The Ansaru Allah Community, also known as the Nubian Islamic Hebrews (AAC/NIH) and later the Nuwaubians, is an immensely important and controversial African American Muslim movement. Founded in Brooklyn in the 1970s, it spread through the prolific production and dissemination of literature and lecture tapes and became famous for continuously reinventing its belief system. In this book, Michael Muhammad Knight studies the development of AAC/NIH discourse over a period of thirty years, tracing a surprising consistency behind a facade of serial reinvention.
It is popularly believed that the AAC/NIH community abandoned Islam for Black Israelite religion, UFO religion, and Egyptosophy. However, Knight sees coherence in AAC/NIH media, explaining how, in reality, the community taught that the Prophet Muhammad was a Hebrew who adhered to Israelite law, Muhammad’s heavenly ascension took place on a spaceship, and Abraham enlisted the help of a pharaonic regime to genetically engineer pigs as food for white people. Against narratives that treat the AAC/NIH community as a postmodernist deconstruction of religious categories, Knight demonstrates that AAC/NIH discourse is most productively framed within a broader African American metaphysical history in which boundaries between traditions remain significantly permeable.
Unexpected and engrossing, Metaphysical Africa brings to light points of intersection between communities and traditions often regarded as separate and distinct. In doing so, it helps to move the field of religious studies beyond conventional categories of “orthodoxy” and “heterodoxy,” challenging assumptions that inform not only the study of this particular religious community but also the field at large.
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Introduction: “The Most Dynamic Pamphlets in History”
1. “I Am the Raisin-Headed Slave”: The Nubian Ahl al-Bayt, Sudanese Mahdiyya, and Global Blackness as Islamic Revival
2. Heralds of the Reformer: Visions of Blackamerican Muslim History
3. “The Covenant Is Complete in Me”: Nubian Islamic Hebraism and the Religion of Abraham
4. Between Zion and Mecca: Bilal as Islamic and Hebrew
5. The Sudan Is the Heart Chakra: The AAC/NIH as Sufi Tariqa
6. Islam Is Hotep: Ansar Egyptosophy
7. The Pyramidal Kaʿba: Malachi Z. York and the Nuwaubian Turn
