To Be Black And Muslim: Struggling for Freedom

 
Sohail Daulatzai’s Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America ambitiously addresses a highly impactful topic in African American culture that has been largely ignored by the US academy. Islam has greatly affected Black popular cultural production (as in the case of the hip hop that Daulatzai explores in his book), it has inspired the Third World internationalism of giants such as Malcolm X and Jamil Al-Amin, and it has contributed to the politicization of figures such as boxer Muhammad Ali. Daulatzai traces the widespread influence of Islam through African American cinema, literature, popular culture, and global politics. With an admirably wide-ranging scope, he examines African Americans’ imaginative, social, and political participation in what he terms a “Muslim International,” which he takes great pains to explain is “not monolithic; it even resists homogeneity and encourages radical difference…. [It] is not universalist, nor is it cosmopolitan in the European humanist tradition” (xxiv). Instead, Daulatzai argues that the Muslim International “represents a shape-shifting and fluid demand for subjectivity in the face of modernity’s horror” (xxiv). Black Star, Crescent Moon argues that African Americans have both significantly shaped and been shaped by the Muslim International.
 
Daulatzai’s project is grounded in an exploration of the political culture of the postwar period, in which, he argues, “the Cold War was a coded race war against Black and Third World liberation movements” (191). States Daulatzai in his introduction, “Part of my interest has to do with exploring the ideological similarities between the current ‘War on Terror’ and the emergence of the Cold War in the late 1940s, both of which have radically altered domestic and international politics” (xvi). Indeed, one of the book’s major contributions is to explicitly chart out the historical as well as the ideological interconnectedness of the figures of the “Black criminal” and the “Muslim terrorist,” which Daulatzai calls “the twin pillars of U.S. state formation in the post-Civil Rights era” (97). As Daulatzai writes, “to be Black is one thing in America that marks you as un-American, but to be Black and Muslim is quite another, as it marks you as anti-American” (xiv).
 
Impressively far-reaching as it is, Black Star, Crescent Moon touches many other subjects, locations, and perspectives. Beginning with a chapter entitled, “‘You Remember Dien Bien Phu!’: Malcolm X and the Third World Rising,” Daulatzai opens with the figure of Malcolm X, whose work had a broad cultural and political impact. Daulatzai will later argue that Malcolm X “emerges in this narrative as having arguably the most defining influence on the politics and art of the nexus of Black radicalism and the Muslim Third World” (190–91). Like the work of Malcolm X, Black Star, Crescent Moon straddles the divide between the cultural and political, seeking the generative space within which the two overlap. In “To the East, Blackwards: Black Power, Radical Cinema, and the Muslim Third World,” Daulatzai explores the joint roles of the Muslim International, Third Cinema, and the Black Arts movement in the creation of a radical cinematic language in the US. In “Return of the Mecca: Public Enemies, Reaganism, and the Birth of Hip Hop,” he provides one of the most complete academic accounts of the role of Islam in the formation of the ethos and aesthetics of hip hop culture. “‘Ghost in the House’: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of the ‘Green Menace’” gives a fascinating account of boxer Muhammad Ali’s transformation from a social and cultural pariah of mainstream US culture in the 1960s and 70s, into a celebrity embraced by the likes of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama in recent years. Daulatzai ends this examination by juxtaposing Barack Obama’s 2009 trip to Egypt with Malcolm X’s 1964 visit to the country, during which he sought support for his newly created Organization of Afro-American Unity. This comparative analysis highlights the contradictory position of the notion of Black Islam in postwar US culture.
 
In the final and most provocative chapter of his book, “Protect Ya Neck: Global Incarceration, Islam, and the Black Radical Imagination,” Daulatzai concludes that the project of US imperialism abroad is intimately linked to the domestic project of Black mass incarceration, illuminating the often startling connections between the latter and the global incarceration and torture of Muslims. The case of Charles Graner, “one of the ‘most feared and loathed of American guards’ at Abu Ghraib,” is particularly telling (Daulatzai 178). Graner had previously been implicated in violence while serving as an officer at the Greene County Prison in Pennsylvania, where guards “were charged with sodomy with a nightstick, unlawful nude searches, and using prisoners’ blood to write ‘KKK’ on the floor of the prison” (Daulatzai 178). According to Black Star, Crescent Moon, Graner was “given supervisory roles at Abu Ghraib” precisely because of his past guard service in US prisons (Cusac, qtd. in Daulatzai 179). In the time that Graner worked at the Greene County Prison almost 70 percent of the prisoners were African American, while over 90 percent of the guards were white (Leiberman). Several other guards connected with abuse at Abu Ghraib had also served as civilian guards in the US.
 
The connections between domestic violence against African Americans and international acts of violence against Muslims go beyond the individual guards associated with Abu Ghraib who had formerly served as prison guards in the US. Daulatzai argues that such linkages are not incidental; rather, they indicate the structuring logics of incarceration and torture in Iraq and Afghanistan. He notes:
 

 

What is especially revealing is that many of the prison officials whom Ashcroft sent to Iraq were not only employed by private prison firms around the United States but were also heads of various state departments of corrections throughout the country, including Terry Stewart (Arizona), Gary Deland (Utah), John Armstrong (Connecticut), and Lane McCotter (Texas, Mexico, and Utah). In fact, all of those listed here have been involved in legal cases and accused of a range of human rights abuses by inmates in the United States, including denial of medical treatment, harsh conditions, sexual harassment, torture, and even death. McCotter, who was forced to resign as head of Utah’s State Board of Corrections as a result of the death of an inmate shackled naked to a chair, was…later chosen by then attorney general John Ashcroft to head the reopening of Iraqi jails under American rule and also to train Iraqi prison guards, just one month after the Justice Department had released a report following the death of a prisoner due to the lack of medical and mental health treatment at one of the Management and Training Corporation’s jails, a private firm in which McCotter was an executive.

(177–178)

 

Black Star, Crescent Moon thus makes explicit the joint destinies of African Americans, African American Muslims, and the Muslim International. Daulatzai writes, “the Muslim International is constituted within the context of incarceration and even despite it. For it also sees the world as a prison” (175). Further meditating on the cultural effects of this social reality, Daulatzai’s project importantly concludes, “for if prison is about disappearance and erasure, silence and violence, then epiphany, conversion, or politicization is a kind of ontological resurrection against social and civic death, redefining one’s existence and challenging the panoptic power of the state” (174).

 
Since the book is in many ways a “first,” it is hard to avoid wishing that it had done more. One wishes, perhaps, that there had been further time spent historically contextualizing the many rich trajectories of African American Islam, especially those of groups beyond the Nation of Islam. The philosophy of Five Percent Nation has had a tremendous impact on the lyrics of hip hop artists from Jeru the Damaja to Eric B and Rakim to Erykah Badu, and has contributed to the popularization of phrases like “What’s up, G?” and “word is bond” yet the group merits only a brief mention in Daulatzai’s study. Additionally, the Moorish Science Temple of America, a group founded by Noble Drew Ali in 1913, barely receives any attention, although there is much evidence to support the idea that its philosophy and structure were formative for the creation of the Nation of Islam. Jamal Al-Amin (formerly known as H. Rap Brown) is discussed at length, but the historic rift that created the powerful organization headed by Al-Amin before his arrest is not discussed. Without exploring these and other important variants of Islam that exist within the African American context, Black Star, Crescent Moon not only risks missing some of the significant nuances and debates that shaped the Islamic tradition in African American communities; it also risks framing Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam as the monolithic voice of African American Islam. This is less a critique of Black Star, Crescent Moon than it is an indication of the research that has yet to be conducted on this important topic.