Zareena Grewal
In 1929, eight Black converts to Islam sailed from New York to Turkey to escape racism and white supremacist terrorism.According to historian Rasul Miller, one later moved to Egypt, where he adopted the name Muhammad Ezaldeen, joined the Pan-Islamist Young Muslim Men's Association, and spent five years studying Islam and Arabic before returning to the US as an influential Black Sunni leader. 1 Almost a century later, I met twelve Black Muslim Sunni women from my local mosque at a Pakistani restaurant for a celebratory send-off for Aisha (pseudonym).A local leader in the Black Lives Matter movement, she was going to Saudi Arabia and Gambia to study Islam for several years.She enrolled in an Islamic studies summer course taught in Chicago at the American Learning Institute for Muslims (ALIM), a confessional, liberal arts seminar that introduces Muslim college students to the Qur'an, hadith, and religious debates. 2 Aisha was especially inspired by Sherman Jackson and Ubaydallah Evans, Black faculty at ALIM who have studied Islam in Egypt and who enliven their lessons with Black cultural references.Impressed by what she called their "very Black, very Muslim" blend of religious and cultural fluency, she decided to pursue independent Islamic studies abroad but outside of universities constrained by state control.Gambia's Muhammad al-Jilani, for example, offers his global sufi following, including hundreds of Black, Arab, and South Asian American Muslims, an initiatic learning experience tailored to their individual intellectual and spiritual needs.Like Jackson and Evans, Aisha is most invested in the challenges facing Black Muslim communities, rife with debates over who to follow as a religious 1 Rasul Miller, "Black Muslim Racial Reimagining: Traditions of Racial and Religious Self-Making among Black Sunni Muslims in the US,"