Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online Volume 1, Issue 1 | Page 68

2/2/2016

Middle East Media and Book Reviews Online

Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America
By: Sohail Daulatzai
Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota, 2012. 257pp. $22.50. ISBN: 0816675864.
Volume: 1 Issue: 1
April 2013
Review by
Stephen Sheehi, PhD
University of South Carolina
Black Star, Crescent Moon by Sohail Daulatzai identifies the history and contours of the ‘Muslim International’, “a dissident and exilic space that
encourages transgression, applauds border crossing, and foments forms of sabotage and resistance not possible within European and U.S. discourses
about individualism, the nation-state, ‘democracy’, and the broader philosophical and juridical frameworks of the Enlightenment, modernity and
Western liberalism” (p. xxiv). If this explanation sounds broad or enigmatic, the following chapters clearly demonstrate that the Muslim
International is an intellectual tradition and cultural space, if not network, within which American Black Muslim intellectuals, activists, writers, and
artists have located themselves politically since World War Two. Within the global context of the Cold War, globalization, the “war on terror,” the
American Empire, European colonialism and neo-liberalism, the chapters “explore popular culture as a powerful site for revealing the struggles
over ideology and power, race and nationhood, and the politics of identity” (p. xxvi).
To put it simply, Daulatzai’s Muslim international is a conceptualization of a pronounced Muslim (not Islamic) sub-trend, or perhaps better,
intellectual, cultural and political tradition within Third World anti-colonialist and anti-racist struggles since the end of World War Two. The idea is
not a mapping of a pan-Muslim network, but an excavation of how American Black Muslims, and indeed radical American blacks, foregrounded
their own ant-racist, anti-capitalist and civil rights (read: human rights) struggle within the larger anti-colonial, independence and revolutionary
struggles of the “Muslim Third World.”
Black Star’s first chapter posits the life, thought and activism of Malcolm X as a foundational radical thinker, who used “the national liberation
movements in the Muslim Third World as a critical lens that served to define the contours of black identities, liberation struggles, and their
solidarities with the broader Third World” (p. 3). Even those who are familiar with the life of Malcolm X will find Daulatzai’s anatomy of his
“shifting Muslim identities” riveting (p. 2). The author maps the shifts within the leader’s political identification with African and Arab (read:
Muslim) anti-colonial liberation struggles, posing the 1955 Bandung Conference as a central event and reference point that set up for Malcolm X
“an analogy between black people in the United States and people in the Third World” (p. 29).
Yet, if “Islam came to be seen as an alternative form of radical Black consciousness,” Malcolm X, along with the Nation of Islam pioneered it as
“quite distinct from what was perceived to be the integrationist goals of Black Christianity” (p. 18) and a rejection of the cooptation of the white
liberal and Civil Rights establishments into the anti-communist, jingoistic patriotism of the day by the United States government. To this end, the
author forcefully communicates how Franz Fanon, Bandung, the Third World, the Muslim International, and Islam gave Malcolm X a “grammar of
resistance” (p. 21) that conceptually helped internationalize his thought and, in turn, the black liberation struggle. Daulatzai sensitively gives credit
to the relevance of the Nation of Islam in forging Malcolm X’s Third World perspective while fairly noting his growth into a full-fledged
internationalist thinker, whose Organization for Afro-American Unity emulated Kwame Nkrumah’s revolutionary Organization of African Unity (p.
36).
While each clearly express its own integrity and separate argument, the remaining chapters of the book demonstrate the legacy, force, contribution
and, indeed, haunting of Malcolm X’s life and works, showing how he was the central figure in converting the mainstream “Negro Revolution” of
Civil Rights into a “Black Revolution,” the former being “domestic and national