Michael Angelo Gomez

Beginning in Latin America in the 15th century, this text represents a social history of African Muslims and their descendants throughout the Americas, through to the post-slavery period of the 20th century.

"This book examines the global unfolding of the African Diaspora, the migrations and dispersals of the people of Africa, from antiquity to the modern period. Their exploits, challenges, and struggles are discussed over a wide expanse of time in ways that link as well as differentiate past and present circumstances. The experiences of Africans in the Old World, in the Mediterranean and Islamic worlds, is followed by their movement into the New, where their experience in lands claimed by Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French and English colonial powers is analyzed from enslavement through to the Cold War. While appropriate mention is made of persons of renown, particular attention is paid to the everyday lives of working class people and their cultural efflorescence. The book also attempts to explain contemporary plights and struggles through the lens of history." -- Publisher description.

"After discussing specific ethnic groups in Africa, Gomez follows their movement to North America, where they tended to be amassd in recognizable concentrations within individual colonies."

"Bundu is an anomaly among the precolonial Muslim states of West Africa. Founded during the Jihads which swept the savannah in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it developed a pragmatic policy, unique in the midst of fundamentalist, theocratic Muslim states. Its founder, Malik Sy, set the state on a distinctive course, and the ruling Fulbe group kept its distance from subsequent Islamic revolutionary movements and tolerated the diverse religious and social practices of its Soninke, Malinke, and Wolof subjects. Located in the Upper Senegal and with access to the Upper Gambia, Bundu played a critical role in regional commerce and production and reacted quickly to the stimulus of European times."--BOOK JACKET. "Drawing upon a wide range of sources both oral and documentary, Arabic, English, and French, Dr Gomez provides the first full account of Bundu's history. He analyses the foundation and growth of an Islamic state at a crossroads between the Saharan and trans-Atlantic trade, paying particular attention to the relationship between Islamic thought and court policy, and to the state's response to militant Islam in the early nineteenth century."--BOOK JACKET.