Abstract
In 1999, a media blitz covering the police killing of amadou diallo, an innocent victim from Guinea mistaken for a Black serial rapist, revealed he was not only one of many Black immigrants living in New York, but he was also a member of an emerging West African Islamic community.1 In 2003, an undercover officer wrongfully killed another African Muslim, Ousmane Zongo, an African arts restorer from Burkina Faso, deepening the city’s engagement with these recent arrivals.2 For the first time, New Yorkers were exposed to the Muslim practices of their West African neighbors. There was even press coverage following their slain bodies from funeral services in New York mosques to their respective countries in Africa.3 Because of a tendency to view immigrants in terms of their labor rather than their humanity, the media spread taught us another lesson. West African life in the United States cannot be fully understood by focusing on their work habits alone. Will Herberg’s classic work Protestant, Catholic, Jew4 revealed how early European immigrants used religion to aid their assimilation into middle America. As Black immigrants, however, West African Muslims are already classified at the bottom of the U.S. racial hierarchy. Yet, just as Judith Weisenfeld argues that the “African American religious experience has rendered the margin a site of power and of creativity, an activity that necessarily alters the center,” African Muslim migrants also challenge their peripheral status by creating religious practices they hope will shield them from a Black underclass.5
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Notes
Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew; an Essay in American Religious Sociology (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955).
Judith Weisenfeld, “On Jordan’s Stormy Banks: Margins, Center, and Bridges in African American Religious History,” in New Directions in American Religious History, ed. Harry S. Stout and D. G. Hart (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 433.
I employ the term space or, more precisely, Muslim space to mean the social relations (e.g., Muslim gatherings or ritual performances), cultural productions (e.g., reinvention of old narratives or traditions), and physical objects (e.g., Islamic clothing, Muslim architecture, incense aroma, Islamic bumper stickers) that signify and sustain a Muslim presence or identity. For a more detailed examination, see Barbara Daly Metcalf, ed., Making Muslim Space in North America and Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
Min Zhou, “Segmented Assimilation: Issues, Controversies, and Recent Research on the New Second Generation,” in The Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience, ed. Charles Hirschman, Philip Kasinitz, and Josh DeWind (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999), 196–211.
Paul Stoller, Money Has No Smell: The Africanization of New York City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 30–31.
Madhulika Khandelwal, Becoming American, Being Indian: An Immigrant Community in New York City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 4.
John L. Jackson, Jr., Real Black: Adventures in Racial Sincerity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
Zain Abdullah, “West Africa,” in Encyclopedia of American Immigration, ed. James Ciment (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2001), 1070–78.
P. K. Makinwa-Adebusoye, “Emigration Dynamics in West Africa,” International Migration 33, nos. 3–4 (1995): 459.
Margaret Peil, “Ghanaians Abroad,” African Affairs 94 (1995): 345–67.
Donna L. Perry, “Rural Ideologies and Urban Imaginings: Wolof Immigrants in New York City,” African Today 44, no. 2 (1997): 229–59.
For a discussion on the politics of reception for migrants, see Aristide R. Zolberg, “The Next Waves: Migration Theory for a Changing World,” International Migration Review 23, no. 3 (1989): 403–30.
Evans E. Crawford and Thomas H. Troeger, The Hum: Call and Response in African American Preaching (Nashville: Abingdon, 1995).
Donal B. Cruise O’Brien, The Mourides of Senegal: The Political and Economic Organization of an Islamic Brotherhood (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 1.
Cheikh Anta Babou, Fighting the Greater Jihad: Amadu Bamba and the Founding of the Muridiyya of Senegal, 1853–1913 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007), 156–57.
For a discussion on the role Touba plays in the lives of some African Muslims, see Mamadou Diouf, “The Senegalese Murid Trade Diaspora and the Making of a Vernacular Cosmopolitanism,” Public Culture 12, no. 3 (2000): 679–702.
Hildi Hendrickson, Clothing and Difference: Embodying Colonial and Post-Colonial Identities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996).
Roland Barthes, The Fashion System (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983).
Robert C. Smith, Mexican New York: Transnational Lives of New Immigrants (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 167.
John L. Jackson, Jr., Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 43.
Ann Miles, From Cuenca to Queens: An Anthropological Story of Transnational Migration (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 32–33.
Maxine L. Margolis, Little Brazil: An Ethnography of Brazilian Immigrants in New York City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 234.
Linda Beck, “West African Muslims in America: “When Are Muslims Not Muslims?” in African Immigrant Religions in America, ed. Jacob K. Olupona and Regina Gemignani (New York: New York University Press, 2007).
For an examination of the problems West Indian immigrant parents face when reunited with their children, see Mary C. Waters, Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
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© 2009 Manning Marable and Hishaam D. Aidi
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Abdullah, Z. (2009). West African “Soul Brothers” in Harlem. In: Marable, M., Aidi, H.D. (eds) Black Routes to Islam. The Critical Black Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230623743_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230623743_15
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