A compelling and illuminating call for recognizing America’s earliest Muslims.
A work of historical criticism advocates a thorough investigation of Islam’s impact on U.S. slavery.
Most people probably don’t associate American slaves with Islam. But as Karim explains in his debut book, Islam was an influential force within Africa and a continuing presence in the lives of many African American slaves. “The study of African Muslim slaves and their impact upon the various aspects of slave culture, African-American and American culture in general, has remained wanting,” writes the author in his introduction, arguing that ignoring this area of history simplifies African American identity and reinforces Orientalist notions of a clear divide between East and West. After offering an account of the way that various figures within academia have been receptive or hostile to investigating the Islamic faith among some American slaves, Karim goes into a history of the religion in Africa and its state at the time of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. He then profiles three known Muslim slaves in America: Job Ben Solomon (Ayyub bin Suleiman), who was born in Senegal and ended up in Maryland; ’Abd al-Rahman Ibrahima, a nobleman from Guinea who was known as “the Prince of Natchez” during his time in Mississippi; and Ben Ali (Salih Bilali), born in Mali and transported to Georgia. By examining their narratives and highlighting their relationships to their faith, the author sheds light on a long-overlooked corner of the American experience. Karim concludes the book by examining the complex place Islam holds in American life today, within the black community and outside of it. Islam continues to be depicted as a boogeyman by Donald Trump and his political allies even as opponents of the president who wish to counter that narrative hold up Muslims as increasingly valued participants in American life. The author’s prose is scholarly without being dry, and during the slave narratives, in particular, he reveals himself to be an adept storyteller: “We also know that he wore a fez and long coat in the style of Muslims in Africa and fasted in Ramadan. He had at least twelve sons and seven daughters, all of whom bore Islamic names. He was a powerful and inspiring man, whose capabilities were recognised by his owner, Thomas Spalding.” Karim successfully weaves a number of historical trends together, from Yarrow Mamout to Muhammad Ali to 9/11 to Khizr Khan, showing how often Islam has been seen by its practitioners and opponents as something at odds with the American status quo. The author’s perspective is fairly Islamocentric, and he is perhaps more interested in establishing the existence of a Muslim tradition within the U.S. than in, say, resurrecting the backgrounds of these slaves for the mere sake of accuracy or multiculturalism. While Karim makes no pretense of objectivity, his arguments are persuasive and expose a significant hole in the mainstream view of American slavery. History fans of all backgrounds should be intrigued to learn of the surprises and complexities still hidden in this nation’s past.
A compelling and illuminating call for recognizing America’s earliest Muslims.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-912892-23-5
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Diptote Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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