Related Topics

• African-American Muslims
• Converts to Islam
• Muslims in the United States

Middle East Quarterly

• Jail for Iranian Journalists
  by Arash Sigarchi
• Iran's Revolutionary Guards - A Rogue Outfit?
  by Michael Rubin

Get Involved with the MEF

• Campus Activities
• Donations
• Employment & Internships

Articles by MEF Staff

• "Sharia Is Hate"
  by Supna Zaidi
• Obama or McCain, Iran stance won't change
  by Michael Rubin

MEF Wires

• "My Pentagon Years"
  by Douglas J. Feith
• What's at Stake for the West in Lebanon?
  by David Wurmser

Press Releases

• Irfan Yusuf Apologizes Again to Daniel Pipes
  October 1
• Irfan Yusuf Apologizes to Daniel Pipes
  September 17

Most Viewed Articles

1. Assessing English Translations of the Qur'an
2. Iran's Revolutionary Guards - A Rogue Outfit?
3. Jail for Iranian Journalists
4. Beheading in the Name of Islam
5. The Middle East's Tribal DNA

Most Mailed Articles

1. "Sharia Is Hate"
2. Iran's Revolutionary Guards - A Rogue Outfit?
3. The Revolutionary Guards' Role in Iranian Politics
4. Ahmadinejad and the Mahdi
5. Iran's Global Ambition

DECEMBER 1995 • VOLUME II: NUMBER 4

Subscribe   |    Archive   |    Submit Manuscript   |    Board of Editors   |    Contact Editor   |

American Jihad: Islam after Malcolm X

by Steven Barboza
New York: Doubleday, 1995. 370 pp. $14 (paper).

Reviewed by Daniel Pipes

Middle East Quarterly
December 1995

Print

Send

RSS

The title brings the World Trade Center bombing to mind, but it's a come-on. By jihad, Barboza means not war sanctioned by the laws of Islam but striving to be a better Muslim. The book, in fact, consists of some fifty vignettes on American Muslims -- mostly first-person accounts, plus some interviews.Barboza, an American convert to Islam, makes his goal to feel "the pulse of Islamic society in America."

In this he succeeds. Immigrants tell of the challenges they met on arrival in the United States, and the second generation reveals its confusions. Converts explain both what repulsed them about mainstream U.S. culture and what drew them to Islam. As a group, the converts strike an outsider as decidedly ignorant (Barboza himself calls Friday the "Muslim Sabbath" and has the odd notion that Richard Burton's translation of The Thousand and One Nights "reeducated generations of Westerners about Islam").

Perhaps the most interesting stories are those of Nation of Islam members who found their way to mainstream Islam. Ozier Muhammad, a grandson of Elijah Muhammad and now a photographer at The New York Times, tells how he illicitly adopted mainstream practices under the guidance of his older relatives. "Man, it was like I was reborn." And then, there are those who stayed with the original Nation of Islam teachings, including H. Nasif Mahmoud, a graduate of the Harvard Law School and international lawyer in Washington, loyal to the Nation of Islam because of its success in raising black morale.

Related Topics: African-American Muslims, Converts to Islam, Muslims in the United States

To receive articles regularly by email, join the MEF News mailing list.
To receive the full, printed version of the Middle East Quarterly, please see details about an affordable subscription.

Related Items

• Other items from the December 1995 Middle East Quarterly
• Other items by Daniel Pipes