Muslims in the Caribbean

Speaker 1 00:00:06 Welcome to on the square. A special podcast brought to you by SAP little square in collaboration with the may dad. I am Dr. <inaudible> senior editor of a little square and curator producer of this podcast where every month we get on the square and into some real talk about race at a slam in the Americas. Speaker 1 00:00:30 And this episode of on the square, we are talking slam Muslims and the Caribbean with Dr. Alia Khan, professor and author of the new book far from Mecca globalizing, the Muslim Caribbean. So thank you so much for joining us on the square. Um, I'm really excited to talk about, um, Muslims in the Caribbean, right? I think one of the things that, you know, uh, the subtitle of our podcast is real talk on a slab and the Americas, right. And that was intentional because, um, while Saffola square does have a focus on the U S based on, you know, kind of, sort of how we're located, um, the relationships to blackness in the U S are not in a vacuum. Right. And so, and, you know, and they don't even really begin like blackness as a concept. Right. And as an experience as even really begin there. So we want to kind of also broaden out and make sure we're talking about sort of other parts and how race kind of shapes itself. So that's why I was really excited to read your book far from Mecca. Um, and, um, to talk to you about it today. So I know you because we are colleagues, right. You also at the university of Michigan, but our audience doesn't know you. So can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Speaker 2 00:01:51 Yes. And thank you so much for having me on the square today. Um, so my name is Alia Khan. Um, I, I'm your colleague at the university of Michigan. Um, the director of the global Islamic study center and also a faculty member and associate professor in the department of Afro-American and African studies, as well as the department of English. My primary fields are Caribbean literature and also Muslim and Islamic literature, which is always a puzzle for people to figure out why those two things together. But we'll be talking about that today. Um, I'm also an immigrant from Guyana. So, you know, my dad is where my interest in this work starts. Speaker 1 00:02:31 Um, yeah. You know, that's funny, you said people, so you said Caribbean, literatures and Muslim and the Sonic literatures and people are like question marks when they see that. And you know, and you recently visited a class that I I've, I've had the pleasure to teach with, um, Dr. <inaudible> studies and, you know, the students love the book. So for folks who are out there, they love, love, love the book, but they were a little timid around their questions because they, when I asked them, they had never really like, thought about the Caribbean, Caribbean, right. Or the Caribbean, Caribbean, Caribbean. Speaker 2 00:03:10 It depends on where you're from. Um, and you know, in Guyana, people say Caribbean on some of the islands, people say Caribbean, so either one is right. Correct. Speaker 1 00:03:19 Yeah. So, um, I had a friend, a friend of mine, her parents are from Trinidad. She said, I think she wants told me, so the carob are exactly Speaker 2 00:03:29 Right. They're one of the indigenous yeah. Speaker 1 00:03:32 But the term, right. So she told me to folk like, that's how you do it because you want to acknowledge them. So Caribbean that's. Yeah. That's an interesting, that's a Speaker 2 00:03:43 Good story as any, you know, Speaker 1 00:03:46 So when people have this question and the students, you know, they, um, they hadn't really engaged with the Caribbean, um, in any way before really I particularly not intellectually, which is both not surprising, but also crazy when you think about the significance of the region to like the world. Right. And so I'm thinking, so I guess my phone on the first one I, to ask you is, can you give us a bit of a snapshot? Like, so people, well, maybe. Yeah. So, cause I was thinking, when you can tell us why people are confused, like why do they have a question, mark? Speaker 2 00:04:21 I mean, I'll start off by saying why I think people are confused and then I will give the snapshot because I think it's important for people to understand who it is that we're talking about here. Um, so people are confused because the Caribbean is not a space that you associate with Muslims. Um, even if you are studying religion, people tend to think of the African diasporic religions by which I mean, um, I mean, you know, condom blaze <inaudible> and so on those, uh, polytheistic religions that evolved in conjunction with Christianity and particularly with Catholicism, along with, you know, blending with west African and central African polytheistic religions, um, or do you think about Christianity and all, or they think about Rastafarianism when they think of our religion in the Caribbean, they don't think about Islam, even though we should be thinking about Islam as a trends, as a hemispheric religion. Speaker 2 00:05:12 Right. Which is one of your goals too, in thinking about Cibolo square, it's a hemispheric Americas, religion. It's not just a us religion. Um, so, but, but that, that, that, that leads into who it is that we're talking about, why we should be thinking about the Caribbean as a Muslim space, um, and Islamic space. That's because since the invention of the Caribbean, as a colonial space, it has been Muslims. It has had Muslims and it's been a Muslim space, but who are we talking about? So we talking about like four distinctive groups of people chronologically the first armory schools who are enslaved north. And I have to begin by saying that the originary Muslims in the Americas are most are African. So we're first talking about the schools who are enslaved north African, um, Muslims from the Maghreb region colonized by, um, you know, later colonized later colonized by every single European power there is who were enslaved by the Spaniards and the Portuguese and arrived in the Americas on the Spanish and Portuguese voyages of exploration in the 15th and 16th centuries. Speaker 2 00:06:20 We don't have any kind of a count of how many people there are, but we know that some of them were on those ships and we have records of some of them and those voyages of exploration. Um, and then we are talking about west African Muslims who are victims of the transatlantic slave trade. Um, again, there is no accurate count on how many of them we're talking about, but just as there is no accurate count on how many total people were talking about. Um, but historians like Sylvian duke and some other people estimated that as many as 10% of enslaved west Africans, um, in particular, right, not so much central Africans, but enslaved west Africans might have been Muslim. And that is just to do with where they were from. They are from the south. They were, many of them were from the centers of Islamic learning in west Africa from like where from, from, you know, places that are know the, the post-colonial nations of, you know, Senegal, Guinea, Nigeria, ivory, coast, all of these places, they were from these like medieval Muslim centers of learning. Speaker 2 00:07:26 So necessarily many of them would have been Muslim. We also to have records of some of their names when they ended up in plantations, um, in the Caribbean and India and in the United States to, you know, when you have like 10 people named Mamadou and Muhammadu, um, you know, chances are they're west African Muslims, even though, you know, it is dark the record, doesn't say that for sure. We also know for a fact of some specific people based on their autobiographies, um, you know, two of which two of which from Jamaica, I explored in the book, right, who are, you know, literate and wrote, wrote their autobiographical tree disease on Islam and named themselves as Muslims. So there were certainly there, um, of course we have some good examples in the us too, from Sapelo island, like the Ben Ali diary and so on. Um, that's the second group, the third group is the term third group started arriving in 1838. Speaker 2 00:08:24 So between the years of 18 30, 8 to 1917, with the British, the British Dutch French brought about half a million people from, um, India colonial British India to the Caribbean to serve as indentured laborers on the plant on plantations, from which, um, uh, people who were people of African descent had recently been freed, right? So emancipation in the Caribbean, in the English speaking, Caribbean happens early on in the 1830s. So by, you know, the late 1830s by 1838, they need, you know, the British needed people to work on their plantations. So they look to their audit colony there, you know, one of their other major colonies, India for indentured laborers. And so about six to 10% of those people were Muslim. The vast majority of course were Hindu, which has given the demographics of India. Um, some later on became Christians, but about six to 10%, which is still true now. Speaker 2 00:09:19 Um, and then I would say, you know, the fourth group of people are people who have converted or rather reverted, um, in the beginning of the 20th century for different reasons. And there are disparate groups of people, some of them are, you know, identify and have identified themselves as black nationalists in the co in the tradition of Malcolm X, um, and a tradition of other people looking to the U S civil rights movement, um, specifically like the Muslim angle, um, site side of that. And, um, later on too, um, there are growing number of people who identify as reverts in the Spanish speaking Caribbean, um, particularly places like Puerto Rico and Brazil is where I've seen the largest, the largest number of people. Um, and Brazil of course, has this massive history of black Muslims, um, with the Malai rebellion in, uh, in which was the largest urban slave revolt in the Americas. And that was, you know, headed by Yoruba NAGO and how's the people in enslaved and free people. So, yeah, uh, yeah, there, there, there's, there's a large history, but, you know, I want to say something too about how the, it is, it is non nonetheless, even though we in the Caribbean have this huge history of Africa, of African Indian and other Islam, um, the, our discourse, and I know you want to talk about this too. Our discourse is still filtered through the U S discourse of nine 11. Speaker 1 00:10:50 Hmm. And so, so there's so many things, some of the things I saw your question, some of the ways I want to go, I want to know if I can add a group to your, your, your thing. And that is Arab migrants. Speaker 2 00:11:03 Yes. Yeah, yeah. So I, you know, I'm always, I always think about where to put them. Exactly. So one thing that is true is that the majority of our migrants who arrived in the Caribbean to even places like Trinidad and even Haiti, you know, you and I were talking a little bit earlier, but what's going on at the Texas border with Haiti, but, um, even, um, yes, so places like Haiti and Trinidad and then Brazil, Argentina, and so on, got all, these are my rooms, but the actually majority of them work Christian, um, so like Maronite Melkite and various kinds of like Lebanese Orthodox and Christian Orthodox. So the majority, and that's the same thing for the people who came in the United States to the United States around the same time, because they're the same people, you know, these 17 people, um, the majority were a Christian, even though there are some Muslims, Speaker 1 00:11:53 Some associate the reason, the reason why I also thought about them too, is because I wanted to think about what does race in Islam look like in the Caribbean? So I'll ask that question and then I'll follow up with my question about the Arabs and some experiences I've had to, to that. But one of the things that I noticed and use, one of the things you kind of mentioned talk about in the book is the way that, you know, the Caribbean is this interesting place where like the kind of sense of self is this notion of kind of, you know, hybrid of the, or creolization right. Like the, you know, we're, we're from these different places and we have, we kind of mix, but at the same time, you know, Islam is an Indian thing, right. It's not a black thing. Right. Type of thing. So I'm interested in like, what does that look like? Like, what is it like in terms of, I guess there's two parts of that. So one is just like the general perception of Islam and race. And then what are the relationships between the different, different sort of racist people, Muslims in the Caribbean? Speaker 2 00:12:54 Yeah. Yeah. That's a great question because it changes over time. So I would say that, you know, before the 1990s, there is a, there's a, yes. If you ask people from the Anglophone Caribbean in particular, which is where had the majority of Muslims period, and that's still true. If you ask them who is Muslim, they would say an, an Indian person, right. They would associated with Indian people who are descendants of those indentured laborers, because before then that is the majority, the ethnic majority of people who were, um, who were Muslims. But the perception of that changes in 1990 with this coup in Trinidad, uh, spearheaded by Yaseen Abu Bakker and the Jamal Muslim mean, which is a prem, which still exists today and is a primarily Afro Trinidadian group. Right. Um, and that was very interesting because they drew, um, they, they had been in existence for over a decade previous to that. Speaker 2 00:13:50 You know, they drew inspiration once again from black nationalists movements, as well as, um, their, their location of reference was different from Indian Muslims. So, you know, because of the, where, you know, indentured people were from and whatever, like where they look to for Islamic learning the first in the first half of the 20th century and where they would go to study where missionaries would come from and so on, is Pakistan or India, or, you know, the sub-continent, that's where they look to, um, these Ooredoo language regions, um, in particular for their knowledge of Islam, but that's not where yes. You know, blacker and his people from the gym look to, yeah. They were looking to the Arab world and in some ways they were some of the first to do so, because it's been true that nowadays, um, and nobody like, you know, Pakistan, India to sub-continent is no longer the reference for anyone, for any Muslims in the Caribbean. Speaker 2 00:14:45 That's the title of the book far from Mecca. It shifted to Mecca and it shifted to the Arab world. But in some ways you, these black nationalists were some of the first to do that. Um, uh, <inaudible> the leader of the group who was, you know, he's still around, he's like 90 years old and I interviewed him for the book and he's a funny guy. He's a funny guy, you know, in that kind of Trinny, Caribbean jokes kind of way. Um, I'm like, you're, you're number one. You're like number one on the Caribbean terrorist list. But like, you're just, you're hilarious. It's like, I don't know what to do with that. Right. Uh, so, um, it was so, so he actually had a relationship. Um, and, and there, this, I know you want to ask me too about days, you know, what we might call there are <inaudible> Islamization of, um, of, of Caribbean Islam. Speaker 2 00:15:36 So he, yeah. So, you know, blacker had a relationship with the Libyan Islamic call society, um, and Libya's interest in the Caribbean, um, which is the first, like our interest in the Caribbean starts in the 1970s with <inaudible> the same Islamic call societies and dare Dawa outreach to, uh, places in the world that may have may, you know, seem to have Muslims of some kind. Um, so yes, the novel Bucher had a relationship with them. And from then on, um, you know, people just sort of start looking, started looking to the Arab world nowadays, like Caribbean Muslims of all ethnic backgrounds. They don't go study in Pakistan, India, whatever anymore they go to Egypt. Um, they go to Saudi Arabia, um, they go to the UAE, um, and also those places send money, you know, like they give money to, um, Muslims in the Caribbean and to build mosque and they send their crimes. Speaker 2 00:16:31 Um, those particular translations as what I'm trying to say. And yeah, during the coup, um, to answer your specific question during the coup there was a contentious relationship between Indian Muslims and Trinidad and, um, you know, the majority that was the majority of the, uh, Jamaica Muslim mean that was black, where Indian Muslims, many Indian Muslims sought to distance themselves from what the, from the, um, because it was a violent government coup right, like armed government coup they took over parliament. It took over the radio and television station and national radio television station then surrendered after a few days. And so on. Although if you ask, I have a backer, he will say, I never surrendered there. You know? Um, so Indian wasn't start sought to distance themselves from this because, you know, they were like, we would never do this. We would never have armed insurrection against the state. Speaker 2 00:17:23 This is a black thing. Um, and that, you know, this is some kind of dissatisfaction that we don't share. Um, I, yes, you know, BlaBlaCar framed his work as not just Islamic. He wasn't trying to just, uh, perpetuate an Islamic group, but he had problems with the government. Like he was like, you know, they're corrupt. Um, they don't have to look after the health of citizens, there's drug activity. So he saw it as a social cause really more than just an Islamic clause. Um, I would say now, um, because in the countries that have these populations that are evenly split between Indians and people of African descent, which are Ghana and Trinidad, which also to have the most Muslims, um, those, you know, it's still an uncom, just like the related to general racial relationship between those two groups is, you know, uncomfortable to the point of always turning to violence, whenever elections roll around. Um, there is maybe a little bit more cooperation and communication amongst the Muslims than there are because of the shared religion, um, than there are between the general populations are the larger groups of people who are C Afro-Caribbean people who are majority Christian and endocardium people who are majority Hindu. Speaker 1 00:18:34 Um, you know, when you said, so this two things, so one, so I, um, I don't know when I first heard about the coup, right. I remember in 2010, my husband was graduating from university of Chicago. Um, he was getting a master's degree and I'm, you know, I'm at the, you have a lawn or whatever, where they have the graduation. And I befriend this woman from Trinidad, this a black woman. And when she realizes I'm Muslim, she brings up Speaker 2 00:19:04 The cool that's their point of reference Speaker 1 00:19:07 And she brought it up. So it was interesting, you know, your, um, your discussion of the CU, particularly your discussion around Calypso and all the Calypso songs that came out to me read that sort of the general community, or at least the general black community wasn't necessarily there wasn't certainly afraid or opposed to, you know, they, they kind of understood right where people were coming from, but this one was actually kind of like, yeah, she had a very negative, like reaction to so surprising Speaker 2 00:19:36 To me at all. Speaker 1 00:19:37 It just seeing that. Um, but, and then the other thing, you know, when you said these black nationalist Muslims are looking to the world, I was like, why would they be doing that? But then you said Libya, right. And so then it made me think of, you know, Libya is the airport world, Speaker 2 00:19:53 But it's not Africa too. Right, right. Speaker 1 00:19:56 Cause I'll be at that particularly sort of, he had a, cause I know the same thing happened in Panama, like in Panama city, like the largest, like the Jahmiyah like the large mosque was built with money from Libya. Like I know that also happened there too. So there were, so could that be had this kind of, it seems like perception outside of Libya, right. And on this atmosphere as being this kind of kind of evolutionary person, you know, so if you're gonna look, you're gonna look, you're gonna look there, although today, I guess it's different, right? I mean, if you're looking, if you look, look to look to Saudi Arabia is not the same as we're looking at Olympia, right. Speaker 2 00:20:31 Not even, not even a little bit, right. Because this is the old growth of the seventies and eighties sofas, the elk road of cold war politics and the independent nations of the Caribbean thinking and independent people of the Caribbean, thinking about what it's like to have the us in your backyard, trying to control everything and who it is that you should try to align yourself with. Um, specifically in the case of Guyana, um, it is a cold war thing, or it does begin as a cold war thing because of course, Diana, as a sorta, you know, nebulously socialist nation at that time, um, that, you know, there are, there are redacted released FBI, you know, transcripts from JAG or Hoover and Kennedy talking about how they don't want Diana to become another Cuba. Um, but as Diana is occupying that place, um, considered itself a non-aligned nation. Speaker 2 00:21:22 So as such formed a relationship with Libby on the basis of being a non-aligned nation, um, and that's where it started. But then when the Libyans arrived in Ghana, like for their economic and political interests, they realized there were Muslims there. Um, and much of the, you know, what you can point to, to some extent as the beginnings of a kind of <inaudible> of Guyanese Muslims begins with the, um, man in charge of the Libyan mission in the 1970s, whose name was <inaudible>. Um, he was later on killed in an attempted coup in Libya, but, um, he saw that there were Muslims there, but they seem to be, um, it was, it was a polite way of putting it. They, they seem to not know it is according to his, you know, north African Arab viewpoint. They seem to not know very much about slab. So because, you know, they were, you know, running around wearing what they were wearing. Um, you know, some of them Indian dress or just whatever, you know, Western clothes and they didn't, you know, they didn't seem to be proper Muslims, I think, to, um, to his and other people's perceptions. So, you know, he, he took it as a personal mission to bring them in line. Right. And that that's true too, of other Arab missionaries to, to that part of the world. Speaker 1 00:22:38 So one of the things I heard you say was that, um, in countries like Diana entry, that where you have the general population, that's kind of half Caribbean and Afro Caribbean, you know, there are tensions like racial tensions between, between these groups in general. And so the Muslim community is not, may have, may have, have a space where they can be more so aligned, but they're not immune to that kind of tension, which is similar, like in the U S right. In terms of like, you know, the kind of racial, the kind of, sort of ways in which white supremacy works. And like you have these different groups to be pit against each other. Um, you know, you know, like, you know, the kind of anti-blackness that we talk about a lot with ensemble and black people experience is not something that like is unique to being Muslim, but it's part of the broader society. Speaker 1 00:23:28 And then it plays itself out in the Muslim community. And I'm wondering, would you say, I guess I'm wondering what happens when, cause the, so my family's from New York city and, um, my grandmother lives in Queens and now in Queens, right? Like my, my younger sister, she went to an Islamic school in Queens where the population is primarily in the Guyanese and she experienced like anti-black discrimination, like around here was one of the things that she experienced when she was going to school. And so I'm wondering like when sort of the guy in these Muslim migrates, right. To the United States, do these things change, you know, or like, oh, what does that look like in terms of the relationship they have to sort of black people or blackness, you know, now that you're in this different place, you know what I mean? Speaker 2 00:24:19 Yeah. Yeah. So this is an extremely complex question. Obviously I'm an I two I'm, I'm a Guyanese that immigrated to Queens when I was, when I was 11. Um, so again, this is very complicated because you're coming from a situation, first of all, in Ghana and Trinidad, where it's not the same everywhere where race relations are not the same. It actually depends regionally where you're from. So I'm from the capital of Georgetown where people live, where people of Indian descent, people of African descent, and a lot of other people live in very close contact. Um, and it's also the most urban dense urban space in the country. So that is where the locus of most conflict is, um, uh, in, in there or in some of the other towns that are a little bit outside, many Indo Guyanese, however, come from fairly, uh, who immigrate to the United States and who immigrate to Richmond hill in Queens, which is the main locus of where they all live, um, into Caribbean people, um, outside of Toronto and Liberty UK is, um, many of them actually come from very rural areas where, um, they actually never lived with Afro Guyanese before. Speaker 2 00:25:25 Um, so like their point of reference is more hearsay about what the politics of the country are or were, um, than it is anything else, but they've never lived with, you know, and, and like lived in relation. And that's something I always have to think about when I'm talking to those communities too, because their lived experience is different from mine. Um, having grown up in the Capitol and having to have that close relationship just because you're there. Um, so then they come to, um, Queens or to come to the United States or so on and they bring their to some extent, you know, lack of experience, lack of knowledge, or lack of, uh, you know, that preexisting interaction that a guy needs, who were living in more urban spaces have, and, you know, they, they pretty quickly adopt, um, or pretty easily, it's so easy to adopt us frameworks of anti-blackness and transpose them onto the stories that you may have heard from your parents or, or, um, or, or, yeah, it's easy to transpose those, those stories onto it and to like, you know, adopt an American perception, but, um, an American perception of what race is and where you might be as a brown person, as opposed to a black person or a white person. Speaker 2 00:26:40 Um, so there's that, but, you know, I, I also don't know how to transpose my own framework onto here, because it is one in which I grew up in a country that's demographically split, um, or, uh, spent my childhood, um, in very close contact on both yeah. In very close contact with people from people of African descended people and everybody. Um, and then coming here and trying to understand blackness in the United States is very different because in the Caribbean, at least in the Anglophone Caribbean, in those urban spaces, white misses doesn't exist, uh, such, right? Like it's this historic it's, it's historically valorized, um, in, in a particular way, but it's gone. Like those people left, they try to be again, and nobody tried to beat again and not even got any needs. So like they left right. They left in 1966 and they didn't come back. Um, what's the issue now is like these, these descendants of two labor populations, neither of whom are white battling it out over, who's going to control the nation state. Um, and then of course you have the fact that while, you know, race in relation to whiteness is not an issue. Colorism is a huge issue, um, in intra-group intra-group way as ways as well as inter group ways. Um, Speaker 1 00:28:02 Man, it's Speaker 2 00:28:04 Just like really complicated and the frameworks aren't the same. And even within the U S and within the car, the guy, Diane, or the Caribbean itself, it differs depending on where you're from. Um, Speaker 1 00:28:14 Um, and then doesn't also differ, you know, there was this, um, matchmaking show on Netflix, Speaker 2 00:28:21 Oh God, I can't even stand it. Speaker 1 00:28:29 It's a fashion show on Netflix that was based, it was like an auntie, like an Indian auntie kind of here was the person. And I was struck that they have one ounce of, I guess, I don't know the coconut substance, but one participant and she was endo Guyanese. Right. And that came up as a question of her like desirability. Right. And I know one of the things you talk about in the book as well is the ways in which kind of engender, right. And so the ways in which Indian women, so like when the, when the indenture ship is beginning, women are coming, this is a question of them being loose women. Right. But the women being loosened to different than having to be like Uber proper, right. To kind of counteract that. And so I was just wondering, like, in the relationships that indu Guyanese people have to like folks, you know, cause I'm assuming it's probably going to happen like in the U S I guess if you come, and I don't know if it happens, I guess both places in Guyana, but also in the us, like, what is that relationship to like the ancestral like Pakistan, right? Speaker 1 00:29:34 Or sexual thing is it, are people like, oh, they're a part of our DAS bruh, or that's right. Speaker 2 00:29:41 That these people are somehow different than us. Um, it's both, um, it depends on who, and, and I think it's changed generationally. Like when I immigrated here in the nineties, um, I, a lot of the Indian immigrants that I met and Pakistani immigrants that I met in New York, um, had no idea that this diaspora, this early labor diaspora existed. Right. They didn't know their own history. So they just saw you as some kind of weird off shoot or something like that. And I would get repeated questions as to why I didn't speak any Indian languages, um, and why I just seem to be kind of culturally off. Um, but, uh, yeah, but that's actually changed generationally because now there's such a huge Indo Caribbean population in New York. I think it's like something like the eighth largest ethnic group or something like that, um, in, in New York. Speaker 2 00:30:34 Um, so now everybody knows, and there's people who are in like local government and things like that. So now people know who they are. Um, but one thing that really is kind of a problem is kind of unfortunate and like, you know, problematic is that when Indo Guyanese and Africa and he's, and I actually should say Indo Caribbean, and Afro-Caribbean people immigrate to places like New York and also large urban centers like Toronto, they separate, um, even while maintaining these transnational relationships back home, they separate and they have much closer contact with people of their ethnic background than they do with people from the country that they're from, that's from a different background ethnic background. So what I mean by that specifically is that when the Indo Caribbean people move to Richmond hill and to Queens, um, they actually have much closer contact with people from the sub-continent India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, um, who are also immigrants to the same areas of Queens. Speaker 2 00:31:28 Um, to the point where I know plenty of men there's, you know, Hindu Manders and mosques where the, the people who go there are all of the above, you know, they're from India, they're from Pakistan, they're from Bangladesh or different guy and Trinidad, which is a really interesting development, right. Um, however, then you have like the African Caribbean people who go to Brooklyn and then, you know, are even like Crow high. So I did just go to Brooklyn and sometimes, um, the Bronx and they have much more closer, much closer relationships with other Afro-Caribbean people, as well as African immigrants who also go to Brooklyn as well as African Americans who are already in Brooklyn. And then they stick to their own people, you know, and then they don't, they do their own, even to the point of doing their own community organizing, like when they're doing their own community organizing around Caribbean immigrant issues. Speaker 2 00:32:20 I'm like, why aren't you talking to each other man? Like, wow, like you ha you know, so they, they don't mix. It's almost, you know, it's, it's, they have a contentious relationship within the Caribbean itself and it's, it almost feels like they can't wait to be rid of each other once they come to the U S yeah. And, and, and, you know, I'm, I don't like saying it that way. It's very harsh, but it feels like that sometimes, um, in the sense of like, they don't bother to retain those relationships with each other. Um, and, um, even while most of them have a transnational relationship, as I said, with people back home, they go back and forth all the time to see their family back home and this and that. So they see how it's different, um, in Ghana and Trinidad itself when they go back home. But it just don't, they're not up for it once they come to the U S Speaker 1 00:33:08 Yeah. I mean, I think it's crazy to think about it. I mean, that's interesting, it's interesting to me, and really in complicated and complex ways though, which kind of, sort of ideas of race and ethnicity and the kind of divisions, right. Sort of both are distinct and overlapping right. Throughout the Americas. Right. And, and that brings you back to the Arabs that I mentioned earlier. So the reason I thought about arms, like I said, so my father is from Panama, right. Which is a country in the central America. It's very Caribbean as well, because there are, um, uh, his family is among the families who were people who migrated from the English, speaking of Anglophone, Caribbean from Jamaica to build the Panama canal right. In there by the 20th century, or earlier than that, it depends anyway. But so, um, and in Panama, right, in terms of the Muslim population there, um, there are kind of, I guess, three groups contemporarily. Speaker 1 00:34:08 So there are Lebanese Muslims, right. There are Muslims, <inaudible> India. And then there are Panamanians, majority of them, African comedians who converted to Islam. Yeah. And my experience of the era of the Lebanese Muslims was that they are very, um, they're exploitative, like as an extractive relationship they have with the country, um, not the country, but the people. Right. So the idea is like, so sort of, kind of like what, for example, one thing that I discovered was, you know, when the Americans, the us, when they was in Panama, they had this thing in the canal zone, they call it gold role and silver roles. So they brought your problem with them. And so they would pay the white American folks on sole role, a gold role in play and pay the Panamanians. Most of them were Afrobeat. I mean, it's almost on the civil role. Speaker 1 00:34:57 And they also have them living in separate places. Right. And there's an Arab. So this is one of those places where the gold role people lived is now this gated community of Lebanese Muslims. And like, there's a mash it over there. And it, for me, I remember being so infuriated because of all the inequality that's in this country. Right. And they're successful. Right. Um, and they're doing that, but they also write for the muscles, people who convert like the Panamanian was some start their own kind of mosques because you would go to that mosque and they would judge you. Right. They would judge you, they would try to tell you how to do your Islam, this kind of stuff. Like this was the experience that I had. And also in Puerto Rico, it was not as bad in terms of that, but there was also this sense of like the Arabs are the Muslims and the other people have to figure out either how to be like them or have to sort of challenge them to be themselves right. Speaker 1 00:35:54 As Muslims. And so I was just wondering if like, that's what I thought about Arabs, because I know the majority are not Muslim, but that was the experience that I haven't. And I feel like to me, and I guess this cause to your book though, to your point about where people are looking right. In terms of grabbing Aloni, his thumb is just thinking about how, and even I think of your subtitle, like globalizing asylum in the Caribbean, but like the ways in which the Arab or Arab Venice functioned in a lot of Muslim places as this kind of thing that you have to either be like or challenge. Speaker 2 00:36:33 Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I think projection of the Arab is different from reality of the Arab, um, in, in our, in our communities, you know what I said, that people look to the Arab world. It's not necessarily like that. Uh, or at least they, you know, began looking to the artists, not necessarily that they knew any Arabs, um, at least at first, right. It was just valorize, like valorizes, the people from whom the language of the Koran came, you know, like the people who gave birth to the prophet, um, Hammad and, you know, it's just like, they're the source, they're the source. Um, and, and so there's this like initial valorization of the idea of the Arab, at least starting from the seventies and eighties. And when people didn't even know too many Arabs as like, they have the right version of a slam and like, we don't know enough, right. Speaker 2 00:37:23 We need them to tell us what to do, because, you know, as indentured and enslaved people in the Caribbean, we lost our roots. So the only people who can get back, our religious roots for us are Arabs. You know, the only people who know truest slam are ARBs, um, not even so much now, like Pakistanis and Indians or whatever, because they're not the source. Um, but the only people who know true Islam are Arabs. But then, um, you know, speaking to the point of like these economic migrants, like Lebanese and so on to, to Latin America and to the Caribbean, um, you know, they're, that's true, right? They, these like economic enclaves of are of people of Arab descent have been a thing in Latin American, the Caribbean for like a long time, not just in Panama, but like when you, when you say like, who's the business class in Trinidad, it's a group of people who people will call Syrians, even though, um, it's, uh, that's broader than just Syrians. Um, but it's a group of people of Arab descent who people will say are Syrians. Um, and one thing Syrians are known for besides their, um, economic acumen is their light skin. So it's also like racialized, right. Um, in addition to being about Arab tennis is racialized as a kind of lightness whiteness in some places in the Caribbean, in addition to being an economic thing. Um, even when you know, it, it's not necessarily associated with Islam because so many of these people aren't Muslims. Speaker 1 00:38:52 Um, but there's a kind of talk about that, the kind of the color politics. So I used to talk about it in the kind of, so there's a, I can see how that would also, cause that was interesting. Cause I'm thinking about, and also I'm of the question, but I was just thinking about that in terms of what you said in terms of, um, like I was thinking of why would write into Caribbean Afro-Caribbean Caribbean people even know, or even think that we should look to the Arab as the people who know and part of what you, what I heard you saying was that kind of a part of it, it's like you have a sense that you have lost something, right. Cause of slavery and ship. So you're looking to reclaim that. Um, and then, you know, and then, so you have to have some sort of ancestral place where, when that takes place, but then also, and I think you'd bring this up too, in your book as well. There's a global, this global kind of Islamic revival that's happening. Speaker 2 00:39:49 It plays into that too. Right. Speaker 1 00:39:52 That's a very Arab dominated thing. Right. So if you're doing, and then if you have this other level of the color, right. You can kind of see how people can make particular kind of choices around that. No Islam in the Caribbean, is it sectarian like, oh yes. Speaker 2 00:40:12 Yeah, but not sectarian in the usual ways. Um, so Islamic, the Caribbean is heavily dominated, um, just numerically by Sunni's. So, um, particularly because the majority of endocardium Muslims, um, who, you know, whose ancestors migrated from the sub-continent were Hanafi, Sunni Muslims, um, just cause that's where, you know, they were from a region where that's predominantly what people are. Um, and, um, then later on when you have all these other groups in contact with like Saudi Arabia and so on, they are also Sunni's that defined themselves in various relationships to Salafi Islam and what habeas Islam, um, there's a small Shia, or there was a small Shia minority during inventorship that gave rise to the one thing that I mentioned in the book is this <inaudible> festival called say in the Caribbean and Taja or Tazia um, in tajin Tazia meaning the, um, model, these models, tombs that they would carry in precessions down the street during the British colonial era as a celebration of mohara the martyrdom of Hassan and Hussain. Um, so that, that was, uh, that was a Shia holiday to the British shutdown, um, because they would, you know, because it meant large numbers of people, you know, sell doing religious processions in the street, um, Speaker 1 00:41:31 As well. Speaker 2 00:41:33 Yes. Speaker 1 00:41:33 Yeah. But, you know, I think, um, the possibility of what it could have been, um, was derailed by the British outlawing of it within the confines of the major cities in both Trinidad and Guyana. Um, and also set up an event in the 19th century called the Mahara massacre, where they shot into a group, the British soldiers shot into a group of people celebrating, um, Hussein and killed a number of people. Um, they were also afraid of it because it was a Muslim. It was a true instance. I think maybe the truest instance of Korean Muslim creolization in the Caribbean, the British were also afraid of it because it was, multi-racial like very quickly on, um, which is a really interesting thing for that part of the world. Um, black people started participating in the pre-sessions, even though they were Muslim and, um, product predominantly India. And then they started participating in processions and like playing the drums and things like that. And like, that's scary if you're called nicer, you are not trying to, you're not trying to have the people that to subjugating come together and organize. Speaker 2 00:42:40 They were starting to religiously participate and socially participate with each other. So, you know, there's these moments right? Where Indian and black unity start to happen in the Caribbean and the British, just like chop, chop, chop, chop, and later on estriol the U S too, when they were fearing like further communism in the Caribbean and it worked like we're like suckers, like it works Speaker 1 00:43:05 Right. But I have to move it just cause I know. So I know that Jose is something that people still they do. Right. And people participate in it's like a cultural holiday in a way. Right. But it doesn't have that potential anymore. Speaker 2 00:43:18 I should. Yeah, no, I should add that in places in Trinidad, particularly, um, St James and see Cedros people still have the pre-sessions and still celebrate who say their understanding of it is a whole Muslim holiday, but I think a lot of people link it with carnival. Um, and, and think of it as something more celebratory that belongs to that somehow, you know, affiliates religiously and belongs to Muslims, but it's also something more kind of realized and uniquely Trinidadian, um, Jamaica also had a version of this and, and, you know, there's like a revival of it. It, it died completely in Guyana because of the way that the British shut it down. Um, but the other thing I wanted to say about sectarianism is that, um, so Shia are not the main minority sect in the Caribbean act muddies are, which is rare, which is really unusual, um, because they are persecuted sect in PA in their place of origin, Pakistan, where they were declared apostates by the state. Um, so, you know, they are a brunch they're nonetheless of Rancho of Sunni Islam and dare, you know, there are, uh, divisions within Mathias lab where they believe different things, but, uh, because of missionaries who arrived from Pakistan to the United States, as well as to the Caribbean, many missionary starting in the 1920s, um, uh, you know, some of the population of SUNY's in the Caribbean, you know, it was kind of switched over to Ahmadiyya Islam. And so, because of that reason, that's, I mean, that's the main, minor sect. Speaker 1 00:44:49 Wow. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So that's interesting. Right. Cause I know when I teach about like history with someone American, we talk about most of the Sadik, right. Coming in as a machine, Speaker 2 00:44:59 They send people to the Caribbean through at the same time. Speaker 1 00:45:03 And so, um, I w I wanted to also ask you, um, so you mentioned this thing about nine 11. And so, because I was thinking, so one of the things that we, I know about the Caribbean, um, is the kind of like the big brother to the north. Right. And the way the United States really has played a really significant role in determining the kind of possibilities and outcomes for the Caribbean before, during colonization and particularly post colonization. Right. You know, and this kind of hand, right. Meddling in all the ways, you know, really, and not just the Caribbean, the whole hemisphere. Right. And I was wondering about what kind of this imperialism that states, like, what does it mean for like Muslim life in the U S right. Like how does, how to, how to, yeah. I guess in terms of, particularly in terms of this question of are the set nine 11 and how that impacts, you know, how Muslims experience themselves as Muslims, you know, like they've been home, that's the place that's home for them, you know, that they're not new to, you know? Speaker 2 00:46:12 Yeah. I mean, the main thing I want to speak to there is the way in which us nine 11 discourse has been wholesale adopted in these carbon countries to apply to their own home grown Muslims. Um, when, without any kind of recognition of the fact that like, yes, there has been a long history of Muslims in the Caribbean itself, um, without any kind of acknowledgement that like, okay, so fine. You, the visible people are in new Caribbean Muslims and then this one coop, but there was a history of west African Islam. Um, none of that, right. All we get is a us discourse. And one primary example of how that functions is that right after nine 11 happened, you know, the Trinidadian authorities were looking around trying to be like, well, what can we do to ensure that like, you know, we are safe, so did decide to search. Speaker 2 00:46:57 I will backers mosque compound. And, you know, I would, Barker didn't have anything to do with nine 11 and the tomato Muslim. He didn't have anything to do with nine 11, but they decided to search his compound like that as their show of like, what could we be doing in Trinidad to prevent the Muslim threat of, um, uh, of terrorism. And then you had, um, you know, there have been like various discourses from like the Pentagon and like the state department. And so on over the years that have implicated the Caribbean, um, particularly because, um, you know, about five or so years ago, a number of Caribbean nationals went from primarily Jamaica, Trinidad, and also a little bit Jamaica, um, went to fight for the Islamic state in Syria and Lebanon. So, you know, you had these like people and they were affiliated with certain mosques, um, primarily in Trinidad that, uh, that happened to be, um, in some ways offshoots of the Jamal Muslim mean, but not really affiliated with them anymore, but, um, Speaker 1 00:48:00 Afro Caribbean men, Speaker 2 00:48:02 They're both definitely there they're both, they're both. Um, and one interesting thing about them too, was that they, um, were almost just as many women as men, which is, uh, maybe unusual. Um, you know, it's not just like young guys going across the statistics were different, um, as families, um, like co like couples, and then they would take their kids and all of that. Um, it's not like a huge number of people, a couple of hundred, but that's enough. That was enough, of course, for the United States military intelligence to start paying attention to like what's happening in the Caribbean. Is there like mosques that people are radicalizing ad and so on and ended like just adopted this nine 11 discourse. But of course that has to do, like, those people are recruited the exact same way people in the United States are recruited. Um, but it also has to do too with this complex history of Islam in the Caribbean where, you know, in places like Trinidad, particularly following that, um, I will, Barker's CU, um, Muslims always feel like the outsiders. Speaker 2 00:49:02 Um, they're like the outs, even they're the outsiders to citizenship. The majority of the Afro-Caribbean population is Christian. Um, they just they're, they feel like, or ha you know, Hindus for the Indians. And they just have always felt like outsiders. And like, you know, they're, they're, they're perceived as that too. You know, we were talking about how about somebody Calypso's that were, um, that people sang at the, at carnival in, um, right after the coup in 1990, the 1991 Calypso's many of them were about the CU and, and, you know, the vast majority of these Calypsonians themselves are Afro Trinidadians singing about how strange it was that Islam had appeared in the sphere of Trinidad. So, as you were saying, when you met up with a woman from Trinidad, it's not like all black Trinidadians were like, yes, you know, the black Muslims are here for us. They're still strange. And they're still outsiders. Um, even though they are black, they're foreign, right. I mean, which is of course the same thing as they are, as the discourse in the U S Speaker 1 00:50:05 Right. This idea is different even though like yeah. Despite the fact that there's this insignificant history, right. You become foreign, like the Muslim is this foreign thing to these places. Yeah. Speaking of being Muslims. So you are so, um, so I guess before I get to that, so other question was, I was just thinking about, you know, so we're talking about race in Islam and the Americas in this, in this, um, in this podcast and you are a scholar and you're Muslim and you're not black. Right. So we don't know, because I don't think you've said that. And I can't see you, but I was wondering, like, for your work it's stuff that you're doing on Caribbean, Lynch's Muslim literatures, like how those blackness, or what is it, blackness and black people, like, what does it, what do they mean to your work? Speaker 2 00:50:55 Um, so as I was saying, um, I grew up in a space in which, you know, it really, you really did live a relational life to blackness. Um, regardless of you're in the Caribbean, you know, where Afro-Caribbean people are the majority of population and it's half of the population in Ghana. So you're always thinking about relation to blackness, um, especially if you live in the urban centers. Um, and it is different from, you know, when I migrated to the U S and whiteness enters, enters the picture, um, and, you know, transposing one framework onto the other, as we've talked about, don't really work. Um, I also, I would say I work in two different frameworks of post-colonial and black Atlantic blackness, but they are linked through transnationalism. But my goal is to put the Muslim Bian and a Muslim Afro-Caribbean together. There are plenty of there, you know, you know, scholars who study each of these groups, they usually study them separately, but, you know, like I have, um, you know, I have like political and community goals here. Speaker 2 00:51:51 Like, I, I need them to be able to talk to each other as people who have a shared colonial and labor history in the hopes of doing repairative work for these people who are still racially and politically divided to this day, in terms of being a non-black person. I'm very conscious that my identity as a Caribbean person, and as an indole Caribbean person is relational to Afro-Caribbean this and relational to blackness because Indo Caribbean as an identity evolves in relation to blackness. Um, it's, I mean, at many times the endocardium community has thought of itself as oppositional, which is what happens if you're trying to figure out who you are in a new world and you lost everything. But, um, it is definitely relational. One story that I always like to cite is the question of, like, where did Indians learn English on the plantations in, um, Indiana and Trinidad? It's not what people might immediately assume. They didn't learn English from their British overseers. They learned English from black people who were on the plantation. Um, they learn, they learn, you know, these Creole English is Creole easing in, in Guyanese parlance. Uh, they learn crawlies and these Creole Englishes from black people who were either still working on the plantations, or they had built villages around the plantations from which they had been manumitted. So there's always been this kind of close relationality, um, in which Indo Caribbean identity, my own ethnic identity formed in relation to, Speaker 1 00:53:26 Yeah, no, that's, that's, that's, that's, uh, that, that story, this idea that they've learned in Indo Caribbean, people learned English, black people for whom that's not their first. Yeah. That's not their mother tongue. Right. It's a really kind of powerful, like, thing to think about. Right. And in terms of our relationships to each other. Right. Um, yeah. Thank you for that. I mean, I think, um, you, uh, mentioned you have this, these political aims is I'm wondering, so you're, you are, you said just a Caribbean person into a Caribbean person and also a Muslim person. Right. It was also, I'm an academic and I'm, I guess I was just wondering, like, how, what does that like, Speaker 2 00:54:14 It's complicated. Okay. I mean, look at me, you asking me I'd you hear like from Montserrat Barbados, Panama to the U S okay. Um, okay. I mean, this is a complicated question. I mean, you can take them all separately, but, you know, as, as you, as you know, in the U S it would be complicated to identify my exact place as a multiple minority, Caribbean and Indo Caribbean Muslim, because I am not a member of any really of the racialized identity categories that people identify as Muslim, meaning that I'm not Arab. I don't really think of myself as south Asian, even though ethically that's more or less true, but I don't identify with the sub-continent as such, because I'm not from there. Um, I'm not African right. People have a, maybe some sense that some Africans are Muslims and I'm not black Muslim with us roots. So none of these identity categories work for people, it's always a little confusing. Like, where are you? Where are you from that kind of thing? And of course my own relationship with the religion that I was born into Islam, um, has changed, you know, as a seeker of knowledge over the years, it goes back and forth. It goes in one direction and it goes into another. Um, I think, you know, in my older middle age arrived at a place of comfort. Speaker 2 00:55:31 I know, right. Where I don't let you know, I don't, I don't let the haters get to me, although, you know, whatever it doesn't, that's not even true. But, um, um, but you know, and then also thinking about as a scholar, you know, my training is impulse, colonial literature, critical theory. And post-colonialism, as we discussed in your class, emerges from a secular tradition of scholarship of European enlightenment. And then I like also has heavily Marxist influences and so on in which you don't really think about religion, um, or you don't think of it as important to, um, people, even peoples post-colonial identities and becoming, and I just don't think that that functions as true for people of color in particular. Um, you have to think about their spirituality and religion and the ways in which it empowered them during, during colonial period and the ways that it sustains them after. But then in terms of just being like, I'm a religion period in American academia, people think you're really strange, Speaker 1 00:56:32 Right? No, it's so true. Yeah. There's not people like to study religion, but they don't know how to interact with people who actually, you know, you do things like if I get one more con, if I, if I see one more conference panel that has something to do with this law, that's scheduled for, <inaudible> like on a Friday, Speaker 2 00:57:01 It's like what was on that panel? Speaker 1 00:57:06 Oh my God, this has been a really far reaching conversation. I, you know, like I said, I think there's so many things I think about now and after reading your book and even in my own personal kind of, I'm trying to sort of understand what the Caribbean means to me having some connection. But mostly it being something having like having like a lineage, right. A connection that way. But mostly it really being a relationship that developed in Brooklyn, which is like a little piece of the Caribbean, except the weather is not, not at all. Sorry, but before I let you go, I want to ask you this one question we ask all of our guests. Okay. So the question is in black and slam had a theme song. What would it be? Speaker 2 00:57:59 I have an answer to the question that is the same answer. I started my book off with, um, which is, um, where the college Siddiq song. My grandfather was a Muslim. So Kyla Siddique is Jamaican black, British. Um, I don't know in what order he would put those terms for his own identity, but you know, of Jamaican descent, but also black, British, um, he got his start. He's a, he's a YouTube youth star, you know, that's how he got his start and he got his start with the young Muslims. I wanted to hear some, something, a little different. Um, he draws his inspiration for reggae, but also from hip hop. Um, I highly advise you to, you know, everybody listening to listen to his, um, listen to his words. But so this song is from 2017. My grandfather was a Muslim I'll, I'll tell you what the chorus is. Speaker 2 00:58:41 So, you know, he was thinking about relationships like Islam and Jamaica and what that means for his family and what it means for himself as a revert, a Muslim revert, um, uh, who may have traced some kind of west African tradition in which has, you know, long lost ancestors may have been Muslim. So he says, my grandfather was a Muslim and my daddy was arrested. There were searching for the truth and the Koran gave the answer. They put their hands up to the sky and they asked the Lord why we not gonna worship the creation? We only pray to the creator, which is a little bit of shade at the end, but that's fine. Um, but you know, just, just the idea, right, in thinking about like questing for, you know, African spiritual origins. What happens first is that the, you know, the, the, the grandfather or the ancestor is a Muslim who comes from west Africa and then, you know, inquest like for what's next that he became arrested for political reasons and African empowerment reasons in Jamaica. And then him, the son reverts back to a lab to what the grandfather was through the path of Rastafarianism. So, you know, to me, that is a great, that is a, that is, that is, that is the metaphor, right? For what Islam means to Afro-Caribbean people and, you know, peop UN Indo Caribbean people to who are the descendants of these labor diasporas that were brought, um, in some cases unwilling, unwillingly, but in all cases unknowingly, I had no idea what they were getting into doesn't care of you. Speaker 1 01:00:13 Oh, wow. Thank you. All right. My grandfather was a little slow. I'm gonna check that out. I will. Thank you again so much for being with us today on this. I Speaker 2 01:00:23 Appreciate that. Yeah. Speaker 1 01:00:28 Thank you for tuning into this episode of on the square, real talk on race and a slam and the Americas especial podcast brought to you by sapele little square at the may dam, you can find more information about what we discuss, including links and more by visiting sapele square.com/on the square or at the may dan.com/podcast. Our theme music was created by fanatic on beats.