Aliyah Khan, Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean

Abstract

American Religion 2, no. 2 (Spring 2021), pp. 163–165 Copyright © 2021, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.2.2.17 Book Review Aliyah Khan, Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020) Alexander Rocklin Otterbein University, Westerville, USA The title, Far from Mecca, which could be interpreted to mean at a distance from Islam, reminded me of a story about the eight-century Sufi saint Rabia Basri. She was once far from Mecca, on her way there for the hajj, when the Kaaba uprooted itself and came out to greet her right where she was, in the middle of the desert. As Aliyah Khan clearly demonstrates in her book, while Anglophone Caribbean Muslims are far from Mecca, they are making Islam right where they are—Islams in and of the Caribbean. Though not apparent from the title, the book’s methodology is primarily focused on literary analysis (of literature and music by and about Caribbean Muslims). However, this analysis is framed with and supported by historical, ethnographic, and postcolonial approaches to the cultural politics of Caribbean Muslim social life. It includes autobiographical elements as well, the author being an Indo-Guyanese Muslim. The book establishes that Islam has had a longstanding part in the literary heritage of the Caribbean. The blurb on the back cover claims that it is the “first academic work on Muslims in the English-speaking Caribbean.” Strictly speaking, I don’t think this is true. But the book is the first monograph on Anglophone Caribbean Muslim literature and music and Islam. Importantly, Khan begins her book by reminding the reader that Indo-Caribbean Muslims are not, and historically have not been, American Religion 2:2 164 the only Muslims in the Caribbean. The book focuses on both Indo- and AfroCaribbean Muslim lives together (when previous scholarship has often been divided along ethno-racial lines). Further, it is not focused solely on a single country, but looks at Guyana, Trinidad, Jamaica, and the Caribbean diasporas and their writers. Khan wants to decenter the US and the 9/11 attacks as the primary hinges for understanding Islam in the Americas, when the history of Islam in the region goes all the way back to the beginnings of European colonization, racial slavery, and indenture. Khan fleshes out the Muslim Caribbean subject on the page and in life, a figure who is dynamic, changing, context-dependent, performatively reproduced, and continually racialized. Khan’s analysis of Muslim Caribbean literature and culture shows the false distinction between creolized Caribbean culture and a pure and foreign Islam. Khan demonstrates that the fullaman (a Guyanese word for Muslim) complicates and exceeds these reified extremes. The chapters of the book explore a variety of themes. Chapter one examines the Sufi aesthetic in Afro-Caribbean Muslim literature. Khan traces an arc of Afro-Caribbean Sufi Islam beginning with the writings of enslaved Jamaican Muslims and intersecting with the twentieth-century Sufi-inspired poetry of AfroGuyanese writer Muhammad Abdur-Rahman Slade Hopkinson (though the reader does not get a sense of what points one could plot between these). Chapter two presents Indo-Caribbean Muslim women’s negotiations of dominant Indian patriarchal norms and the diversity and complexity of Muslim women’s gender performativity between India and the Caribbean in the first half of the twentieth century. This chapter raises the theme of dress in performativity, which is picked up in later chapters as well. Chapter three looks at the Caribbean marvelous real in novels by Wilson Harris and David Dabydeen. Chapter four, “Muslim Time,” examines music and literature reacting to the 1990 Muslimeen Coup in Trinidad. Khan makes particular use of the coup leader’s sister Brenda Flanagan’s novel about the coup, Allah in the Islands, and of David Rudder’s coup-era calypso “Hoosay.” Khan looks at the ways in which Afro-Trinidadian Muslim men and women challenged reified racial and religious lines on the island, making a place for a Trinidadian Islam. The fifth chapter focuses on Islamophobia, the racialization of Muslims post-9/11, and the specter of global terrorism, zeroing in on Guyanese novelist Jan Lowe Shinebourne’s 2010 book Chinese Women...