East of the Sun (West of the Moon): Islam, the Ahmadis, and African America

This article attempts to intervene in the standard narrative of African-American Islam, where ideas of separation and exclusion reign. Far less inscribed, however, is a history of African-American Islam that views the faith as a religion of universal belonging, but one that arrives at it through a particular aesthetics of living. Music is an important part of this story and of this article, and when it was originally delivered the article began with Yusef Lateef's "Meditation" (Prestige, 1957) and concluded with John Coltrane's "Acknowledgment" (Impulse, 1964).