Racializing the Ummah Author Event

Join us to celebrate Racializing the Ummah at Source Booksellers on Monday April 6th at 5pm. Doors at 4:30pm. We are hosting this event in partnership Wayne States Center for the Study of Citizenship with Dr. Saeed Khan and we are grateful for the support of this event from Dream of Detroit. This book celebration will include a rich panel conversation, Q & A and a Book signing line.

Join at this event with a Free or Book Ticket. Everyone is welcome.

About the Book:

A robust ethnography of Islamic Relief explores difficult questions about the extensive reach of white supremacy

An ethnography of Islamic Relief (IR), the largest Islamic NGO based in the West, Racializing the Ummah explores how a Muslim organization can do good in a world that defines Muslimness as less than human. Rooted in more than a decade of international research, Rhea Rahman’s study on the organization’s projects, methods, and limitations reveals how racial capitalism permeates all aspects of humanitarianism.

Beginning with a counterhistory of Muslims in the United Kingdom following World War II, Rahman analyzes IR’s mission and transnational activities in and across places including the UK, South Africa, and Mali in the broader context of global white supremacy. She shows how IR’s approaches often effectively secularize Islam to evade anti-Muslim racism and Islamophobia, implicating concepts such as the “good” Muslim aid worker, who complies with War on Terror surveillance while attending to victims of Western colonialism. Meanwhile, Rahman theorizes the tactics of aid workers on the ground, who creatively draw on an Islamic Black radical tradition to drive real change.

About the Author:

Rhea Rahman is assistant professor of anthropology at Brooklyn College, CUNY. Her research has been published in Africa, Religions, and an edited volume of The Anthropology of White Supremacy.

in Conversation with

Charisse Burden-Stelly is associate professor of African American studies at Wayne State University. She is the coauthor of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History and the coeditor of Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writing and Reproducing Domination: On the Caribbean Postcolonial State, a collection of essays by Percy C. Hintzen.

Navid Farnia is an Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies. His research broadly explores the relationship between racial oppression in the United States and U.S. imperialism in the context of revolution and counterrevolution. Dr. Farnia’s book manuscript, National Liberation in an Imperialist World: Race, Counterrevolution, and the United States, traces the U.S. national security state’s evolution by examining how U.S. officials responded to national liberation movements at home and abroad from the 1950s to 1980.Dr. Farnia writes about race and current events and enjoys watching sports, particularly basketball, soccer, and baseball.

"Exploring themes of racialization among, across, and between Muslim communities worldwide, Racializing the Ummah positions Islamic Relief’s work in the coordinates of anti-Muslim and anti-Black racism. Rhea Rahman persuasively shows how Islamic Relief is situated between diverse logics of racialization with this much-needed and overdue book."—Darryl Li, author of The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity

"Rhea Rahman’s Racializing the Ummah is a highly original exploration of Islamic transnationalism, Western patronage, and the politics of the not-for-profit sector. Richly detailed in its descriptions of how NGO workers conceive of their participation in local contexts, Racializing the Ummah will challenge many of our existing assumptions about international charities, identity, and ‘doing good.’"—Arun Kundnani, author of What Is Antiracism? And Why It Means Anticapitalism

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