This week, we have a listener question! A lovely listener from Canada asked: What are your thoughts on Black Muslims making Islamic decisions?

To answer, I take a step back and ask a different question: What makes a decision Islamic in the first place?

I talk about what scholars call a "lived religion" approach to Islam and turn to Shahab Ahmed's What Is Islam? to think through how Muslims make meaning in conversation with revelation, tradition, and their lived realities. From this perspective, what makes something Islamic is not necessarily the outcome of a decision, but the meaning-making process itself. Why? Because the Islamic tradition has always contained contradictions, competing interpretations, and multiple ways of understanding what it means to live as a Muslim.

Of course, we also turn to Dr. Kayla Renée Wheeler's concept of "hegemonic Islam" to think about how race and gender shape who and what gets recognized as authentically Islamic, and why Black Muslim practices are often measured against anti-Black and gendered assumptions about the tradition.

Then, I spend time thinking with the one and only Dr. amina wadud as an example of Black Muslim decision making. Through her Tawhidic paradigm and her willingness to "just say no" to certain verses, dominant interpretations, and norms, wadud offers a powerful egalitarian framework for making meaning within the tradition and imagining more just Muslim futures.

Chapters

00:00 Teaser: What Makes Something Islamic?

00:27 Grounded in Knowing My Why So I Don't Feel Cringe

09:16 Listener Question: What Are Your Thoughts on Black Muslims Making Islamic Decisions?

10:11 What Makes Something Islamic?

19:23 Hegemonic Islam

24:55 amina wadud & Tawhidic Paradigm

32:35 — Muslima Theology: What Happens When You Disagree with the Norm?

38:24 — Why Crave Simplicity When There is the Capacity for Complexity?

Ahmed, Shahab. What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.

wadud, amina. Qur'an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman's Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

wadud, amina. Inside the Gender Jihad: Women's Reform in Islam. Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2006.

Hidayatullah, Aysha A. Feminist Edges of the Qur'an. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Wheeler, Kayla Renée. “All Americanists Are Christian, All Muslims Are Brown, but Some of Us Are Brave: Conclusion.” American Religion 2, no. 1 (2020).

I’m talking the talk and walking the walk this week by channeling an episode on channeling. I explore two questions that have become central to how I think about channeling, knowledge, and purpose: What do I desire to know more about? And what desires to be known through me?

Along the way, I discuss my experience as an academic advisor and helping students identify their intellectual passions, intuition as method, and moments when research reaches back.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Teaser: Wanna Channel?

00:32 Finding Grounding in the Flow

02:28 What Is Channeling? 2 Questions

11:37 What Is Your Medium

15:49 Intuition as Method

19:46 How to Vonnect with Me

REFERENCE

Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and Other Stories, Duke University Press, 2021.

Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects, Duke University Press, 2007.

Episode 1: Where Do You Know From?

Episode 4: Listener Question: How to Make a Writing Practice (or Any Practice) Spiritual

This week, I’m thinking about self-determination: one of the most important concepts in Black political, intellectual, and spiritual life!

Starting from a moment of personal reflection on feeling caught in an ebb rather than a flow, I explore what it means to determine the potentiality of your own being according to your own sense of things. Moving between Black intellectual history and my own life, I trace how self-determination has taken different forms across Black thought, from struggles for community control over schools to Black nationalist visions of independent nations.

Thinking with the histories of Ocean Hill-Brownsville, the Republic of New Afrika, and Black Power era organizing, I reflect on why self-determination has never meant just one thing and why every attempt to live a self-determined life is necessarily messy, unfinished, and full of trial and error.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Teaser

00:27 Grounding in the Ebb and Flow of Life

04:07 - What is Self-Determination?

07:01 - Two Different Takes on Self-Determination in 1968: The Republic of New Afrika and Ocean Hill-Brownsville

19:01 - Self-Determination as a Lived Practice

30:05 - Self-Determination as Trial and Error

References:

Getachew, Adom. Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019.

Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.

For a good read on the religion of Black Power, I would recommend: Corbman, Marjorie. Divine Rage: The Religious and Political Dimensions of Black Power. New York: NYU Press, 2025.

For more on Ocean Hill-Brownsville, I recommend listening to School Colors, a podcast about race, education, and the struggle for community control in Brooklyn during the Ocean Hill-Brownsville crisis:

https://www.schoolcolorspodcast.com/brooklyn