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 It was these connections that 6 years ago led me to track down his descendants to see if they still possessed his unpublished correspondence.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**