This study examines the influence(s) that Sufism in general, and West African Sufism in particular, had on African American practitioners of Islam in North America as evidenced by the growth and development of the Nation of Islam (NOI). In what follows, I argue that African Americans created a distinctive cultural attribute of Black Islam that had yet to exist on the American continent. This distinctive way of examining Black Islam is neither Arabocentric nor Afrocentric, but rather it reveals a distinctive African Diasporic element of Black Islam whereby the NOI created a hybrid Islamic identity that (1) was rooted in the racial context of the United States during the early to mid-twentieth century, (2) aligned with West African Sufi Islamic practices, (3) retained and reinvented basic tenets of “traditional Islam,” and (4) created mythologies in order circumvent white secular and sacred power structures, signaling both a cultural and religious transformation within the NOI. This social a religious transformation was created through transcultural bricolage, a hybridity of the cultural, religious, and abstract interpretations and inventions that allowed members of the NOI to practice a brand of Islam that was rooted in the particularities of the black experience. This study reveals how the Nation of Islam was forged through the processes of bricolage, a method of construction that involves using whatever is at hand, and transculturation, the process of using merging and converging cultures, to construct a religion that centered African Americans adherents.
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