The twentieth-century history of black resistance to slavery and imperialism is bound up with the Cold War, the struggle against colonialism, and racial justice movements across the globe. Sohail Daulatzai has revealed another dimension of this epic: the role of Islam in firing the black radical imagination and in constructing counternarratives to the governing integrationist paradigm in the United States. The author emphasizes the degree to which Muslims brought African Americans into conversation with a worldwide community of dissent and resolve. He makes a particularly powerful argument for the present day when he demonstrates how the conflation of Muslims with terrorism and their criminalization in the United States has paralleled the mass incarceration of African Americans.

One of the most original sections of the book examines the influence of the Middle East on African American popular culture. Daulatzai considers the impact of the 1966 film The Battle of Algiers on urban black nationalist politics and internal colonialism as an explanatory model for African Americans' plight. He analyzes the influence of Islam on hip hop, a product of African American popular culture that is now disseminated and improvised upon worldwide. The genre arose in the 1980s, with new Middle East crises and growing Western hostility toward Islam as backdrop. Black Star, Crescent Moon studies the insurgent messages in this music and notes the widespread references to Malcolm X and its antiracist and anti-imperialist commitments.

Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam (NOI) dominate much of the book, and they are made to stand in for the Muslim challenge to the West as a whole. Drawing heavily on the work of Melani McAlister, Daulatzai traces how the NOI and its most noted orator stood the “moral geography” and symbolism of Christendom on its ear to craft oppositional discourses and practices that provided alternative pathways to personal and collective emancipation for African Americans. He recuperates the Nation's use of the term “Asiatic black man,” explaining that blacks should not limit themselves to Africa as the exclusive site of what is actually a global identity. These sweeping claims, however, bury as much history as they reveal. We learn very little of the substantial history of Islam in America before the NOI, nor are the black American Muslims who did not belong to the Nation or who disagreed with its tenets acknowledged or described. It is also odd that the author sees little contradiction in bequeathing Louis Farrakhan, a lethal enemy of Malcolm X, the mantle of Malcolm's internationalist energy and commitment. No specific examination of Farrakhan's views is found in this account. Farrakhan's opportunism is forgotten, and he is praised for making peace among various hip hop artists and for being cited in their lyrics.

Black Star, Crescent Moon could use less of the author's irritatingly essentialized appeals to the “Muslim International” and the “Muslim Third World.” While the author describes the former as “a parallel space to the state,” the “Muslim Third World” is never defined. It includes variously Saudi Arabia and the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, although neither of the two leading conference luminaries, Nehru and Zhou Enlai, were Muslims or represented Muslims. If the “Muslim International” and the “Muslim Third World” are meant to connote spaces of anti-imperialist popular resistance, the inclusion of certain polities is indeed puzzling. Are people who grew up in refugee camps or confront brutal Israeli apartheid policies to be conflated with those who secretly tipple fine scotch in Jeddah mansions? In reality there is no neat equation between Islam as currently practiced and anti-imperialism and antiracism. Just as Islam has been the principal religion in some revolutionary regimes that resisted domination, in other places it has proven compatible with slavery, racism, and exploitative capitalism, now as in the past. The same may be said for all of the “universal” religions.

This work makes an important contribution in allowing readers to see beyond the intellectual ghetto to which much scholarship has consigned present-day Muslims. In so doing it ably dissects popular media representations. It ambitiously reaches beyond national borders to construct a picture of a global community of struggle. In the process, it arrives at important insights but often blurs these by indiscriminately associating all emancipatory impulses with Islam and by claiming insurgents who neither were Muslims nor were motivated by religious goals.