Muslims in the African Diaspora: New Books in the Field

Samiha Rahman

Dr. Samiha Rahman is an Assistant Professor of Human Development at California State University Long Beach. She holds a joint Ph.D. in Africana Studies and Education from the University of Pennsylvania. Her scholarship and teaching examine how young people and their families engage race, religion, and education to achieve justice and liberation. Her research has garnered support from the Mellon Foundation, the Institute of Citizens and Scholars, the Henry Luce Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Spencer Foundation, the National Academy of Education, and the Fulbright-Hayes.

Her first book, Black Muslim Freedom Dreams: Islamic Education, Pan-Africanism, and Collective Care, is forthcoming from NYU Press in April 2026. Based on more than a decade of ethnographic engagement, the book tells the stories of a multi-generational community of Black Muslims in the Tijani Sufi tariqa who live, learn, and strive for liberation between the U.S. and Senegal. Her other ongoing research project focuses on the experiences and world-making practices of Black Muslim college students in the U.S. It examines how they sustain joy and resistance in the face of intersectional marginalization.

Alaina Morgan

Alaina Morgan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at USC. Trained as a historian of the African Diaspora, Professor Morgan's research focuses on the historic utility of religion, in particular Islam, in racial liberation and anti-colonial movements of the mid- to late-twentieth century Atlantic world. As part of a body of work in intellectual, political, and religious history, Professor Morgan's research teases out the connections between religious identity and racial formation, intellectual discourse and grassroots activism, and local and global politics. Her first book titled Atlantic Crescent: Dreaming of Black Muslim Liberation in the Contemporary Atlantic World considers the ways that Islam and Blackness were used by Muslims and non-Muslims in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Anglophone Caribbean to form the basis of transnational anti-colonial and anti-imperial political movements from the end of World War II to the end of the twentieth century. This book investigates the varying ways that Muslims of African descent thought of colonialism and imperialism.

At USC, Professor Morgan teaches classes on African-American and African Diaspora History; Islam in the Americas; Black intellectual history; and Black international movements.

https://dornsife.usc.edu/profile/alaina-morgan/

Atiya Husain

Dr. Atiya Husain is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Williams College. Husain is the author of No God but Man: On Race, Knowledge, and Terrorism, published by Duke University Press in 2025. The book deeply investigates the category of race, racialization, the "average" man, and the role of Islam among mid-century Black revolutionaries like Assata Shakur.

Youssef Carter

As an anthropologist of religion, I am interested in the manner in which religious discourses and movements become oriented in the direction of abolition. At the moment, I am fascinated with how Muslims in the United States and in West Africa interpret their religion as a means of empowerment in the face of oppression, while relying on scripture and prophetic narration to navigate hostile political realities. My book, called The Vast Oceans: Remembering God and Self on the Mustafawi Sufi Path, is a multisite ethnography of a transatlantic spiritual network of African-American and West African Sufis that deploy West African spiritual training to navigate historical-political contexts in the U.S. South and beyond. It is forthcoming from UNC Press.

Ellen McLarney is an associate professor of Arabic Literature and Culture at Duke University and the Director of Duke's Middle East Studies Center. Her accolades include two Fulbright Fellowships (in Tunisia and Argentina), a National Humanities Center Fellowship, and a Stanford Humanities Post-Doctoral Fellowship. In her first book, Soft Force, she explores how Muslim women in Egypt, in the decades leading up to the 2011 Arab Spring, played a pivotal role in shaping an Islamist presence in the public sphere. By focusing on the writings and activism of scholars, preachers, journalists, artists, and public intellectuals, the book illustrates how these women envisioned an Islamic revival rooted in women's rights, family life, equality, and emancipation.