Review of Sohail Daulatzai, Black Star, Crescent Moon:The Muslim International and Black Freedombeyond AmericaMinneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012, xxix + 257 pp. ISBN978-0-8166-7586-9

Patrick D. Bowen

# Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

In Black Star, Crescent Moon, author Sohail Daulatzai appears to have two basicprojects. The first is an attempt to prove the existence of a community that he calls the‘Muslim International.’ According to Daulatzai, the Muslim International is theproduct of the intersecting, overlapping, and mutual influencing of Black Islam,Black Radicalism, and the Muslim Third World (p. xxii)—movements and commu-nities that since the time of the Cold War have shared a fundamental desire for‘radical justice and equality’ (p. 196), an international self-image, and trenchantcritiques of the U.S.’s treatment of non-white and non-Christian people. The secondproject of the book is to use the histories, traits, and critiques of certain prominentAfrican-American Muslim individuals and movements in order to bring into relief thesimilarities and connections between the U.S.’s treatment of African Americans andMuslims domestically and its treatment of Third World Muslims internationally.Daulatzai concludes by repeatedly asserting that through this book he has ‘revealed’the fact that the U.S. is ‘really’ an imperialistic, racist nation, and therefore a nationthat members of the Muslim International rightly critique and resist in the name ofjustice and equality.

Daulatzai’s approach for each chapter is to focus on a handful of cultural andpolitical productions—such as speeches, artistic works, and, in one chapter, modernprisons—related to that chapter’s main subject, set these productions in a historicalcontext, and provide an analysis of how the subjects and productions reflect andtherefore prove his theories about the Muslim International and the U.S. For example,chapter one’s subject is Malcolm X and Daulatzai examines his ‘The Message to theGrassroots’ and ‘The Ballot or the Bullet’ speeches. For Daulatzai, Malcolm X standsas both the ultimate representative of and the greatest influence on the MuslimInternational. He identified with Third World Muslims and as an international, not

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P. D. Bowen (*)University of Denver-Iliff School of Theology, Denver, CO, USAe-mail: Pbowen303@gmail.com

a national, subject. Furthermore, he critiqued the U.S.’s treatment of AfricanAmericans and its imperialism. As a symbol of pride and resistance for Muslimsaround the world, Malcolm X is in fact the most important figure in Black Star,Crescent Moon. Towards the end of the book, Daulatzai returns to him, drawing asharp contrast between his message and that of President Obama in order to highlightthe decline of the influence of the Muslim International critique in American cultureand the simultaneous rise of both the notion of ‘color-blindness’ and the post-9/11American involvement with Muslim countries. This feature of the book, explainingwhy the critiques of African-American Islam are still relevant today, is its mostimportant contribution. Black Star, Crescent Moon is one of the first scholarly booksto systematically apply these critiques to (A) a discussion of the popular claim that theU.S. has moved into a post-racial era as well as to (B) an interpretation of post-9/11U.S. foreign policy.

The remaining chapters follow a similar pattern to the one used in the first. Likethe topic for chapter one, a few of the main topics Daulatzai chooses for theremaining chapters have been discussed by other scholars (such as the Islamicinfluence of Muhammad Ali and Hip Hop’s Islamic current). In these sections hiswork offers little new data, but some of the issues and cultural productions he looks athave not been examined before. In chapter two, for example, the subject is BlackRadical thought, and Daulatzai focuses on one film, Sweet Sweetback’s BaadasssssSong (1971), and Sam Greenlee’s novels The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1969) andBaghdad Blues (1976)—all works that, to my knowledge, have until now beenignored in discussions of African-American Islam. Daulatzai explains how all ofthese works reflect the Muslim International themes of identifying with Muslims andanti-colonial movements throughout the world and of calling out and resisting U.S. orEuropean oppression. Chapter three looks at Hip-Hop, an art that is (for those keepingup with the scholarly discussions) well known for its resistance and Islamic elements.Here Daulatzai highlights the work of Hip-Hop artists Public Enemy, N.W.A., Rakim,and Mos Def. The subject of chapter four is the boxer Muhammad Ali, who becamethe preeminent representative of the Muslim International in the 1960s after the deathof Malcolm X. In addition to presenting several small examples of Ali’s actions andthought, Daulatzai spends a large amount of time analyzing popular perceptions ofAli since the 1990s, paying particular attention to the way Ali was depicted in theAcademy Award-winning documentary When We Were Kings (1996). Daulatzaiargues that the praise lauded on Ali since the 1990s generally ignores or silenceshis critical words from the 1960s and 1970s, a fact that reflects the rise of the NewRight’s increased promotion of the notion of ‘color-blindness.’ This highlights multi-culturalism and downplays the continued existence of racism while asserting thatracism no longer exists—all in an effort to help restore American imperialism andracism. Finally, in chapter five, Daulatzai compares the imprisonment of African-Americans in the U.S. with the prison systems in the Muslim Third World that aresignificantly influenced by the U.S. government. Daulatzai makes the case that theseprison systems are driven by the same racist and imperialist logic and, in many cases,the same individuals.

While the writing in Black Star, Crescent Moon is sometimes cumbersome andrepetitious, the principal limitation of this book is that on a number of occasionsDaulatzai makes claims about certain cultural productions, U.S. political actions, or

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cultural dynamics—claims that, if they were found to be true, would provide greatsupport for his theories—without giving sufficient or clear evidence. In chapter two,for instance, Daulatzai spends a great deal of time discussing the film SweetSweetback’s Baadasssss Song, which he claims is representative of the MuslimInternational. However, while he shows that it shared some thematic and artisticsimilarities with the classic anti-colonial movie The Battle of Algiers (1965), he failsto demonstrate not only that the latter film had a direct influence, but also thatfilmmakers of Sweet Sweetback’s had any influence from or interest in Islamicculture. A direct connection with some aspect of Islamic culture would have madeDaulatzai’s inclusion of this film in a book about theMuslim International much morecompelling. Later, in chapter five, Daulatzai makes the claim that since 9/11 BlackIslam has been increasingly seen as representative of both the stereotyped ‘Muslimterrorist’ and the ‘Black criminal,’ and that this has resulted in ‘the crackdown onBlack Muslims in U.S. prisons’ (p. 174). However, the only clear evidence he bringsout in support of this theory is a collection of statements from U.S. politicians abouttheir beliefs that African-American Muslim prisoners are a community that has a highpotential for terrorist violence (p. 183–84). He offers almost no evidence that thisrhetoric has actually led to any measurable change in the way African-AmericanMuslims are treated in prisons. In fact, the only discussion of increased harshtreatment for Muslims in U.S. prisons (outside of Guantanamo) deals primarily withimmigrant Muslims (p. 179–80).

Chapter four’s discussion suffers from a similar, but much more significant, failure toproduce evidence. Daulatzai insists, first of all, that When We Were Kings’ portrayal ofAli and its winning of an Oscar were the result of the influence of a vaguely defined‘United States,’ which is said to be heavily influenced by the fallacious ‘color-blind’concept. But Daulatzai’s explanation for how the ‘United States’ directly had a hand inthe events related to the movie is neither straightforward nor supported with strongevidence. He attributes the initial rise of the notion of a post-racial America to theinfluence of New Right (p. 150–52), but then the only explanation he offers for why therest of the American public supposedly bought into this idea is because of ‘a deep-seatedwhite fear that [multiculturalism, feminism, queer politics, Black Radicalism, and BlackIslam] would undo the work of the New Right and fracture the social cement that hasmade America what it is’ (p. 152). What Daulatzai does here is imply—without eitherexplicitly stating it or presenting any evidence—that the majority of the white Americanpublic—which he identifies as ‘the American mainstream’ (p. 163)—supports the NewRight and has this vague ‘deep-seated white fear.’ Daulatzai accepts these ideas as sofundamentally true that he does not even bother to discuss the roles and the decisions ofthe individual people who were involved in either the film production or Oscar votingfor When We Were Kings. It is a provocative approach, if nothing else.

Although the book’s publisher has classified Black Star, Crescent Moon as a workof history (see the back cover), and Daulatzai describes his chapters as “histories ofresistance” (pp. xx), his tendency to highlight similarities at the expense of provingdirect connections between important events or cultural productions is in fact closerto the methods of cultural criticism or critical theory. Both of these approaches focuson emphasizing what are often considered to be hidden or downplayed culturaldynamics, rather than making a detailed, highly nuanced case for the direct influenceof certain, specific phenomena. Indeed, Black Star, Crescent Moon is more similar to the

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critical theory work of Michael Eric Dyson and Cornell West than it is to the history andethnography work on African-American Muslims by Richard Turner, Michael Gomez,and Robert Dannin. Because of this style, readers hoping to discover either the precisemechanisms through which all of Daulatzai’s subjects interact or a significant collectionof new data on the history of African-American Islam may be left disappointed, but, atthe same time, like the work of Dyson and West, Daulatzai’s book succeeds in bringingattention, in a rather provocative way, to certain aspects of American and Islamic culturethat are often ignored.

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