C.IAS Lectures Series: Inter-American History and Culture

Islam in the Americas: Islam made in the USA: The Spread of Black Muslim Movements in the Americas and the Caribbean Philipp Bruckmayr

12.05.2021
18:45 - 20:15
Zentrum für Inter-Amerikanische Studien in Kooperation mit dem Forschungs- und Kulturverein für Kontinentalamerika und die Karibik (KonaK)

Following the emergence of a variety of Black Muslim movements in the USA since the 1920s, Islam began to spread among Afro-American and Afro-Caribbean communities in a number of states in the Americas and the Caribbean as well as in Great Britain. The lecture will provide an overview of this transnational expansion of Black Muslim movements, being the account of a conversion process to Islam among African-descended populations, which has spread - not from the Muslim world but the USA – across the Americas and Caribbean and into Europe. Further it will show how and why the adherents of an Islamic tradition, which had initially developed in and radiated from the USA with only limited discursive and personal links to the Muslim world, have in recent decades embarked on various paths of transformation, including towards more mainstream Sunni Islam, Shiism and Salafism.

 

Philipp Bruckmayr (Dr. phil. Univ. of Vienna) teaches Arabic & Islamic Studies at the University of Vienna. His most recent publications include Cambodia’s Muslims and the Malay World (2019).