Popular conceptions of Islam and Africa often put the two at odds with one another–conjuring up phantom images of an unspeakable “Islamic slave trade” and an impenetrable barrier of the Sahara dividing an “Arab” North Africa from the “Black” Africa that appears south of the desert. Yet Islam has been present in Black communities in Africa for well over one thousand years, playing a key role in both the history of the entire African continent, as well as in the cultures and resistances of the worldwide African diaspora. This panel draws together histories of the interaction between Islam and the global Black world spanning the African continent and the diaspora, to explore the uneven contours of the relationship between Islamic faith and various iterations of Pan-Africanism.

This panel takes a Pan-African focus, with papers covering the Black world, from Sudan to South Carolina, and from Ahmed Sékou Touré’s Guinea to plays performed by Samori Touré’s purported grandson in 1930s Harlem. There are two threads that simultaneously run through each of the papers. On the one hand, Islam works as a guiding force for all the actors–whether as a revolutionary means of resistance to the predations of the enslavement, or as the cornerstone of community for early Black Muslim movements in New York City. Islam was invariably an outward and inward facing means of attempting to create community despite certain violences and a means of bridging histories that connected disparate places throughout the global Black world to the African continent. Similarly, Pan-Africanism emerges as an organizing logic– yet one that is fragile and contested. In Guinea, Pan-Africanist commitments that tied together bauxite producing countries in the global South are undercut by desperate attempts to navigate predatory global markets, whereas in intellectual networks crisscrossing the Red Sea, Pan-Africanism became a means to instantiate the power of new states.

Bridging centuries and spanning global Black geographies, “Islam and New Histories of Pan-Africanism” sheds light on various traditions of Pan-African engagements with Islam in historical context. These papers in conversation open space to move beyond the simplistic historical debates about Islam and Africa and toward a deeper discussion of the critical role and engagement with Islam and Pan-Africanism by Black and African people the world over.