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Podcast: New Books in African American Studies
Episode: Michael Muhammad Knight, "Metaphysical Africa: Truth and Blackness in the Ansaru Allah Community" (Pennsylvania State UP, 2020)
Description: The Ansaru Allah Community, also known as the Nubian Islamic Hebrews (AAC/NIH) and later the Nuwaubians, is a deeply significant and controversial African American Muslim movement. Founded in Brooklyn in the 1960s, it spread through the prolific production and dissemination of literature and lecture tapes and became famous for continuously reinventing its belief system. In this book, Michael Muhammad Knight studies the development of AAC/NIH discourse over a period of thirty years, tracing a surprising consistency behind a facade of serial reinvention.
It is popularly believed that the AAC/NIH community abandoned Islam for Black Israelite religion, UFO...