Book Review: Black Pilgrimage to Islam

June 1, 2003

Source: Journal of the American Academy of Religion

On June 1, 2003 the Journal of the American Academy of Religion published a book review of Black Pilgrimage to Islam by Robert Dannin. The review stated that Dannin "sets out to correct the sometimes lopsided accounts of Islam in black America by narrating the stories of Muslims such as Wali Akram, who founded the First Cleveland Mosque in the 1930's, and Daoud Ghani, who helped to establish a Muslim communal farm in upstate New York during the same period. In addition, readers encounter detailed stories of rivalries among Islamic groups... Based on Dannin's fieldwork completed largely in the 1980s and 1990s, these narratives constitute real additions to the growing scholarly corpus on African American Islam. Most importantly, they avoid caricature by depicting subjects studied as three-dimensional subjects who both shape and are shaped by the complex social, cultural, economic, and political worlds that they inhabit."