Description

The Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University will launch a project on Black American Muslim Internationalism. Seeking to map and explore various dimensions of African American Muslim tradition through an engagement with global Islamic practices and institutions, the project will work in collaboration with leading university-based scholars as well as a network of non-academic, community-based historians in three cities: Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Washington DC. The project’s goal is to create a sustained field of study centered on how African American Islamic tradition influences, and is influenced by, encounters with global Islam—and, in turn, how those encounters impact American understandings of race, religion, and American identity. Project activities and outcomes will include academic workshops and public events, online forums on the Center’s digital publishing platform, public lectures and curriculum workshops, archive-building research in collaboration with community-based historians, and a public-facing website organized around a long-form interactive essay on African American Islam in international perspective