Talk by Yasmine Flodin-Ali (Religious Studies, University of Pittsburgh)

Twentieth-century Muslims used Islam to articulate resistance to systems of domination, from British colonial rule in India to Jim Crow laws in the United States. This article maps the moral geographies promoted by three early twentieth-century Muslim American movements: the Moorish Science Temple of America, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, and the Islamic Mission of America. Despite stark differences between these groups— the MSTA had their own version of the Qur’an, the Ahmadiyya began as a minority theological movement in South Asia, and the Islamic Mission was a Sunni group— they all appealed to an imagined, unified Muslim world, through which an all-encompassing Muslim identity would solve the problem of racial inequality. Imagining a more just world meant investing in sacred spaces, from establishing mosque spaces to theorizing cities such as Chicago and New York as Mecca to idealizing Asia and Africa as homelands, connective nodes of Islamic civilization and liberation.