheists and devout Catholics. For those who
have studied new Muslims in America and are familiar with many of the common
reasons that people in the United States have embraced Islam, it is striking
that, although one could group similar narratives together, no two stores in
the four dozen here are the same, which reflects the wide variety of cultural,
psychological, spiritual, and even discursive currents that are at play as
people across the country turn to Islam.
It is of course still true that a responsible scholar should
not simply and uncritically take conversion stories at face value, and it is
the things that this book lacks that will make a critical scholarly analysis of
its contents all the more important. The reader, for instance, is not provided
with any data about the converts beyond what they have chosen to include in
their narratives—narratives that occasionally do not give any clue as to the
convert’s location, mosque affiliation, age, or nation of (family’s)
origin—basic pieces of data that would significantly aid analysis. The sources
of the narratives or the dates they were written are also not included, nor is,
in most cases, information given that might indicate whether or not the convert
has written or told his or her story before—and how similar or dissimilar their
narratives are compared with other converts they personally know. This type of
information can be of immense help in determining larger issues concerning
patterns of conversion, geographic dynamics, and discursive movements. More
research will therefore be necessary to uncover such trends.
Still, Latino Muslims: Our Journeys to Islam can be of
real value to scholars of American Islam and Latino religions. It has ensured,
first of all, that these narratives have been both preserved and made easily
accessible; no longer will their fates be dependent solely on the upkeep and
viewership of old websites and tortuous hyperlink chains. Scholars who read
this book will be forced to acknowledge the diversity and breadth of the Latino
Muslim experience—conclusions based on small samples of respondents will not
suffice. Finally, for those who look hard enough, there are enough clues in
this book that one can begin to connect dots to other known events in the
histories of Islam in America and Latino religions. Latino Muslims,
then, is essentially the type of book I was hoping to find when I was working
on early white and African American Muslims—and I am sure the other scholars
who find it will similarly recognize it as the gem that it is.
Latino Muslims: Our Journeys to Islam will be available online at Amazon.com in paperback and digital versions and in hardcover at BarnesAndNoble.com. ISBN: 978-1530007349. Publisher: Self-published. Page Count: 243. See also: http://www.latinomuslims.net/
