Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America * By SOHAIL DAULATZAI

Abstract

The ‘Negro problem has ceased to be a Negro problem. It has ceased to be an American problem and has now become a world problem, a problem for all humanity’.1 Malcolm X, speaking in 1964 at Harvard University, firmly tied the movement for civil rights and Black identity in the United States to the global movements of liberation of the 1950s and 1960s. Sohail Daulatzai utilizes Malcolm X’s ‘Black internationalism’ as a lens for examining the ‘political and cultural history of Black Islam, Black radicalism, and the Muslim Third World in the post World War II era’ (p. xiii). He develops an historical narrative ‘in which the Muslim Third World framed and inspired a radical anti-imperialist challenge to American and European power’ (p. xix), providing an alternative to dominant imperialist and Cold War liberal narratives. Daulatzai’s narrative begins with an analysis of the emergence of anti-imperialist radicalism in the years after World War II. The key to this examination is Daulatzai’s presentation of the life and influence of Malcolm X. The logic of what Daulatzai calls Cold War liberalism identified anti-colonialism and civil rights radicalism with communism while young Black activists like Malcolm X, in the 1950s, came to identify their cause with global movements of liberation. One of the major events in this history is the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung, which articulated ‘a clear challenge to white world supremacy and American-Soviet dominance’ (p. 20). Daulatzai emphasizes the importance of the Bandung conference in shaping Third World and Black solidarity, and in defining Malcolm X’s project of internationalizing the domestic civil rights movement in America.