EVERYDAY MUSLIM: MATERIAL RELIGION AND THE PERFORMANCE OF BLACK IDENTITY IN THE NATION OF ISLAM

How have African American religions been constitutive in the process of shaping Black identity and providing a space within which such identities were performed? Professor McKinnis’s new book project, tentatively titled Everyday Muslim: Lived Religion and Material Spirituality in the Nation of Islam (NOI) proposes to explore this question through the ordinary lives of African American Muslims. An ethnographic study, Everyday Muslim offers an intervention in the field of African American religion and Black Studies by turning our attention to the Nation of Islam (NOI), a new religious movement organized in Detroit, MI in 1930 by Wallace Fard Muhammad (c. 1877-1934 [disappearance]), and soon thereafter in Chicago, which became the headquarters of the emergent tradition.

The core argument of the larger research project maintains that beyond an interrogation on NOI leaders and controversies attached to them, there exists a religious community of ordinary believers whose religious practices are steeped in a Black spirituality that frames a sense of personal and collective identity for believers in their quest to fashion a Black nation that attends to both the social and spiritual needs of its followers. While much attention has been given to the former, the latter is often in the shadows. Everyday Muslim commences with the spiritual and argues that spirituality is at the heart of what attracts followers to the NOI. The project exposes a novel story about the profoundly spiritual world in which disciples divulge how spirituality forefronts their participation in the African American religion. In essence, while considerable attention and scholarship are available on NOI leaders, particularly its male leadership, such a concentration often renders the lives and experiences of ordinary devotees in the group invisible. There is therefore a paucity of scholarship that offers a sustained engagement on the lives of everyday Black Muslims in the Nation of Islam as seen through their own lens. This project aims to fill that lacuna.