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As women convert to Islam in Mexico and go on to become pregnant, give birth, and care for their infants as Muslims, a number of them have trained as midwives, birth attendants, and lactation consultants with the intention of serving their communities. They attend births in homes, birth centers, and some clinical settings, provide postpartum care for mothers and infants, and support breastfeeding. Attending to Muslim converts as healers and midwives invites recognition of new birthing practices among women socialized into what they narrate as emancipatory understandings of corporeality through conversion. My ethnographic exploration of their practice draws on key insights from the anthropology of birth inaugurated by Brigitte Jordan and the core questions developed by her students around childbirth and the construction of authoritative knowledge about pregnancy, birth and nursing These include recognizing the cultural definition of these processes and the ideological status of such definitions in guiding how decisions and routines are conducted around preparation for birth, attendants and support systems, birth territory, the use of technology and medication, and the allocation of decision making. Descriptions and analyses of the role that spiritual practice and religious tradition plays in these processes are surprisingly absent from this rich literature, as key contributors such as Sheila Kitzinger have recognized . The construction of midwifery practices that sacralize and naturalize pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding in convert experience occur at a peculiar transnational node of corporeal knowledge. Convert midwifery has flourished in the context of a wider rebirth and professionalization of midwifery in urban Mexico . The creation and legal recognition of modern midwifery schools and birth centers in Chiapas, Michoacán, Oaxaca, Guerrero, and San Miguel Allende have been achieved in conversation with global midwifery associations and funding partners, within the larger context of movements asserting women’s sexual and reproductive rights and championing the female subject’s autonomy. Converts’ commitment to midwife-assisted births partly originated in the preference for home birth among the Spanish Murabittun community in San Cristobal de las Casas since they began proselytizing there in 1994. Many of the new Muslim midwives narrate long family histories of healing expertise in different regional indigenous or rural traditions however, which are also mobilized by the new professionalized midwifery at large along with other practices labeled holistic, natural, or traditional and which include herbal medicine, prenatal yoga, meditation, acupuncture, Chinese medicine, and placental therapies. Muslim midwives’ repertoires include therapeutic recourses that reference historically Muslim healing traditions, such as prophetic medicine, hiyama, or Quranic recitation, dua, and dhikr as accompaniment to birth. I argue that these midwives and the women they assist are bodies archiving assemblages of aggregate authoritative knowledges about being inhabited by new lives and the transcendental experience of birthing them.

The Black Atlantic and the African Diaspora refer to overlapping geographic and historical concepts each representing a complex series of dispersals, connections and reconnections, interactions, engagements and disengagements, and conflicts. As a geographic, spatial, and historical subset of the African Diaspora, the Black Atlantic refers to the sustained contacts and connections among the peoples of Atlantic Africa, Europe, and the Americas beginning with the “Age of Reconnaissance” (1306–1484) and the “Age of Contact” (1482–1621) and extending into the present. One of the first acts in the creation of the Black Atlantic can be located within the story of Mansa Qu, Islamic emperor and explorer from the western Sudanic empire of Mali, who commissioned two oceanic voyages to discover the western extent of the Atlantic between 1307 and 1311. Reconnaissance expeditions of this sort, launched by both Atlantic Africans and later by Iberians in the 14th and 15th centuries, helped create knowledge networks and webs of interconnections that would become critical to the later formation of the Black Atlantic. At the core of many of these earlier efforts to explore the world around them were the religious pursuits and goals—both Christian and Islamic—on the part of Atlantic Africans and Iberians. Delegations of Christian monks and pilgrims from Ethiopia visited the Italian peninsula, Iberia, and other parts of Europe beginning in 1306 seeking pan-Christian alliances against common Muslim foes. These early delegations fueled later Iberian imaginations about the existence of Prester John—an eastern defender of Christendom believed by the early 15th century to preside over an East African kingdom. In part, the protracted search for the mythical Prester John in Africa by the Portuguese after 1415 set in motion sustained contacts between Iberia and Atlantic Africa highlighted by the creation of Iberian-African settlements along the Atlantic African coast and in the Atlantic Islands, the transfer of enslaved labor to the Americas via the Atlantic Slave Trade, and the beginnings of sugar plantations and slave societies in the Caribbean and Brazil by the mid-16th century. Centuries of sustained contact of this nature spawned a range of cultural formations, the processes of ethnogenesis, and the creation of new transnational identities in the littoral regions and beyond of the four continents that frame the Atlantic Ocean. Creolization, the unique confluence of Atlantic cultures, served as the foundation for reinvented peoples across the Western Hemisphere who remembered, activated, and re-created “Africa” while attending to New World realities of racial slavery and hierarchy. This process of creolization created a range of ethnocultural permutations, from Atlantic Creoles to a wide array of neo-African ethnic groups in the Americas (e.g., Eboes, Coromantees, Congos, Nâgos, and Lucumís). Within this diverse cultural matrix and the processes of cultural mixing, religious and spiritual worldviews were among the most significant articulations of Black Atlantic and creole cultures. Indeed, there is no other way to decode the intricacies of Cuban Santería, Brazilian Candomblé, Haitian Voudou, New Orleans Hoodoo, Jamaican Myalism, or Obeah without framing them in the context of the cultural negotiations among many Atlantic African peoples made necessary by the suffocating confines of racial slavery and more recent socio-racial hierarchies embedded within Western Hemisphere colonialism, Jim Crow in the United States, and other manifestations of white supremacy

There is a relatively small yet emerging community of scholars working toward the development of Latinx Muslim studies. While the field itself is in its early development, Latinx Muslims across the Americas are, in fact, not new populations to these regions. Transnationally, both Islam and Muslims in the Americas have held influence on both the cultural and religious lives of Latinx peoples, including impacts on material and cultural practices such as food, language, architecture, and the like. These transnational cultural exchanges and developments are not limited to one-way interactions, as Muslim peoples in the Americas have equally been influenced by their social, cultural, and geographical surroundings. Despite this influence and history, the field of Latinx Muslim studies is still in its comparatively early formations. The area itself has notably risen out of the scholarship from religious studies spaces where scholars have focused mainly on questions of why contemporary Latinx persons convert (or, as some say, revert) to Islam. Though questions on conversion and demographics will continue, the area of Latinx Muslim Studies has begun to delve deeper into these communities, reflecting their richness and diversity that go beyond founding narratives surrounding conversion. Additionally, with such a strong focus on conversion, the stories and histories of generational Latinx Muslims continue to remain at the margins. The challenge following conversion is that of otherization experienced by Latinx Muslims, even from their own communities. Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s concept of nepantleras, those who exist amongst several cultures or “forces that clash,” is appropriate here, as Latinx Muslims are traversing in between spaces, and it is in this sometimes painful space in between where societal change occurs. Latinx Muslims act as nepantleras because they refuse “either/or” binaries and consider “and” as critical to their selfhood. Latinx Muslims thus typically identify as both Latinx and Muslim, an identity formation that rejects binary otherization or notions of needing to pick between the cultures they have inherited as well as those they chose to take part in. Many scholars have argued that racializations of Latinx peoples and Muslims have led to binary thinking of these populations as inherently separate, further contributing to nationalist dialogues. How can the study of the intersection of “Latinx” and “Muslim” contribute to the fields of religious studies, Latino studies, Muslim studies, and broader ethnic studies? Why is the study of these intersections only a recent development in the literature? It can be argued that academic silos have unintentionally mirrored the societal binary constructions of “either/or” that Anzaldúa described, and how those that exist within “and” continue to remain at the margins due to the institutional structure of academic disciplines. Engagement in interdisciplinarity—a continuing trend in religious studies—is often a means of addressing those communities at the margins and in-between spaces of society.

Following the emergence of a variety of African American Muslim movements in the United States since the 1920s, Islam began to spread among African American and African Caribbean communities in a number of states in the Americas and the Caribbean as well as in Great Britain. There is little evidence for the expansion of early African American Muslim movements, such as the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam (NOI), beyond the United States in the first decades of their existence, but the process gained traction in the second half of the 20th century. By the 1970s, different originally US-based African American Muslim movements had acquired followings in Canada, England, and various Caribbean and South American states. These included not only the NOI, and its successor organization, the World Community of al-Islam in the West (later known as the American Society of Muslims), but also the Islamic Mission to America, the Dar-ul-Islam movement, the Ansaaru Allah Community, and the Islamic Party in North America. In addition, African Americans and African Caribbeans in different countries embraced Islam on a more individual basis, inspired by famous African American Muslims, such as Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali. This transnational expansion of African American Islam represents a conversion process among African-descended populations, which has radiated not from the Muslim world but the United States across the western hemisphere and into Europe. Despite the international connections of some of the concerned movements, African American and African Caribbean Muslim communities outside the United States initially exhibited only limited discursive and personal links to either the Muslim world or established local Muslim communities of South Asian, Southeast Asian, and Middle Eastern descent. By the 1980s, however, many of the US-based movements were in a state of disarray and disintegration. As a result, the ties of African American and African Caribbean Muslims to the United States were weakened and local tendencies toward emancipation from US organizations and models intensified. Concomitantly, at least in some locations, interactions with larger and longer-established local Muslim communities of South Asian, Southeast Asian, and/or Middle Eastern descent increased. Another major development during the period was the general growing exposure to transnational impulses from the Muslim world, particularly from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Libya, Iran, and South Asia. Against this background, African American and African Caribbean Muslim communities outside the United States have embarked on various paths of transformation, including toward more widely recognized Sunni (including Salafi) and Shiite expressions of Islam. Many communities have nevertheless retained a distinctly Afro-centric character, either in orientation or just in membership, without subscribing to a racialist theology. Notable cases in point are Trinidad’s Jamaat al-Muslimeen, the Afro-Colombian Shiite community of Buenaventura, and Suriname’s Sadaqatul Islam, as well as London’s Salafi Brixton Mosque. Individual African American and African Caribbean Muslim scholars and leaders, such as the Trinidadian Shiite Shaykh Ahmed Haneef or the Jamaican Jihadist preacher Abdullah el-Faisal, have, however, acquired followings and influence extending way beyond African-descended constituencies. Arguably, the most well-known African Caribbean scholar to date is the Jamaica-born Bilal Philips, one of the key figures of Salafi preaching in English.

Encounters between Americans, Muslims, and Jews in North Africa played a foundational role in Americans’ early understanding of Islam and Judaism. At a time when the United States population had few Jews and virtually no free Muslims, North Africa was one of the places Americans were most likely to meet individuals from these groups. Initially, American sailors and diplomats encountered North African Muslims and Jews as the result of frequent ship captures by Barbary corsairs beginning in the colonial period and culminating in the 1780s and 1790s. After 1815, the sailors and diplomats were joined by missionaries journeying to the Mediterranean region to convert Jews and Muslims as well as non-Protestant Christians. These encounters prompted a good deal of literature published in the United States, including captivity narratives, novels, plays, histories, and missionary journals. These publications reinforced two dominant views of Islam. First, the early focus on Barbary corsairs capturing American “slaves” reinforced old notions of Islam as despotic and Muslims as “savages” similar to Native Americans. Missionary accounts prompted more thoughtful approaches to Muslim theology at the same time that they reinforced existing notions of Islam as a deceitful religion and revivified millenarian hopes that the declining Ottoman Empire foretold the Second Coming. As a result of the captivity crises, Americans often had to deal with the area’s small but influential group of Jewish merchants in order to get terms and credit to free their countrymen. These fraught negotiations reinforced older European stereotypes of Jews as sharpers and Shylocks. As with Islam, the missionary period brought more thoughtful consideration of Jewish theology as Americans engaged in chiliastic hopes of bringing the Jews to Jerusalem. After 1850 or so, Americans interested in Jews or Muslims looked less frequently to North Africa. Growing immigrant populations, first of Jews and then of Muslims, meant that Americans could encounter people of all three Abrahamic faiths at home. At the same time, missionary interests moved east, into the Holy Land, Syria, Turkey, and ultimately East Asia. Nevertheless, the early impact of North Africa on American thinking retained its influence, as is evident from President Barack Obama’s 2009 speech on American-Islamic relations delivered in Cairo.