Lived Religion and Material Spirituality in the Nation of Islam

My current book project is an  ethnographic study  about lived religion in the Nation of Islam (NOI). It investigates how followers in the Nation of Islam construct and perform their Black identity, and the ways in which religion is seen in the mundane. As such, this project focuses our attention on the relationship between religion and resistance, religion and memory, and religion and self-fashioning. 

This study contributes to a wider conversation in the fields of Black studies and religion. It finds resonance among those studies that ambition to broaden the category of Black religions beyond the historic focus on protestant traditions, while paying specific attention to matters of racial and social conflict within the United States, and how Black religions became vehicles of both narrating a broader history about Black people while concurrently rejecting socially constructed notions of Black identity tethered to white supremacy. 

The core argument of my larger research project maintains that beyond an interrogation on NOI leaders and controversies attached to them, there exists a religious community of ordinary believers whose religious practices are steeped in a Black spirituality that frames a sense of personal and collective identity for believers in their quest to fashion a Black nation that attends to both the social and spiritual needs of its followers. While much attention has been given to the former, the latter is often in the shadows.  This project commences with the spiritual and argues that a Black spirituality is at the heart of what attracts followers to the NOI.

 The project exposes a novel story about the profoundly spiritual world in which disciples divulge how spirituality forefronts their participation in the Black religion. This turn toward the spiritual offers an opportunity to revisit NOI scholarship; one centered on the religious lives of believers in their yearning to shape their Black identity filtered through a lens of a Black spirituality that manifests in their daily lived experiences.