UCSB Santa Barbara Department of History logo

Latest Past Events

ISRRAR Event–Dr. Rasul Miller, “Black Internationalism and Black Sunni Muslims in America”

University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara

During the interwar period, the historic neighborhood of Harlem was home to a thriving Black political scene that included Garveyites, Communists, labor organizers, anticolonial activists, and politicized adherents of various new Black religious congregations. Shaykh Daoud Faisal and Mother Khadijah Faisal, the architects of New York City’s first lasting Black Sunni Muslim community worked as […]

ISRRAR Event–Dr. Samiha Rahman, “Redefining Black Excellence: Ihsan, Islamic Education, and the Tijani Sufi Order”

Zoom CA

Since the 1980s, hundreds of predominantly working-class African American Muslim youth have migrated to the West African Tijani Sufi town of Medina Baye, Senegal. They hope to circumvent the antiblackness, Islamophobia, and economic inequality they face in the U.S. in search of a transformative educational encounter in a society where Blackness and Islam constitute the […]

ISRRAR Event–Dr. Maytha Alhassen, “The Ummic Imperative: A Decolonial Approach to Malcolm X’s Islam”

Zoom CA

Through an assemblage of multiple archives, Dr. Maytha Alhassen tracks the Malcolm X’s political and spiritual project the last year of his life as he travels across decolonizing geographies. Alhassen contends that undergirding Malcolm X’s Black liberation framework is a praxical commitment to an “ummic imperative.” Engaging Malcolm’s spiritual political philosophies will also serve to […]