Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas Illustrated Edition

Great!

This is one of the best books on the topic I've read. You don't find alot of books that detail the history of Muslims in the Western Hemisphere. This book details the role Muslims played in history as they were brought to North, Central, and South America as slaves. The proud culture they fought to retain. The book also chronicles the rise of African American movements that eventually lead to the revival of Orthodox Islam in North America around the latter part of the 20th century. Michael A. Gomez does an improbable task of doing research on a topic not covered by most historians and uses historical contexts and clues to make educated theories where the trail of research suddenly runs cold. This is a must read for anyone interested in US and African American History.

Prof. Gomez has an astute way of presenting a vast amount of information in a composite that flows from prologue to epilogue. Very informative. I would not entirely agree on all his assumptions regarding Noble Drew Ali and his teachings, Drew did not advocate hate vs any people of the earth but taught the Moors to "Love instead of hate", and to be proud of self and one's nationality and identity, putting no one above God, family, and self, however I would highly recommend this book along with "The Huevolution of Sacred Muur Science Past and Present" by Noble Timothy Myers-El

From: free-studentHaving read many articles and books on the subject of African Muslims in the Americas, I approached Prof. Gomez 'Black Crescent' somewhat complacent. His earlier book 'Exchanging Our Country Marks:' is outstanding indeed with info and data compiled within an intriguing format. It is refreshing to see that Prof. Gomez has again produced a work like 'Black Crescent' with such insight and honesty of historical realities. I can not improve upon what the reviewers have written about this book, I will note them again. "A brilliant, magisterial account of the multifaceted experiences of African Muslims in the Americas", "An encyclopedic book", "A stunning intellectual achievement characterized by enormous learning, judicious conclusions...". Without any reservations 'Black Crescent' is a book for every student of the historical connections between Africa, Americas, Muslims, Islam and slavery.

As much as I wanted to love Michael Gomez's Black Crescent, I could not. Gomez is quite the scholar, a tenured professor at NYU which is probably the reason why he was allowed to publish such anecdotal, baseless scholarship. The book is supposed to be about African Muslims in early to more modern American history, when in fact it is about people who may have been Muslim, or those who had Muslim names, or people who prayed alone (and therefore according to Gomez were probably Muslim), or those who chose not to pray at all (again, that somehow proves or suggests their religious beliefs). It seems that Gomez was so caught up in his goal to show religious continuity starting from early peoples brought to the Americas as slaves (from probably Islamically-influenced countries, i.e. Senegambia) to the black Islamic movements of people such as Malcolm X, that he never stopped to wonder if any of it was based in fact.If we remove all of the religious speculation, the book is a fairly interesting collection of newspaper clippings, slave listings, land records, personal letters, interviews, etc. that offers a look into cultural appropriation and (dis)integration, and a fantastic look at the struggle for self-identification. But it is certainly a misnomer.