Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean is the first academic work on Muslims in the English-speaking Caribbean. Author Dr Aliyah Khan focuses on the fiction, poetry and music of Islam in Guyana, Trinidad and Jamaica.
Combining archival research, ethnography, and literary analysis, Khan argues for a historical continuity of Afro- and Indo-Muslim presence and cultural production in the Caribbean.
The case studies explored range from Arabic-language autobiographical and religious texts written by enslaved Sufi West Africans in nineteenth-century Jamaica to early-twentieth-century fiction of post-treaty South Asian Muslim indigeneity and El Dorado, to the attempted government coup in 1990 by Jamaat al-Muslimeen in Trinidad, as well as the island’s calypso music, to contemporary court cases concerning Caribbean Muslims and global terrorism.
Khan argues that the Caribbean Muslim subject, the “fullaman,” a performative identity that relies on the gendering and racialization of Islam, unsettles discourses of creolization that are central to postcolonial nationalisms in the Caribbean.
Dr. Aliyah Khan is an associate professor in UM’s Department of African American and African Studies, and in the Department of English Language and Literature. She is also the Director of the Global Islamic Studies Center (GISC) at the International Institute. Dr Khan specializes in postcolonial Caribbean literature and contemporary literature of the Muslim and Islamic world, with a particular focus on the intersections of race, gender and Islam in the Hemispheric Americas, including immigrant communities in North America. She has also presented and taught extensively in the area of Muslim representation in comics and graphic novels and is on the editorial board of the Bloombsbury Critical Guides in Comics Studies.
Far from Mecca: The Globalization of the Muslim Caribbean (Rutgers University Press 2020, University of the West Indies Press 2021), Dr. Khan, is the first academic monograph on the literature, history, and music of Caribbean Islam, focusing on Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica, as well as on enslaved Muslim West Africans, colonial Indian sugar plantation workers, and their Caribbean Muslim descendants. . Far from Mecca won three national awards: honorable mention in the Modern Language Association Award 2021 for a first book; 2018-2019 American Association for Comparative Literature Helen Tartar First Book Grant Award and 2017-2018 American Association of University Women (AAUW) National Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Award. The work of Dr. Khan has also appeared in academic settings, including GLQ, Caribbean Review of Gender Studies, Caribbean Quarterly, Journal of West Indian LiteratureAND Studies in Canadian Literature. Her non-fiction writing has appeared in media including the Caribbean fiction and non-fiction collection Bookmarked (2021), Pree: Caribbean LiteratureAND Former Agents.
Dr. Khan is an advisory board member of the Journal for the Study of Indentureship and its Legacies, a national university program consultant on diversity, equity and inclusion issues with a specialty in African and Islamic Studies programs, a senior Program advisory board member of UM Arab and Muslim American Studies in the Department of American Culture, and a member of the UM Center for World Performance Studies, for her research on the qasida devotional songs of Indo-Caribbean Urdu Muslims. She is currently conducting research for a book project on Caribbean hurricanes, regional environmental disasters, and oil drilling, and their implications for migration and contemporary economies in the Hemispheric Americas.
