Author-Meets-Respondents Session for Samiha Rahman's Black Muslim Freedom Dreams: Islamic Education, Pan-Africanism, and Collective Care (New York University Press, 2026)

This author-meets-respondents session will discuss Samiha Rahman’s Black Muslim Freedom Dreams: Islamic Education, Pan-Africanism, and Collective Care (NYU Press, 2026) and how this book intervenes in the fields of Contemporary Islam, African Diaspora Religions, and the anthropology of religion. In this current moment, in which Black Muslims from Minneapolis to Harlem to Sudan and beyond are being locked up, beaten, exploited, and killed, this session engages Rahman’s ethnography as a way to turn attention to the historical and ongoing ways in which Black Muslims in the Tijani Sufi order have imagined and actualized liberatory futures beyond the dominant registers of crisis, exclusion, and dehumanization that have often been associated with Black and Muslim life around the globe. This ethnography invites us to explore the possibilities and challenges of studying the complicated lifeworlds of religious practitioners who inhabit the liminal space between building “futures beyond despair” and adopting “superficial hope”.