Sufism--1970s Style

 A rare collection of faces...

Volume 3 is still coming

Upcoming Presentation

 

New Book Chapter: "Conversion to Islam in modern Western Europe and the United States"

 "Conversion to Islam in modern Western Europe and the United States"

This is a thoroughly revised version of my book chapter of the same title that was published in 2014. This new version is, I believe, the first scholarly work to examine and compare quantitative and historical data on modern conversion to Islam from virtually every Western European country and the United States. In doing so it offers a fresh, broad perspective on the phenomenon of conversion to Islam in the modern West. 

in Routledge Handbook of Islam in the West 2nd Edition, ed. Roberto Tottoli

Amazon

Upcoming Lecture - March 2022

 

Upcoming and Recent Lectures - Spring 2021

*UPDATED WITH APRIL SPEECH  DATE AND TIME

“Early Black Muslim Political Candidates in the Midwest, 1975-1989”

AAR-Midwest Region

Friday, April 23 @ 4pm CST

Registration--FREE for students and contingent faculty using promo code MIDWESTAAR on the Eventbrite registration page

“Remanufacturing Religion: On the Early Years of Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam”

AAR-Rocky Mountains – Great Plains Region
Virtual Regional Meeting
Saturday, March 20, 2021

Registration is Free

Upcoming Presentation for the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, December 3

"Exploring Local Histories of African American Islam Through the Black Press"

ABSTRACT: This paper offers a new historiographic approach to African American Muslim history from both a local and a multilocal perspective. Based on an analysis of over four dozen African American newspapers from 1975 through 1989—the years corresponding to the transition of the original Nation of Islam and the rise of Louis Farrakhan’s group—it is proposed that we can gain great insight into the local and regional development of certain African American Muslim communities by looking at their coverage in the local black press. It will be shown that, in general, the amount and type of coverage of Muslim communities roughly corresponds to those communities’ growth. The paper will present several examples of this phenomenon functioning at both local and regional levels. It will be observed, for example, that local growth is highly correlated with press coverage of the local branch of a particular community, but not necessarily with coverage of national news for that community. In some cases, regional patterns can also be observed, such as the case of black newspapers along Interstate 35 showing similar patterns of coverage, which generally corresponds to local community growth in that region.

For those attending (virtually) the upcoming American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, I will be presenting in a session on Thursday, December 3 from 4 pm - 5:30 pm EST

Afro-American Religious History Unit
Theme: Mormon, Muslim, Coptic, Webb: Blackness and Identity in New Religious Movements

Program book PDF

New Book Chapter: "'The Real Pure Yog': Yoga in the early Theosophical Society and the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor"

"'The Real Pure Yog': 

Yoga in the early Theosophical Society and the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor" (GoogleBooks)

from the new book 

Imagining the East: The Early Theosophical Society

I wrote this about 5 years ago while I was still working on the Thomas Moore Johnson letters. This book chapter expands on my discussion in Letters to the Sage Vol. 1 concerning the first known organized practice of yoga in the United States. In the 1870s and 1880s, as Western esotericists were forming stable organizations for the first time, they began to study yoga. At first, it was the Theosophical Society that showed the most interest, but as the group moved away from "practical occultism" in the mid-1880s, it also began dismissing non-philosophical forms of yogic practices. 

Just as this was happening, however, the TS's new competitor--the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor--was doing just the opposite: it was stressing the importance of practical occultism. Its leaders, who were all highly familiar with what was transpiring in the TS, soon reached out to its Indian contacts and were obtaining and assigning yogic practices to its neophytes. Interestingly, within a few years the HBL was claiming not to use "oriental" occultism--yet, as I demonstrate in my chapter, much of the yoga knowledge they had obtained from India was retained, but with the specific references to yoga removed.

Choice Review of HCTIUS V2

From Choice Current Reviews, July 2018

Upcoming Lecture on Thomas Moore Johnson

https://calendar.missouristate.edu/event/105070/200787

FYI: 

Letters to the Sage Vol 1 

Kindle edition is only 99 cents

And Vol 2 is available as a Free Download

Early 80s part 1

Deep into my research for HCTIUS v3. Will start posting random findings.

Here are some rare ads from the "Rebirth" stage of the NOI.

New Review of HCTIUSv2

On the AAR's "Reading Religion" review site:

http://readingreligion.org/books/history-conversion-islam-united-states-volume-2

And see Robert Dannin's review here: https://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/the-ontology-of-black-emancipation/

Letters to the Sage Volume 2 Now Available

Thomas Moore Johnson was many things. Besides working as an attorney and serving in several civic positions in his hometown of Osceola, Missouri, he was also an early leading figure in American Theosophy and in the occult group known as the H.B. of L. (Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor). It was these connections that 6 years ago led me to track down his descendants to see if they still possessed his unpublished correspondence. It turned out that they did, and soon I was poring over hundreds of pages of fragile missives that had been sent to the lawyer. Those letters were crucial for understanding the early development (1870s-1880s) of organized esotericism in America generally, and in St. Louis in particular.

I had become interested in Johnson after learning that the famous early white American Muslim convert, Alexander Russell Webb, had been in the same Theosophical lodge at that time. Johnson's letters, I discovered, not only shed a great deal of light on Webb's personal religious transformation, but they also put American esotericism in a very new perspective, revealing previously unknown ties to Rosicrucians, New Thought, yoga, and Sufism, and showing the struggles and battles of those who strove to plant non-Christian religious identities within the American mainstream. The letters were so important that, after writing my book on early white American Muslim converts, I teamed up with K. Paul Johnson to edit several of Johnson's esotericist letters, which were published in 2016 under the title Letters to the Sage, Volume One.

Johnson's correspondence, however, includes a great deal of material that has nothing to do with esotericism. Indeed, the majority of his non-family letters came from individuals whose primary interest was philosophy--Johnson's first intellectual love. Johnson was a committed Platonist, having converted in the early 1870s through the writings of the 18th c. British Platonist Thomas Taylor. It was Platonism that he saw Theosophy and the Hermetic Brotherhood as manifestations of, and it was in fact Platonism that first put him in touch with Madame Blavatsky's movement.

The connection came through Alexander Wilder, a polymath whose recent edition of translations of Thomas Taylor inspired Johnson to reach out to him in early 1876. Timing is sometimes everything, and within a year Wilder was working as the editor of Blavatsky's famous Isis Unveiled, a project through which he became an associate of Theosophy's founders in New York. This was Johnson's initial connection with esotericism, an area of intellectual life that would hold much of his attention for the next decade.

Despite these important connections, however, Wilder's relationship with Johnson was based not around Theosophy, which Wilder did not care for all that much, but on Platonism. Wilder was fascinated by the ancient and late antique Greek philosophers--he was even friendly with the Transcendentalist Bronson Alcott and other members of the Concord School--so he was happy to engage with the energetic young Platonist. Over the years, in fact, he encouraged Johnson to start and then continue both a Platonism-focused magazine and translations of Neoplatonic works. Through these efforts, Johnson solidified himself as a key figure in the history of the American study of Plato and his Greek interpreters.

But Wilder was also an important figure in his on right. His interests were broad (he was a sometime politician and an "eclectic" physician), and his diverse ties to American thinkers and liberal movements made him an important, if generally overlooked, influencer in the development of multiple intellectual currents. Wilder published prodigiously--numerous articles of his have in fact been collected and re-published in multiple volumes over the last several years. The letters from him to Johnson, which are now being released in Letters to the Sage, Volume Two, therefore provide a detailed glimpse into the mental workings and social life of key behind-the-scenes players in American philosophy.

For more on Wilder, Volume Two, and continuing developments in the research of the history of American esotericism, see K. Paul Johnson's blog, History of the Adepts.

New Article: "That We May be Known Throughout all the Moslem World": Pittsburgh's African American Muslims, 1925–45

"That We May be Known Throughout 

all the Moslem World": 

Pittsburgh's African American Muslims, 1925–45

Pennsylvania Legacies

Vol. 18, No. 1 (Spring 2018), pp. 20-25

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5215/pennlega.18.1.0020?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Robert Dannin's Review of History of Conversion to Islam Vol 2

at Marginalia:

Islam and Black Emancipation

May 25, 2018

Robert Dannin reviews Patrick D. Bowen’s The African American Islamic Renaissance, 1920-1975

Call to Action: Collecting the History of Conversion to Islam in the US

In 2009, I began collecting documents related to the history of conversion to Islam in the United States before 1975. To do this, I dug through library catalogs, visited various archives, put in dozens of Freedom of Information Act requests, and reached out to Muslims and scholars throughout the country. The results of this work appeared in the first 2 volumes of A History of Conversion to Islam in the United States--which are the 2 most thoroughly documented books on the topic. 

              

Currently I am working on volume 3 in the series, which looks at American Muslim converts of all ethnicities since 1975. So far, using the same research techniques that I employed for the previous volumes, I have collected a large number of books, articles, interviews, magazines, and newspapers related to Islam in America since 1975. In fact, if I were to stop researching right now and start synthesizing the material and writing, I would already be able to produce another well-documented book. (Below are a couple of small snippets of the catalog for my post-1975 American Muslim periodicals collection.)

      

But I don't want to stop right now. 

Due to immigration and conversion, the presence of Islam in America has grown exponentially since the 1970s, producing many more masajid/mosques and Islamic organizations than there were before 1975. Because of that, there has been a lot more material produced by American Muslims and yet relatively few efforts have been made to collect these materials in order to document that history. I am therefore well aware that my efforts to collect post-1975 materials have only scratched the surface. There is a lot more out there to be learned....

...And that is where YOU come in. 

If you have or if you know of anyone who has old materials relevant to the history of Islam in America, especially from between the years 1975 and 2000, please consider sending me a copy at pbowen303@gmail.com. The material does not need to be about converts specifically; I am interested in anything related to the history of Islam in America since 1975 because it will all help shed light on the larger context of American Muslim conversion. 

Please note that I do not need the original document--a scan or photos of the document would be fine. But if you want to send originals, I would be more than willing to pay for shipping costs. 

Anyone sending material to me will be acknowledged in the book--either by your name, organization/institution, pseudonym, or as anonymous (your choice). I'd also be happy to abide by any other terms/restrictions that you may have, such as your preferences concerning making the material freely available to the public, whether online or in a library archive. (I have already begun donating many of old my research materials to the Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library in Denver, Colorado. Contact me if you would like to know more about this.)

➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖

The types of documents I'm most interested in are as follows:

• Mosque records showing conversions and marriages (It's fine if you remove/redact the names of people.)
• Copies of Muslim magazines, newspapers, and newsletters. I'm interested in both national and local publications. I already have many issues of several of the more popular of these publications (such as Islamic Horizons, Final Call, Muslim Journal), but none of my collections are complete, so please reach out to find out if you have the particular issues I still need. The older and rarer the better.
• Programs from events
• Rare books and pamphlets
• Old newspaper clippings
• Audio and video recordings

This collection project will be an excellent opportunity to ensure that your particular community is accounted for and acknowledged in the historical record. 

If you have any other questions or concerns, please reach out to me at pbowen303@gmail.com

Take care,

Patrick D. Bowen 

**Feel free to pass this notice along**

book received: Latino Muslims: Our Journeys to Islam

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/

The Killing Devils tradition in the Nation of Islam

The Folk Roots of African American Islam Part 2: The Circle Seven Symbol

Interview on Ta'seel Commons

see here: 

http://www.taseelcommons.com/recommended-books/november-08th-2017