the Form And Function Of Islam & the Black Radical Tradition

Africa World Now Project

Religion or one’s spiritual practice are the center of one’s understanding of themselves in relation to the world within which they live. It is indeed the essence of who are. And for better or worse contextualizes and informs our identity.

The development of practices and/or rituals that seek to help us understand the relationship between humanity, nature, and the universe are both a science and an art.

When exploring the contours and continuities of Africana radical traditions, religion and/or spirituality or spiritual practices are often explored in relation to Western European traditions, in many ways, intentionally. The project to situate mainstream denominational formations at the center of the Africana religious experience began as a retort to those who claimed that Africa had no religion—only fetishism (Pietz 1988, 105–123).

More than this, it has operated to silence traditions that have fallen outside regnant post-Enlightenment understandings of religion as “faith”. This has meant that, for the better part of a century, religion has been deemed synonymous with Christianity, and the institutional Black Church, in the U.S, in particular (Pérez, 2014: 82).

Yet, Africa, still flashes through.

There have been calls to reevaluate the grand narratives of Eurocentric religious thought and entertain the viability of de-centering the Black Church (Pérez, 2014: 93). I mean, was it not Cécile Fatiman, a mambo, and Dutty Boukman, a houngan, presiding over a Vodoun ceremony that gave direction and energy to Africans to free themselves in Haiti? What about our maroon ancestors?
In Working Roots and Conjuring Traditions: Relocating Black ‘Cults and Sects’ in African-American Religious History, Pérez argues that it is imperative to de-center the Black church in order to approach the heterogeneity and richness of lived religion…” (73).

In relation to the Black radical tradition and Islam, specifically what’s considered its unorthodox formations, little attention is given.

Accordingly, narrow conceptualizations of Islam, or any spiritual practices of Africana peoples for that matter, marginalizes the impact of unorthodox communities. We miss the fact that Clarence 13X, Father Allah, a dissident follower of El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, use the “Black God trope that 13X learned from El Shabazz to articulate their humanist worldview” (Collins, A Disciple of Malcolm X: Clarence 13X Smith’s Embodied Black God Rhetoric, 2020).

In the final analysis, a historical consciousness that does not inform a radical imagination that invents paths to an African future is counterproductive to liberation.

Today, we will explore, contextually, Islam and the Black radical tradition.

AWNP’s, Dr. Tasneem Siddiqui is in conversation with Dr. Bilal Ware.
Dr. Rudolph (Bilal) Ware is a historian of Africa and Islam. He is currently an associate professor at the UC-Santa Barbara, and the founding director of the Initiative for the Study of Race, Religion, and Revolution (ISRRAR).

His first book, The Walking Qur’an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa, explores the history of a thousand years of Quran schooling in the region. His research and teaching examines Muslim anti-slavery movements in Africa and the Atlantic World. His most recent book, Jihad of the Pen: Sufi Thought in West Africa, with co-authors Zakary Wright and Amir Syed, explores Sufi thought in West Africa.

Dr. Ware is currently working on: Visionaries: Second Sight and Social Change in Islamic West Africa; and The First Atlantic Revolution: Islam, Abolition, & Republic in West Africa c. 1776.

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous, African, and Afro Descendant communities who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!