Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean is the first academic work on Muslims in the English-speaking Caribbean. Khan focuses on the fiction, poetry and music of Islam in Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica, combining archival research, ethnography, and literary analysis to argue for a historical continuity of Afro- and Indo-Muslim presence and cultural production in the Caribbean: from Arabic-language autobiographical and religious texts written by enslaved Sufi West Africans in nineteenth century Jamaica, to early twentieth century fictions of post-indenture South Asian Muslim indigeneity and El Dorado, to the 1990 Jamaat al-Muslimeen attempted government coup in Trinidad and its calypso music, to judicial cases of contemporary interaction between Caribbean Muslims and global terrorism. Khan argues that the Caribbean Muslim subject, the "fullaman," a performative identity that relies on gendering and racializing Islam, troubles discourses of creolization that are fundamental to postcolonial nationalisms in the Caribbean.
Industry Reviews
"In Far From Mecca, Aliyah Khan argues that Muslim identity is neither fixed nor uniform, but is instead performative, expressed according to shifting and contingent boundaries that are responses to historical and cultural, and local and global currents. Well-written and clearly argued, this book is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the diversity of Muslims' histories and representation both in the Caribbean and across the globe."- Aisha Khan, author of Islam and the Americas
"New Books Network - New Books in Caribbean Studies" interview with Aliyah Khan
https://newbooksnetwork.com/aliyah-khan%E2%80%AFfar-from-mecca-globalizing-the-muslim-caribbean%E2%80%AFrutgers-up-2020/- New Books Network - New Books in Caribbean Studies
"Specialists in Caribbean studies and Islamic World studies will find particularly unique and timely Khan's insights."- New West Indian Guide
BAR Book Forum: Aliyah Khan's "Far from Mecca" by Roberto Sirvent
https://www.blackagendareport.com/bar-book-forum-aliyah-khans-far-mecca- Black Agenda Report
"Aliyah Khan presents a brilliant illumination of alternative texts that relieves Caribbean Islamic adherents from facile postcolonial racial categorizations and grants them fluid identities of the twenty-first-century global subject."- Patricia Mohammed, author of Imaging the Caribbean: Culture and Visual Translation
"Khan expands our imagination of what a global Muslim imaginary is, and why that matters. We can no longer understand Muslim communities outside of the Middle East and North Africa as peripheral to what Islam may mean, but rather as constitutive of a global ummah that plays a role in the formation of the many Muslim subjectivities everywhere."- Journal of Indentureship and Its Legacies
"Khan's book demonstrates how scholars can both appreciate the particularities of the global Muslim experience and the nuanced history of religion in the Caribbean and the Americas....Far From Mecca is a gladly received correction to tired narratives about both global Islam and the Caribbean. My only hope is that it will provoke more conversations and research in this regard. Given Khan's erudite treatment of the subject, I have no reason to doubt that it will."- International Journal of Latin American Religions
"With its focus on Muslim Caribbean life and literature, this book expands and challenges typical takes on and typical data for American religion, Islam in the Americas and around the world, and religion and literature. The book would be well worth a look for someone interested in those fields."- American Religion
"There lies...intellectual rigour and the scholarly beauty [in] Far from Mecca: this book is intimately personal. Khan takes as her project to bear faithful witness to her own community, past, archival silencings, and liberatory possibilities."- Caribbean Quarterly
