Jacob S. Dorman traces the largely unknown and seemingly fantastical personal history and influences of the Prophet Noble Drew Ali, who founded the “first American Muslim mass movement,” the Moorish Science Temple of America (MSTA), in 1925 (6). The MSTA was the immediate precursor to the much more well-known Nation of Islam. Noble Drew Ali’s early life was shrouded in mystery until Dorman uncovered archival evidence that suggests Ali was once a famous child musician and adult circus performer named John Walter Brister. His telling of the development of Brister’s identity as Noble Drew Ali is part of his book’s larger goal of demonstrating how some African Americans became Muslims in the 1920s. These African Americans “harvested the produce of a century’s worth of representations of Islam and the Orient from popular culture” (13) and formed a new identity in response to Jim Crow era racism and Western imperialism.In the introduction, Dorman briefly lays out his findings from extensive archival research conducted at dozens of institutions. Fifteen chapters and an epilogue follow, explicitly connecting the MSTA to the Nation of Islam. Arranged chronologically, they function almost as scenes and acts do in a lengthy play or musical—very appropriate given that much of the work is about the performer Brister/Ali and his ever-changing identities and influences. Some of these influences include the prevalence of oriental, specifically “Hindoo,” magic performed in circuses, vaudeville shows, and on the street; the “Ali” acrobats of Morocco; Islamic rituals and language present in Black Shriner organizations; the selling and use of root tonics and medicines whose recipes were from “the Orient,” whether that meant Africa, India, or Arabia; the Ahmadiyya movement; Marcus Garvey’s black nationalism; and black-led moral reform efforts that sought to “civilize” unrefined black southerners who came to live in the major cities of the north such as Chicago during the Great Migration. Dorman contends that “Drew Ali’s movement and his charismatic persona were not the simple products of any single one of these experiences and influences but the complex and polycultural creations of all of them” (201). The author’s knitting together of these various, and ostensibly unrelated, cultural practices and traditions into a compelling narrative sheds new light on the founder of the MSTA and its founding and is a clear strength.Another strength of the work is what embracing Islamic elements does for Black Shriners, and later, members of the MSTA. Dorman notes how “for black Americans not only was the African-ness of Moorish and Islamic peoples a source of pride, but the foreignness of the Orientalist rituals of the Mystic Shrine provided a lifeline outside the racism of American shores” (60). Shriners claimed that the Prophet Muhammad was their founder, bowed “in imitation of Muslim prayer, and…kissed a representation of the Kaaba” (61). By becoming Shriners, African Americans “[built] fictive ties to a global imagined community of Shriners, Masons, and Muslims” (61).In the MSTA itself, the group’s key text was The Holy Koran of the Moorish Science Temple of America, also known as the “Circle Seven Koran.” The book did not contain the actual Qur’an but rather reproduced large portions of Theosophical and Rosicrucian books in its pages. Nevertheless, Ali’s calling the movement’s holy book the Koran gave it a sense of authority and ancient origin. The last four chapters of Ali’s Koran were almost certainly the creation of Ali himself, which he dictated to an unknown scribe. In it, he claims that “Asiatics” included all non-white, non-European peoples from all over the world, such as Moors, the Chinese, Japanese, Arabs, African Americans (actually “Moorish Americans”), and various South American nations. Not only were all these peoples Asiatics, they were also “Moslems.” His Koran thus established a new “intercultural and interracial” reality that was the “antidote to white racism” (190–93) and anti-imperialist in tone.If there is one weakness in Dorman’s work, it is that the “Princess” in The Princess and the Prophet does not get as much attention as the Prophet. The Princess is Eva Brister, the wife of John Walter Brister. She was also known as Princess Sotanki, a “Hindoo” magician and scantily-clad dancer who performed with a large snake around her body. In the 1900s and 1910s, she was even more famous than her husband on the performance circuit. Later on, as Ali’s ex-wife, Eva Allen was a member of the MSTA and put her business skills to use in helping to make the MSTA financially successful during its heyday. Perhaps it was a decision by the publisher to give the book a zippy title, but most of the book discusses Brister/Ali, not the Princess.Nevertheless, I highly recommend this book to history and religious studies professors as well as graduate and undergraduate students who are interested in the rise of Islam in America. The book’s examination of charismatic religious figures like Noble Drew Ali is also notable. Finally, its exploration of the permeability of boundaries between the sacred and profane, the religious and the secular, and the “East” and the “West,” all make it well worth reading.