Dr. Aliyah Khan is an Associate Professor of English, and Afroamerican and African Studies, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is also the Director of the UM Global Islamic Studies Center. She is the author of Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean (Rutgers University Press 2020, University of the West Indies Press 2021), the first academic monograph on Black and South Asian Muslims in the Caribbean.

In service of dispelling the ahistorical notions that Muslim history in the Americas begins with September 11, 2001, and is centered in the United States, this talk explores the colonial and postcolonial trajectory of Black Muslim literacy, literature, and cultural production in the Caribbean: from the Islamic writings of enslaved West African Muslims in Jamaica in the early 1800s, to the Sufi-influenced religious poetry of Abdur-Rahman Slade Hopkinson in 20th- century Guyana, to the calypso songs sung about and played in service of a 1990 government coup in Trinidad by the Black Nationalist Jamaat al-Muslimeen group. Beginning with the literature of enslaved Muslims, Black Islamic literary works in the Caribbean are characterized by a concern with Sufi Muslim ideas of the “hidden” (batin) and other political-religious principles of West African Islam, thereby establishing a genealogy of Afro-Caribbean Muslim literature.