Summary

It is difficult to speak of “Islam in the Caribbean” in any unified sense. Because the story of Islam and Muslims in the Caribbean is characterized by both a long, multifaceted history and modern miscellany, there is no past or present uniformity in progeny, perspectives, or practices. Nonetheless, the classification offers a geographically focused and categorically complex frame of reference to consider often overlooked aspects in the region and of global Islam. Stretching from the long 16th century to the present day, the narrative of Islam and Muslims in and of the Caribbean is one of colonial power and cosmopolitanization, contested history and concurrent heterogeneity, global connectedness, and local complexity.

Across the region, Muslim experience is significantly linked to the complex nexus of relationships and interactions between peoples and powers in the wider Atlantic world since the 16th century. Yet, because the Anglophone, Dutch, Hispanophone, and Francophone Caribbeans are each marked by colonial lineages and created certain networks by which Islam and Muslims arrived in the region, there are multiple assemblages that mark and make up the various socialities in the region. Thus, their stories are sufficiently diverse to warrant distinct recognition and treatment. At the same time, and thanks to this shared Atlantic world, there are shared themes and common concerns that can be identified across the Caribbean, including but not limited to: diaspora dynamics, migration, minoritization, transregional networks, debates over hybridity and purity, religious diversification, notions of space and place, class issues, questions of indigeneity, and the interstices of race and religion in colonial and postcolonial perspectives.

In addition, there have also been enough interactions at, across, and between the various “Caribbeans” to justify—indeed, necessitate—comparing them and putting them into conversation with one another. Aliyah Khan, in her literary study of the significance, influence, and changeability of Muslims in the Anglophone Caribbean, emphasized both the need to decenter the U.S. in the study of Islam in the Americas and further globalize the study of global Islam by putting different regions into comparative perspective (e.g., the Anglophone Caribbean and the Hispanophone Caribbean). This requires putting connected, yet seemingly disparate, contexts such as Trinidad and Puerto Rico, Suriname and Haiti, the Bahamas and Cuba into comparative conversation. The result of such juxtapositions is not only a richer appreciation of the constitutive aspects of Caribbean history and contemporary culture but a more extensive and entangled understanding of global Islam’s constituent communities and representative sites.