Overview

In the mid-1990s, Shaykh Arona Rashid Faye al-Faqir arrived in South Carolina from Senegal. Settling in Moncks Corner, he brought with him the Mustafawiyya Tariqa, a Sufi movement that emphasizes remembrance and inward cultivation, which he inherited from its founder, Shaykh Muhammad Mustafa Gueye. Today, Masjid Muhajjirun wal Ansar in Moncks Corner remains the center of this North American transnational community despite the Mustafawiyya Tariqa’s spread to larger cities like Philadelphia and Atlanta. Monck’s Corner serves as a haven for Muslims to build community and, as Youssef J. Carter argues, to construct diasporic consciousness as they connect with Muslims across the Atlantic. In The Vast Oceans, Carter shows that this expansion of a West African Sufi movement in the Black Atlantic offers those traveling the Mustafawiyya path empowerment through spiritual care as they confront historical and contemporary anti-Blackness. As Carter tracks the community’s thought and practice over time and space, he examines how practices of solidarity and remembrance aid in healing. Ultimately, his richly textured depiction of lived religion expands our understanding of global Islam, particularly the dynamic Black Muslim devotional practices of study and remembrance that span from West Africa to the American South.

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9781469693576

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Reviews

""An incredibly rich and novel ethnography, The Vast Oceans creates and documents conversations between voices that are rarely brought together to show how much has been lost by their separation.""--Oludamini Ogunnaike, University of Virginia

“An incredibly rich and novel ethnography, The Vast Oceans creates and documents conversations between voices that are rarely brought together to show how much has been lost by their separation.”—Oludamini Ogunnaike, University of Virginia

“The Vast Oceans is luminous. Youssef Carter traces how Mustafawiyya remembrance binds more than a community. It sanctifies movement and reorders Black Atlantic life into networks of belonging and repair.”—Zain Abdullah, author of Black Mecca: The African Muslims of Harlem “Carter’s study shatters stereotypes about both Islam and inequity, revealing Sufism as a corrective to generations of disinheritance. It demonstrates that spirituality can endow agency among those shaping community. Inspiring!”—Beverly Mack, author of Equals in Learning and Piety: Muslim Women Scholars in Nigeria and North America “A luminous transatlantic ethnography, The Vast Oceans reframes Sufi practice as spiritual pedagogy and Black Atlantic thought, joining sacred knowledge, place, and political life with rare intimacy and rigor. Through this work, I understand home anew.”—LeRhonda Manigault-Bryant, author of Talking to the Dead: Religion, Music, and Lived Memory Among Gullah/Geechee Women “Personal and analytically sharp, this groundbreaking work takes readers on a journey as it illustrates the Black Atlantic as a vast ocean, where embodied Sufi remembrance becomes insurgent spiritual practice against institutional forgetting and toward collective healing.”—Jeanette S. Jouili, author of Pious Practice and Secular Constraint: Women in the Islamic Revival in Europe “Oceans do not merely divide; they also connect. The Vast Oceans is a thoughtful participant-observant scholarship that continues the recent trend of locating African American Islam in a wider transatlantic context.”—Omid Safi, translator and editor of Radical Love: Teachings from the Islamic Mystical Tradition “A narrative masterpiece of learning and self-transformation that will enrich the study of race, the anthropology of religion, and global Muslim identities for years to come.”—Zachary Valentine Wright, author of Realizing Islam: The Tijaniyya in North Africa and the Eighteenth-Century Muslim World “An incredibly rich and novel ethnography, The Vast Oceans creates and documents conversations between voices that are rarely brought together to show how much has been lost by their separation.”—Oludamini Ogunnaike, author of Deep Knowledge: Ways of Knowing in Sufism and Ifa, Two West African Intellectual Traditions

Author Information

Youssef J. Carter is assistant professor of religious studies and Kenan Rifai Fellow in Islamic Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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