What is the ‘Muslim Atlantic’? An Interview with Daniel DeHanas

Religion & Diplomacy: Your first report is entitled “Mapping the Muslim Atlantic.”  What is the “Muslim Atlantic”?

Mapping the Muslim Atlantic. 2019. King’s College London.

Daniel DeHanas: We understand the “Muslim Atlantic” to be the Islamic cultural space that extends between Britain, the United States, and a broader Atlantic region. While our current research and report are focused on how Muslims in the UK and the US take part in this transatlantic space, we are interested in the broader set of English-speaking participants including Canadian, Irish, and Caribbean Muslims. Indeed, our full vision of the Muslim Atlantic would include a range of places from North and West Africa to the area of Bahia in Brazil, where revolt of enslaved Malê Muslims led to the end of the slave trade in the country. The Muslim Atlantic is about decolonial Islam across a wide geography of the colonial legacy.

Our research builds upon the work of Paul Gilroy, a London-based scholar whose book The Black Atlantic, published a quarter-century ago, has been a formative influence on both of us. Gilroy wrote of the “Black Atlantic” as a cultural space forged out of a collective memory of the transatlantic slave trade. The “Muslim Atlantic” is an analogous idea, but with a focus on how Muslim solidarity is built on the common experiences Muslims face including securitization and cultural racism.

Through our own research projects over the years, Peter and I have both noticed ways that American and British Muslims have been forging and strengthening bonds with each other. In part, they have grown more connected in order to face common challenges, such as the rise of populist politics and increasingly negative public attitudes toward Islam. In part, Muslims have made connections as they moved or traveled across the Atlantic, or have reckoned with their religious tradition in a diverse and globalized world, finding themselves drawn into transatlantic debates.

R&D: Is it possible to discern whether the British or American Muslim community exerts more influence in the “Muslim Atlantic”? For reference, if we think of the “Christian Atlantic,” American Christianity almost certainly exerts more influence on British Christianity than vice versa given the enormous difference in scale.

DeHanas: That’s an interesting question. We are indeed finding that American Muslims tend to be more influential on British Muslims than vice versa. Part of this is a Hollywood-like effect.  Some US Muslims are very media-savvy, develop charismatic American speaking styles, and cultivate major transnational followings. A great example is Hamza Yusuf, the “Californian Sheikh”, who travelled to Britain every year for much of the 1990s to speak to packed-out crowds of young people in mosques and meeting halls. Hamza Yusuf is less popular now because many Muslims see him as out of touch, or even right-wing, on today’s political and race-related issues. But there are many other figures we could name such as Amina Wadud and Suhaib Webb who are distinctly American in style and yet have much clout among certain UK audiences.

There are excellent examples in the other direction too, such as the British female hip hop duo Poetic Pilgrimage who have performed to wide audiences in America. There is also something distinctively prestigious about Old World Britain, and particularly Oxbridge. To follow on from your “Christian Atlantic” example, many American Christians are drawn to the Anglican writer C. S. Lewis in part because he evokes the timeless beauty of cloistered academic life in Oxford. In a similar way, British Muslim theologian Tim Winter has a dual mystique: he trained under classical Islamic scholars in the Middle East and has long been teaching in the hallowed and inimitably British halls of Cambridge University.

In some ways, any attempt to measure the direction of influence misses the point. Muslims who travel across the Atlantic may exert influence, but they themselves will be influenced too. As Paul Gilroy once put it, “the traffic between cultures is never one way”. The race-related dimensions of prejudice in America and the post-colonial dimensions of prejudice in Britain are two sides of the same coin, arising from the transatlantic slave trade. The War on Terror in Britain and the US are likewise part and parcel of a single phenomenon. What we are attempting to understand in this project are the spaces between Britain and America, the mutual influences, and the shared experiences that draw Muslims together.

R&D: In addition to noting several similarities and linkages, the report also highlights some key differences between Muslim communities in the US and UK. What are those differences?

Daniel DeHanas. photo credit: King’s College London.

DeHanas: I suppose one important difference is that Muslims have been part of the United States for its entire history. As many as a third of those who were trafficked as slaves from West Africa to the American colonies were Muslim. African American Muslims today can trace their heritage—and in some cases their direct ancestors—back centuries to these enslaved men and women of Islamic faith.

Although there have been Muslims in Britain since the sixteenth century they were never in large numbers until the 1950s and 1960s post-war period, which coincided with the break-up of the British Empire. British Islam has a strong post-colonial dimension, with most Muslims arriving from former colonial lands in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. There are substantial numbers of immigrant Muslims in America too, many of them Arab or South Asian, but with a less obvious tie back to colonial history. Of course, if we think in terms of an Atlantic perspective, Britain took a central role in the transatlantic slave trade while exploiting colonial subjects in India and elsewhere, meaning that the histories of Muslims in both nations are connected.

In our report we highlighted a socio-economic difference that emerges when we focus on immigrant Muslims. Muslims who immigrated to Britain from the Indian subcontinent were from humble means and took jobs in the declining textile industry or as small shopkeepers.  Muslims arriving in America in the same mid-twentieth century period, in contrast, were mainly students seeking higher education who might go on to become doctors, lawyers, or engineers. These circumstances of arrival have shaped the economic prospects of both groups. It is striking that the average household income of immigrant Muslim families in the United States is just about at or above the US national average, whereas immigrant Muslim families in the UK continue to earn in the lowest quartile.

R&D: What are one or two points that policymakers can learn from this project?

DeHanas: One point for policymakers is that Muslims—like many other people—tend to be highly interconnected across national borders. Much of the previous research on Muslims focuses within national boundaries, asking questions about what it means to be a British or American Muslim, or a French or German Muslim, for example. These studies exist on the assumption that nations are like “containers” and all activity happens inside them.  However, this view does not match our present reality. In our increasingly interconnected world, a young Muslim in Britain may read a news story about politics in the United States, discuss this with like-minded Muslims on social media, and find over time that she is building networks that span the Atlantic. If policymakers think more in terms of “Atlantic Muslims” (rather than just American or British Muslims) they will be better able to see the rich scene of activity that is happening in this transatlantic space.

Another important point relates to the very way policymakers talk about and define Muslims. The current highly securitized approach to Islam in both the US and the UK has given rise to a kind of racialization of Islam in which the “Muslimness” of Muslims often becomes the defining—and sometimes the exclusive—lens through which they are seen in public and policy discourse. But of course the religion of those we have decided to call Muslims is but one facet of those who are inevitably much more complex people. Many American and British Muslims are identifying as much with struggles for non-binary gender rights and the Black Lives Matter movement as they are with “Muslim” causes—seeing in these other struggles a common experience of exclusion and discrimination in the face of rising far right politics and white nationalism.

R&D: What’s next for the project and what is it trying to achieve?

DeHanas:We are excited to be guest editing a “Muslim Atlantic” issue of a brilliant quarterly Critical Muslim, which will be coming out in mid-2020. We’ve commissioned a wide range of Muslim authors, scholars, and artists from both sides of the Atlantic to respond to the idea of the Muslim Atlantic on its pages. Some of the pieces will be intellectual essays or personal reflections, while others will be creative works such as a portion of script from a play with transatlantic themes. We have plans for a photo essay and a discography of the Muslim Atlantic with a range of music you can listen to in the online version.

We will also be taking on some of the thornier questions of race and securitization in a workshop early next year with a range of stakeholders, many of whom will be Muslims who are active in transatlantic networks. You can also look out for our second report. We’ll continue to update our Muslim Atlantic website as the project progresses into the middle of next year.

In all of our research we are trying both to comprehend the Muslim Atlantic as an actual real-world phenomenon and to help energize its further formation and development. In other words, because we are convening Muslims from across the Atlantic to work together to respond to these issues—including those who want to push back against or challenge the Muslim Atlantic framing—our research will in some ways be generative of the very phenomenon we are studying. It seems to us that the Muslim Atlantic can be an important bulwark against the populist waves rising around our world today. The more we can both understand it and catalyse it, the better.