Pseudoarchaeology and Islam in America

One of the key contexts for pseudoarchaeological thought is religion. Not only have religious traditions long informed archaeological thinking, but contemporary religious practices in their efforts to adapt their thought to the modern world saw archaeology or at very least an empirical understanding of the past as a crucial foundation to modern belief.

Within 20th century African American religions, these empirical approaches to the past took on added significance. These groups often sought to restore a sense of a common past that the displacement of slavery and the Great Migration had disrupted. The historical narratives constructed in these contexts were often innovative and compelling, they drew upon a wide range of sources, and emphasized a rigorous method and epistemology. At the same time, these narratives emerged from communities whom the white majority had largely excluded from higher education as well as economic and political advancement. 

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been reading Michael A. Gomez’s Black Crescent: The Experiences and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas (2005). The book is really quite remarkable and helped me bring together some important strands in my research on Black pseudoarchaeology.

First, it is important to stress that there is nothing pseudo about this book. It is rigorously researched, precise in its argumentation, and qualified in its assessments. Gomez’s argument do, however, provide important context for the rise 20th century Islamic movements in the United States and their conspicuous efforts to construct arguments for the origins of the African American community.

Gomez argues suggestively (and at times a bit cautiously) for gossamer strands of continuity between the religious traditions among enslaved Black Muslims in the Caribbean and the American south and the rise of groups such as the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam. Without trying to reproduce Gomez’s careful and nuanced argument, he notes that both Noble Drew Ali and Elijah Muhammad had roots in areas in the South where known enslaved Muslims lived in the first half of the 19th century. More than that, Gomez demonstrated that there is evidence for the memory of Muslim traditions and their possible persistence into the late 19th century in the American south. Gomez is careful in asserting that there is no known connection between Ali or Muhammad and persistent Muslim traditions in their region, but he suggests that their identification with Islamic traditions reflect Black religious practices dating to their earliest time in the Americas.  

The book does a masterful job critically unpacking the history, theology, and religious practices associated with Moorish Science and Nation of Islam. This involves recognizing how these broadly Islamic practices offered new forms of identity to its adherent by combining Afro-centric, Islamic, and innovative arguments for the origins of the African American community both in the Americas and globally. The new narratives served to push back against notions  of Black identity in the US anchored solely in the painful memories of slavery. While Moorish Science and Nation of Islam both had different attitudes toward race, both sought to redefine racial identities. Nation of Islam argued not only for Black historical priority, but also superiority to Whites. Moorish Science, in contrast, argued that racial identities served to obscure Moorish ethnic and even national identities entitled to the African American community in the US.

The significance of this work for my scholarship on Black pseudoarchaeology (and archaeology and pseudoarchaeology in general) is that Gomez offers a compelling vision of historical continuity in the Black community in the Atlantic World. Without overstating the point, he provides a window into the way in which Black communities constructed meaningful pasts, outside of the humiliating memory of enslavement as well as outside of white dominated 20th-century institutions. What qualifies some of these narratives as pseudoarchaeology — rather than more broadly generic forms of invented traditions or myth-making — is the appeal to the use of evidence, “scientific” reasoning, and empiricism aligns the arguments offered by these groups with the emerging discourse of scientific archaeology (and history) suggests an appeal to the authority vested in these methods. 

These new ways of seeing and understanding the Black past not only serve as an important foundation for the Civil Rights Movement in the second half of the 20th century, but also represented a wellspring of creativity of Black artists, musicians, and writers. Far from being the gateway to Continental racism (whether in its mid-century Nazi guise or in its earlier incarnations) that reifying the logic of colonialism and nationalism, Black pseudoarchaeology (and pseudo history) offered a foundation for new forms of African American identity, reformulated tired racial discourse in new ways, and provided a sense of spiritual succor during times of displacement. By taking seriously these forms of pseudoarchaeology, we have the opportunity to create space in our discipline for narratives traditionally marginalized by a kind of disciplinary possessiveness toward modern scientific truth and show how in the hands of diverse communities these modern tools of knowledge making serve counter hegemonic ends.