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.)

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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

The Red Flag tradition in the Nation of Islam and Moorish Science Temple