CONJURATIONS

Wise, a professor specializing in Africa and the Middle East, explores his own identity in this nonfiction work.

“My mother,” writes the author, “told me she didn’t even like Jews, despite having married one. His mother was Scots Irish and Muskogee; much of Wise’s lifelong study of religion and ethnicity stems from his family’s complex web of identities. An “olive-skinned man with black kinky hair,” the author’s father was a devout Zionist who “attended synagogue on Saturdays” before receiving the Eucharist at Catholic mass on Sundays. The book opens with the poignant story of Wise’s great-uncle, Arthur, a Jewish-American GI who helped liberate Dachau. Passed down through the family was photographic documentation Arthur had taken of the concentration camp (photos that are featured at the end of this book) that made its way into Wise’s possession after Arthur died by suicide, in his way another victim of the Holocaust. This book blends the author’s exploration of his own family’s complicated family tree with his decades-long research as a professor at Western Washington University. A four-time Fulbright scholar who has written, edited, or translated more than a dozen academic books and articles, Wise is an expert on the African Sahel. A predominantly Muslim region that includes Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, the Sahel has its own complicated history with religion and ethnic identity. Many part-Arab Muslims in the region, for instance, “believe they are superior to black Muslims because they are blood descendants of the Prophet Muhammad.” Similarly, some of the major Arabic cultural features of the Middle East’s Islamic world “are unknown in West Africa.” With fewer than 140 pages, this is a relatively concise book, but its division into only four chapters makes for an occasionally unwieldy read that eschews a chronological (or even thematic) approach as it jumps across multiple timelines. Despite this disorganization, the book offers poignant insights into the intersection of religion, ethnicity, and racism, from Oklahoma and Nazi Germany to West Africa and the Levant. It also doubles as an accessible introduction to Islamic Africa.

A powerful, if not always orderly, analysis of ethnic and religious identity.