Review: ‘Beyond Bilal’ by Mustafa Briggs

If you’ve been following Mustafa Briggs on social media for the last few years, you will have seen him promoting his speaking tours ‘Before Malcolm’ and the eponymous ‘Beyond Bilal’, which he delivered at various universities and institutions in Europe and the US. Unable to attend any of his events, I was pleased to see he had put his talks to paper and published them in a book. I pre-ordered immediately and after must have been a year (self-publishing is rife with challenges), my copy finally arrived.

The Islamic scholastic tradition is no stranger to books extolling the virtues of people of Black and
African descent. As Mustafa mentions in the book, al-Jahiz, the famous Abbasid Mu’tazilite thinker wrote a book on the superiority of Black people. The great Imam al-Suyuti also wrote a similar treatise nearly 600 years later. More recently, there has been a steady output of literature in the West, from writers such as Imam Dawud Walid and Professor Rudolph Bilal Ware, discussing anti-Black racism that has existed within Islamic societies and cultures despite the faith’s unequivocal emphasis on the equality of all humanity.

Beyond Bilal begins by reiterating the information that can be found in the works of the aforementioned writers, including a list of Qur’anic figures and ṣaḥāba who are described as Black. But what Mustafa attempts to do is use this information to broaden our horizons by considering the place of African Islam within the global tapestry of Islamic cultures and traditions – by going ‘beyond Bilal’ – who for far too many Muslims represents the beginning and end of the ‘Black contribution’ to Islam.

…Bilal is often tokenized when we discuss race and Blackness in Islam and the Muslim community. Any claims of racism or discrimination amongst Muslims, especially within the Muslim community, are usually waved away with an unhelpful appeal to Bilal’s position in Early Islam.

Mustafa Briggs, Beyond Bilal

The following section proceeds with an introduction of Islam within West Africa and its flourishing there, and the history of Islam in the Americas (which was ultimately connected to West Africa). The book then shifts its focus onto the numerous scholastic traditions and schools that have existed in West Africa historically and continue to exist today.

As someone who only relatively recently learned about the history of Islam within West Africa, the book made clear how little I still know. Some of the historical theories presented regarding the possibility of West Africans having travelled and settled within the Americas before Christopher Columbus were also really interesting. Though I’d heard of these theories before, the historical eye-witness accounts Mustafa includes leave little doubt that about the presence of West Africans in the Americas long before The Transatlantic Slave Trade. It is certainly something to read further on.

Overall, Beyond Bilal is a very accessible and informative read that a lot of people can take benefit from, whether they are already knowledgable about Islamicate history or just beginning to learn. Though I would have liked more references to have been included in book to enable further reading, this is something that could easily be rectified in a future edition.

In writing this review, my only slight criticism to what is otherwise a very informative book, was going to be that although the book is subtitled ‘Black history in Islam’, there is little mention of East Africa, which also has a deep and profound Islamic history, except in the context of the first hijrāh to Abyssinia in the time of the Prophet ﷺ. My suggestion was going to be that perhaps this could be taken into consideration as a topic for a future book; but it turns out (as Mustafa has informed me) that that book is actually already in progress and to be published soon- no doubt an excellent accompaniment to Beyond Bilal.