Crescent over Another Horizon

"This fascinating, original, and critically important volume creates a new map of the world and reimagines social history, immigration logics, and cultural transnationalism. This volume serves as an entirely new scholarly agenda for analyzing the history of the conquest/'discovery' of the Americas in ways that make these histories immediately tangible to students in a post-Arab Spring universe." -- Paul Amar, Associate Professor of Global and International Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, author of The Security Archipelago, and editor of The Middle East and Brazil: Perspectives on the New Global South "A significant contribution to the field. Crescent over Another Horizon will produce a re-thinking of what sorts of connections-material and ideological, real and imagined-give meaning to people, Muslims and non-Muslims alike." -- Steven Hyland Jr., Assistant Professor of History and Chair, Women's and Gender Studies Program, Wingate University

In the first book to comprehensively examine the Islamic experience in Latina/o societies—from Columbian voyages to the post-9/11 world—more than a dozen luminaries from nations throughout the Western Hemisphere explore how Islam indelibly influenced the

Muslims have been shaping the Americas and the Caribbean for more than five hundred years, yet this interplay is frequently overlooked or misconstrued. Brimming with revelations that synthesize area and ethnic studies, Crescent over Another Horizon presents a portrait of Islam’s unity as it evolved through plural formulations of identity, power, and belonging. Offering a Latino American perspective on a wider Islamic world, the editors overturn the conventional perception of Muslim communities in the New World, arguing that their characterization as “minorities” obscures the interplay of ethnicity and religion that continues to foster transnational ties.

Bringing together studies of Iberian colonists, enslaved Africans, indentured South Asians, migrant Arabs, and Latino and Latin American converts, the volume captures the power-laden processes at work in religious conversion or resistance. Throughout each analysis—spanning times of inquisition, conquest, repressive nationalism, and anti-terror security protocols—the authors offer innovative frameworks to probe the ways in which racialized Islam has facilitated the building of new national identities while fostering a double-edged marginalization. The subjects of the essays transition from imperialism (with studies of morisco converts to Christianity, West African slave uprisings, and Muslim and Hindu South Asian indentured laborers in Dutch Suriname) to the contemporary Muslim presence in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Trinidad, completed by a timely examination of the United States, including Muslim communities in “Hispanicized” South Florida and the agency of Latina conversion. The result is a fresh perspective that opens new horizons for a vibrant range of fields.