Far from Mecca
272 pages, 6 x 9
10 B&W images
Paperback
Release Date:17 Apr 2020
ISBN:9781978806641
Hardcover
Release Date:17 Apr 2020
ISBN:9781978806658
Far from Mecca
Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean
By Aliyah Khan
SERIES:
Critical Caribbean Studies
Rutgers University Press
Honorable Mention, 2022 MLA Prize for a First Book
Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean is the first academic work on Muslims in the English-speaking Caribbean. Khan focuses on the fiction, poetry, and music of Islam in Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica. Combining archival research, ethnography, and literary analysis, Khan argues for a historical continuity of Afro- and Indo-Muslim presence and cultural production in the Caribbean. Case studies explored range from Arabic-language autobiographical and religious texts written by enslaved Sufi West Africans in nineteenth-century Jamaica, to early twentieth-century fictions of post-indenture South Asian Muslim indigeneity and El Dorado, to the attempted government coup in 1990 by the Jamaat al-Muslimeen in Trinidad, as well as the island’s calypso music, to contemporary judicial cases concerning Caribbean Muslims and global terrorism. Khan argues that the Caribbean Muslim subject, the “fullaman,” a performative identity that relies on gendering and racializing Islam, troubles discourses of creolization that are fundamental to postcolonial nationalisms in the Caribbean.
Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean is the first academic work on Muslims in the English-speaking Caribbean. Khan focuses on the fiction, poetry, and music of Islam in Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica. Combining archival research, ethnography, and literary analysis, Khan argues for a historical continuity of Afro- and Indo-Muslim presence and cultural production in the Caribbean. Case studies explored range from Arabic-language autobiographical and religious texts written by enslaved Sufi West Africans in nineteenth-century Jamaica, to early twentieth-century fictions of post-indenture South Asian Muslim indigeneity and El Dorado, to the attempted government coup in 1990 by the Jamaat al-Muslimeen in Trinidad, as well as the island’s calypso music, to contemporary judicial cases concerning Caribbean Muslims and global terrorism. Khan argues that the Caribbean Muslim subject, the “fullaman,” a performative identity that relies on gendering and racializing Islam, troubles discourses of creolization that are fundamental to postcolonial nationalisms in the Caribbean.
In Far From Mecca, Aliyah Khan argues that Muslim identity is neither fixed nor uniform, but is instead performative, expressed according to shifting and contingent boundaries that are responses to historical and cultural, and local and global currents. Well-written and clearly argued, this book is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the diversity of Muslims’ histories and representation both in the Caribbean and across the globe.
Aliyah Khan presents a brilliant illumination of alternative texts that relieves Caribbean Islamic adherents from facile postcolonial racial categorizations and grants them fluid identities of the twenty-first-century global subject.
New Books Network - New Books in Caribbean Studies' interview with Aliyah Khan
https://newbooksnetwork.com/aliyah-khan%E2%80%AFfar-from-mecca-globalizing-the-muslim-caribbean%E2%80%AFrutgers-up-2020/
BAR Book Forum: Aliyah Khan’s ‘Far from Mecca’ by Roberto Sirvent
https://www.blackagendareport.com/bar-book-forum-aliyah-khans-far-mecca
With its focus on Muslim Caribbean life and literature, this book expands and challenges typical takes on and typical data for American religion, Islam in the Americas and around the world, and religion and literature. The book would be well worth a look for someone interested in those fields.
Khan’s book demonstrates how scholars can both appreciate the particularities of the global Muslim experience and the nuanced history of religion in the Caribbean and the Americas....Far From Mecca is a gladly received correction to tired narratives about both global Islam and the Caribbean. My only hope is that it will provoke more conversations and research in this regard. Given Khan’s erudite treatment of the subject, I have no reason to doubt that it will.
There lies...intellectual rigour and the scholarly beauty [in] Far from Mecca: this book is intimately personal. Khan takes as her project to bear faithful witness to her own community, past, archival silencings, and liberatory possibilities.
Specialists in Caribbean studies and Islamic World studies will find particularly unique and timely Khan’s insights.
Khan expands our imagination of what a global Muslim imaginary is, and why that matters. We can no longer understand Muslim communities outside of the Middle East and North Africa as peripheral to what Islam may mean, but rather as constitutive of a global ummah that plays a role in the formation of the many Muslim subjectivities everywhere.
In Far From Mecca, Aliyah Khan argues that Muslim identity is neither fixed nor uniform, but is instead performative, expressed according to shifting and contingent boundaries that are responses to historical and cultural, and local and global currents. Well-written and clearly argued, this book is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the diversity of Muslims’ histories and representation both in the Caribbean and across the globe.
Aliyah Khan presents a brilliant illumination of alternative texts that relieves Caribbean Islamic adherents from facile postcolonial racial categorizations and grants them fluid identities of the twenty-first-century global subject.
New Books Network - New Books in Caribbean Studies' interview with Aliyah Khan
https://newbooksnetwork.com/aliyah-khan%E2%80%AFfar-from-mecca-globalizing-the-muslim-caribbean%E2%80%AFrutgers-up-2020/
BAR Book Forum: Aliyah Khan’s ‘Far from Mecca’ by Roberto Sirvent
https://www.blackagendareport.com/bar-book-forum-aliyah-khans-far-mecca
With its focus on Muslim Caribbean life and literature, this book expands and challenges typical takes on and typical data for American religion, Islam in the Americas and around the world, and religion and literature. The book would be well worth a look for someone interested in those fields.
Khan’s book demonstrates how scholars can both appreciate the particularities of the global Muslim experience and the nuanced history of religion in the Caribbean and the Americas....Far From Mecca is a gladly received correction to tired narratives about both global Islam and the Caribbean. My only hope is that it will provoke more conversations and research in this regard. Given Khan’s erudite treatment of the subject, I have no reason to doubt that it will.
There lies...intellectual rigour and the scholarly beauty [in] Far from Mecca: this book is intimately personal. Khan takes as her project to bear faithful witness to her own community, past, archival silencings, and liberatory possibilities.
Specialists in Caribbean studies and Islamic World studies will find particularly unique and timely Khan’s insights.
Khan expands our imagination of what a global Muslim imaginary is, and why that matters. We can no longer understand Muslim communities outside of the Middle East and North Africa as peripheral to what Islam may mean, but rather as constitutive of a global ummah that plays a role in the formation of the many Muslim subjectivities everywhere.
Aliyah Khan is an assistant professor of English and Afroamerican and African studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Contents
Introduction Muslims in/of the Caribbean
1 Black Literary Islam: Enslaved Learned Men in Jamaica, and the Hidden Sufi Aesthetic
2 Silence and Suicide: Indo-Caribbean Fullawomen in Post-Plantation Modernity
3 The Marvelous Muslim: Limbo, Logophagy, and Islamic Indigeneity in Guyana’s El Dorado
4 “Muslim Time”: The Muslimeen Coup and Calypso in the Trinidad Imaginary
5 Mimic Man and Ethnorientalist: Global Caribbean Islam and the Specter of Terror
Conclusion: “Gods, I Suppose”
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
About the Author
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