Race and Religion Series: From Newark to Cairo and Black Again: Black Muslims and the Afro-Arab Imaginary with Dr. Rasul Miller

The Race and Religion series at ISGRJ-Newark seeks to center conversations about the intersections of race and religion, and the racialization of religion, from historical and contemporary perspectives, in the U.S. and globally. As categories of identity and identification, race and religion have historically overlapped and competed as primary forms of differentiation and markers of difference. This spring the series will focus on Islam in Africa.

One of the consequences of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade was that West African Muslims preceded much of the rest of the Muslim world in their confrontation with imperial power, market economies, and the moral questions they engendered. Later European colonization and the subsequent process of decolonization, and the tensions between discriminating hierarchies of race and the moral commitments of religion, conditioned conflicting ways of imagining community and group membership.

About the featured speaker: 

Dr. Rasul Miller's work explores the histories of Black Muslim communities in the Atlantic world, Black radicalism and its impact on social and cultural movements in the twentieth century U.S., Black internationalism, and West African intellectual history.

Dr. Miller's current book project, Black World Revelation: Islam, Race and Radical Internationalism in Twentieth-Century New York City examines the origins of Black orthodox Muslim congregations in and around New York City, and the cultural and political orientations that characterized subsequent communities of Black Muslims in the U.S. who built robust, transnational networks as they actively engaged traditions and communities of Muslims on the African continent. He received his PhD in History and Africana Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and his BA in Economics and African & African American Studies from Duke University.