Black Muslim Freedom Dreams - by Samiha Rahman

Book Synopsis

Explores three generations of Black American Muslims pursuing education and liberation beyond the borders of the United States

Since the 1970s, hundreds of Black American Muslims in the Tijani Sufi order have sought refuge in a new world that would nurture their racial, religious and gendered identities away from anti-Black and anti-Muslim racism in the United States. This new world is in Medina Baye, a city in Senegal that is the headquarters of a pan-African Sufi movement with tens of millions of members in Africa alone.

Drawing on a decade and a half of ethnographic engagement, Black Muslim Freedom Dreams explores the Islamic educational opportunities created for and by Black American Muslims in Medina Baye, chronicling the dreams, sacrifices, struggles, and joys of young people and parents who live, learn, and strive for liberation between the United States and Senegal. The volume traces their journeys between these two worlds, zooming in to vividly portray everyday Black American and West African religious life, and zooming out to map the sociopolitical landscapes, educational conditions and Islamic and pan-African ideologies that shape believers' perspectives.

Black Muslim Freedom Dreams argues that Black Muslims' experiences of Islamic education and pan-African exchange are oriented towards collective care - a radical way of being and belonging through which believers journey on the path towards Allah's love by caring for one another and addressing the material inequities that constrain their communities. This notion disrupts narratives of religion that are limited to systems of personal belief, showcasing instead how their educational experiences foster a collective responsibility and solidarity. The book offers a compelling account of how Black Muslims engage with transnational religious and racial networks to build liberatory communities beyond the United States.

Review Quotes

"Amidst a world defined by anti-Black and anti-Muslim racism, Samiha Rahman has written an urgently needed book about an Islamically-centered, Afro-diasporic network that is driven by beauty and dignity. Panoramic in its scope but richly textured in its detail, Black Muslim Freedom Dreams is a field-altering book that forces us to re-think what emancipatory projects around collectivity and resistance can look like. A brilliant and captivating read!"--Sohail Daulatzai, author of Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom Beyond America

"Samiha Rahman tells the extraordinary story of how generations of African American youth found community, care, spiritual renewal, and a radical praxis dedicated to collective liberation in an ancient Senegalese city. Poignant, beautiful, this book brings to light Islam's powerful place in the Black Radical Tradition."--Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

"Rahman's work provides a nuanced and sensitive portrait of the everyday lives, social work, and education of what she calls "revolutionary pan-African Sufi movement." Centering the Black American experience, and moving between the United States and Senegal, Rahman compellingly critiques divides between the political, spiritual, intellectual, and social, showing that for the community of the Fayda, spiritual, intellectual, ethical, and political formation are inseparable. Black Muslim Freedom Dreams is an outstanding ethnography of a transnational Sufi community and the global political stakes of their work."--Oludamini Ogunnaike, author of Deep Knowledge: Ways of Knowing in Sufism and Ifa, Two West African Intellectual Traditions

"An exciting addition to the literature on African American Muslims that highlights Tijani Sufi transnational educational networks between the U.S. and Senegal. Grounded in extensive ethnographic engagement with Black American Tijanis, Rahman's compelling study illuminates how collective care and relational piety undergird the Black Muslim radical quest for spiritual and material liberation of young people and their parents in Medina Baye's African American Islamic Institute."--Judith Weisenfeld, Princeton University

"Like its subjects, Black Muslim Freedom Dreams breathes new possibilities into our understandings of relationships between Africa and its diasporas. Well-written and drawing on extensive multi-sited research, Rahman makes a truly original contribution that demonstrates how practices of care, rooted equally in Muslim cosmologies and the Black Radical Tradition, are strategies of freedom from racial subjugation on both sides of the Atlantic. I can't wait to cite it!"--Su'ad Abdul Khabeer, scholar-artist-activist and author of Muslim Cool

About the Author

Samiha Rahman is Assistant Professor in the Department of Human Development at California State University, Long Beach.