Khan, Aliyah: Far From Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean
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Khan, Aliyah: Far From Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press 2020. ISBN 978-19788006641, 271p. Ken Chitwood 1 # The Author(s) 2020
Introduction Brenda Flanagan’s 2009 novel Allah in the Islands tells the story of the lives, dreams, and social tensions of the residents of Rosehill, a community on the fictional “Santabella Island.” The novel centers around the protagonist Beatrice Salandy and her decision whether or not to leave Santabella, a lush and tropical Caribbean island only thinly veiled as real-life Trinidad. Weaving its way through the novel is Beatrice’s relationship with an “Afro-Santabellan” Muslim community that is critical of island politics and outspoken on behalf of the poor. Through first-hand narratives from Abdul—one of the members of the community and right-hand man to its leader, Haji—readers learn that the “Afro-Santabellan” Muslim community is planning a coup against the Santabellan government. This, in turn, is a thinly veiled reference to the real-life 1990 Jamaat al-Muslimeen coup. A key theme that runs throughout the book, and in contemporary Trinidad, is how the non-Muslim residents of Santabella view “Afro-Santabellan” Muslims. Situated between the island’s Black and Indian communities, Flanagan writes how island residents react with a mixture of awe and opprobrium to their Muslim neighbors. While it may seem strange to start a review of one book with a discussion of another, I would not have been aware of Flanagan’s work if it were not for Aliyah Khan. Khan’s adept analysis of Flanagan’s Allah in the Islands serves as one of the primary means by which she argues that the 1990 coup is the seminal event for the Caribbean’s perception of Islam and Muslims. Combining this analysis with an interview with “Haji”—the reallife “celebrity terrorist” (201) Imam Yasin Abu Bakr—and an exploration of popular calypso music about the coup, Khan shows how events in Trinidad in the 1990s “changed national perceptions of Muslims” (192) throughout the Anglophone
* Ken Chitwood k.chitwood@fu–berlin.de
1
Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany
International Journal of Latin American Religions
Caribbean, long before 9/11. This is just one small example of Khan’s masterful interdisciplinary treatment of the subject of Islam and Muslims in the Anglophone Caribbean. In this regard and many others, Far From Mecca is a commendable monograph that will spark additional research in the burgeoning field of Latin American and Caribbean Islamic studies, building on previous literature on Islam and Muslims in the Anglophone Caribbean in particular (Afroz 2012; Bauer 2005; Chickrie 1999, 2002, 2007, 2011; Cottee 2019; Khan 2004; Korom 2003; Searle 1991, among others). It is also a worthwhile text by which scholars in different fields—religion in the Americas, Caribbean studies, global Islamic studies, postcolonial studies, etc.—might branch beyond their main disciplines and come to learn something fresh, from a slightly different perspective. Such was th
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