Understanding the Historical Contexts of African Muslims in the Americas - Dr. Michael Gomez

Professor Michael Gomez kicks off UPF's new humanities dialogue project American Muslim Pathways with a lecture on the roots of African Muslims in the Americas by looking at the civilization that first brought Islamic practices to West Africa under Mansa Musa in the 14th century. This is a fascinating lecture full of historical maps and description of a culture that is too rarely discussed and examined. To learn more about the project please visit muslimpathways.com.
Dr. Michael Gomez is the Silver Professor of History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University, having served as the founding director of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD) from its inception in 2000 to 2007, and is currently series editor of the Cambridge Studies on the African Diaspora, Cambridge University Press. He has chaired of the History departments at both NYU and Spelman College, and also served as President of UNESCO's International Scientific Committee for the Slave Route Project from 2009 to 2011. His first book, Pragmatism in the Age of Jihad: The Precolonial State of Bundu (Cambridge University Press, 1992), examines a Muslim polity in what is now eastern Senegal. The next publication, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (University of North Carolina Press, 1998), is concerned with questions of culture and race. Reversing Sail: A History of the African Diaspora (Cambridge University Press, 2005) is more fully involved with the idea of an African diaspora, as is Diasporic Africa: A Reader (New York University Press, 2006), an edited volume. Black Crescent: African Muslims in the Americas (Cambridge University Press, 2005), examines how African Muslims negotiated their bondage and freedom throughout the Americas, allowing for significant integration of Islamic Africa. Gomez’s new book, African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa (Princeton University Press, early 2018), is a comprehensive study of polity and religion during the region’s iconic collective moment. Invested in an Arabic manuscript project disrupted by war (in Mali), arguably one of the most important endeavors of its kind in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Gomez remains supportive of the struggles of people of African descent worldwide.