Islam in Black America: Identity, Liberation, and Difference in African-American Islamic Thought. By Edward E. Curtis IV. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. xii, 174 pp. Cloth, $54.50, ISBN 0-7914-5369-3. Paper, $17.95, ISBN 0-7914-5370-7.)

Abstract

Most early works on African American Islam, even C. Eric Lincoln's The Black Muslims in America (1961) and E. U. Essien-Udom's Black Nationalism (1962), generally dismiss black Muslims as either quasi-religious racial separatists or heretical Muslim cultists. Recent scholarship has sought to correct that prevalent tendency by evaluating African American Islam on its own terms. Toward this end, Edward E. Curtis IV has crafted an impressive slender volume that serves as both a history of religion and a history of ideas that squarely situates Islam within the African American experience. Although he is engaged in an exhaustive investigation of African American Islam in the twentieth century, his book also offers great insights into the evolution of such vital concerns within modern African American historiography as the Great Migration, New Negro militancy, pan-Africanism, black nationalism, and the civil rights and Black Power movements. The introductory chapter of the book succinctly outlines the author's governing assumptions about two distinctive ways of understanding African American Islam. First, instead of treating African American Islam as a religion per se, Curtis argues for a greater consideration of Islam as a religious “tradition” subject to more dynamic interpretations and complex adaptations. Making the semantic distinction between religion and tradition is crucial to the author's main argument. Second, the author examines how the diametrically opposed notions of universalism and particularism have shaped the evolution of modern African American Islamic thought over the last century. Each of five chapters analyzes one prominent black intellectual—Edward W. Blyden, Noble Drew Ali, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and Wallace Deen Muhammad—and how he grappled with Islam as a universal faith for all people, a faith for a specific group of people, or some combination of the two. In his treatment of those five figures, Curtis provides assessments of each thinker's intellectual and religious development that are both fresh and provocative.