Description
Book SynopsisFar 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.
Table of Contents
- Introduction: Muslims in / of the Caribbean 1
- 1 Black Literary Islam: Enslaved Learned Men in Jamaicaand the Hidden Sufi Aesthetic 35
- 2 Silence and Suicide: Indo-Caribbean Fullawomen inPost-Plantation Modernity 68
- 3 The Marvelous Muslim: Limbo, Logophagy, andIslamic Indigeneity in Guyana's El Dorado 103
- 4 ""Muslim Time"": The Muslimeen Coup and Calypsoin the Trinidad Imaginary 134
- 5 Mimic Man and Ethnorientalist: Global Caribbean Islamand the Specter of Terror 172
- Conclusion: ""Gods, I Suppose"" 204
- Acknowledgments 209
- Notes 213
- Bibliography 239
- Index 257
