They called a puppetry museum?

Hakim Mansour Ellis

hmm, not bad. I like it.

cool.

sweet

Kinda overestimating the popularity of Islam among 17th- and 18th-century west-African coastal peeps, though.

i love the fact that cnn feels that a story comprised of ten sentences needs a “story highlights” box!

she was calling to book a field trip, and when i made a joke about how not all of macon is actually in macon county, she started complaining about her mayor and what an ‘awful piece of work’ he is

I’ve heard he’s very articulate on the subject.

hee. “Well-spoken black man converts to Islam”

white folks bitching about their black mayors is like a national pasttime down south

So this doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with this guy’s reasoning — “it just feels right” is the ultimate unimpeachable reason for a religious conversion, so good for him — but there’s some stickler part of me that gets a little weird about how conversion to Islam has so often been pitched as some kind of return to African heritage. So far as I know history, at the time of the slave trade Islam’s power was mostly along Saharan trade routes, not so much on the sub-Sarahan coasts where slaves were coming from; and of course when you look at the belief systems slaves contributed to this hemisphere (like in the Indies), it’s more animist-style stuff. The extension of Islam through west Africa is just as much “imported” as Christianity — just accomplished by more pleasant local conversion than by colonialism or slavery.

Not that there’s anything really bad about that disconnect, and not that there’s anything less heritage-finding about connecting with what your African counterparts are doing now, but something about it makes me vaguely skeptical. (I mean, it kinda steps on the old-model beliefs, really, because modern people want a monotheistic religion — nobody wants to say “let’s return to our animist roots.”)

you left out the fact that Islam was totally cool with slavery up until the mid-20th century

Well and it hasn’t always had the best of relationships with sub-Saharan Africans, either!

But whatever — I had to type all that to realize it’s just a nit that I pick at, and I don’t particularly mind the results either way: you know, whatever complex reasons people have for being attracted to a religion are their complex reasons, and I’m happy for whatever people decide and all.

not that there’s anything less heritage-finding about connecting with what your African counterparts are doing now

I think this is probably a huge part of the “returning to heritage” rhetoric associated with Islam for (some) African American converts, i.e. it’s more about attempting a connection with Africa now than about history. I think African American conversions to Islam started happening at the same time as Third World politics gained currency, so the whole utopic idea that black people around the world could and should forge a shared identity politics. The cultural politics of that obviously happened in a lot of different ways, not always religious, but for people who were interested in religion, I think there was a way that Islam could function, because it already had a foothold in parts of Africa and very much did not have a foothold in the European West, as a kind of “third way.” (the other obvious example being rastafarianism, I guess.) and even though that political moment has (maybe mostly) passed, Islam maybe still retains some of those associations. obviously that’s just to address one dimension of the African American Muslim experience and it’s not particularly relevant to many people’s experience (children and grandchildren of converts, for example.)

heh. I qualified that post so much because I’m not at all sure I know what I’m talking about.

white folks bitching about their black mayors is like a national pasttime down south

haha you should’ve been in philly during the 80s, or NYC during the early 90s.

chicago during the 80s, etc

to be fair, though, wilson goode & david dinkins weren’t very good mayors of their respective towns.

harold washington was pretty great