Anyone familiar with the history of Black radical organizing here in the United States will recognize the name Assata Shakur. Many will have read her autobiography, and even more will have heard, or chanted, her famous claim: We have nothing to lose but our chains. This same group of people—of which I am a part—will also have heard of her passing last year and will have mourned her death. In mourning and remembering her, we’ll offer our blessings. Rest in peace and power.
However, in mourning and remembering her, we might have forgotten something important: for a brief period in her life, Assata Shakur was a Muslim. Shakur would eventually downplay this part of her life in her autobiography, but, as Atiya Husain points out, this period, however brief, can tell us a lot about race, religion, resistance, and Blackness.
Shakur is the protagonist of Husain’s disruptive and compelling No God but Man: On Race, Knowledge, and Terrorism. This text is a critical engagement with (the violence of) race, the epistemic and theological hegemony of white normativity, and Islam’s potential as a political, theological, and epistemic counter to all of it—with Shakur at its center.
Do not assume that No God but Man is a biography of Shakur. While Shakur is at the text’s center,there are other characters who make important appearances. You’ll encounter, for example, Adolphe Quetelet and his concept of the “average man” (l’homme moyen), which, as Husain elaborates, is a criminological correlate to—if not expression of—what Sylvia Wynter critically describes as the genre of Man. As such, l’homme moyen epistemologically sediments criminology within a white supremacist Eurocentric framework. And, from the very first page, you’ll encounter the FBI and its infamous Most Wanted Terrorist (MWT) list—a list that is central to Husain’s interventions.
Shakur is at the center of all these discussions. She was on the MWT list, and—although Quetelet was long dead before Shakur was even born—as Husain shows, Quetelet laid the epistemic foundations for the way she was included on this list, particularly with respect to the relationship between race and religion. As such, Shakur’s placement on this list raises critical questions about the epistemological (and theological) assumptions that shape our current thinking. From my perspective, Husain sits with Assata Shakur as a prism and critical interlocutor, with and through which Husain finds herself grappling with some unsettling and disruptive conclusions regarding Blackness, race, religion, and the relationship between all three.
I’m not trafficking in hyperbole when I say No God but Man is disruptive and unsettling. It placed unexpected demands on me; it required that I critically reassess my fealty to the longstanding scholarly conclusions-turned-assumptions regarding Blackness, race, and religion, and their relationship, and it did so by attending to two interrelated parts of Shakur’s life: 1) her brief period as a publicly practicing Muslim; and 2) her inclusion on the FBI’s MWT list. To frame my interview with her, then, I’ll simply note the ways that Husain’s book challenged and unsettled me.
First, No God but Man puts pressure on the assumption that, at least since 9/11, Islam was a site of and for what many scholars have called the racialization of religion. Given all the discourses surrounding “terrorism” and “Islamism,” it feels almost commonsensical to draw an analogy between the violence of antiblackness and the violence of Islamophobia. Brilliantly drawing from giants in Black critical theory like R.A. Judy, Husain demands that we question this assumption. If this is the case, Husain seems to ask, then why does the FBI’s MWT list conspicuously omit the racial identity of many Arab men while nevertheless identifying Shakur—who was also a practicing Muslim, however briefly—by way of racial categories?
Second, given the FBI’s curious consistency regarding omitting the race of many MWT targets, Husain also unsettles the (also commonsensical) conclusion that race and racialization are necessary and inherent referents for Blackness. Underscoring the ways that Shakur and others (including Huey Newton) deployed Islam in service of a different kind of Blackness, Husain situates herself in a tradition of Black critical theory that refuses to reduce Blackness to racial Blackness.
Racial Blackness is the blackness of what R.A. Judy theorizes as the Negro: that being whose primary, and perhaps only, epistemological and ontological point of reference is its existence as a commodity, always and already available for consumption and manipulation by others. As such, the Negro is always and already disempowered—it cannot be anything other than what Hortense Spillers has described as “being for the captor.” There’s no space for resistance, for empowerment here—and Husain wants to empower Black people.
This is why Husain invokes Shakur’s embrace of Islam: Shakur’s embrace of Islam enabled her to engage in a certain kind of resistance—by way of her identity and practices as a Muslim. As Husain demonstrates, in both Shakur’s life as well as the myriad ways that Islam is demonized by the West, Islam operates an epistemological and theological counter to Man/l’homme moyen. Husain discloses how Islam offers an alternative epistemology and theology, one that counters the hegemonic theological and epistemological violence of the West. As such, No God but Man offers a trenchant criticism of what philosopher of Black religion Victor Anderson might call “the blackness that whiteness created.” There are other ways of living as Black, Husain intimates. One need not be subjected to the epistemological categories—and therefore epistemic and political constraints—that race entails.
Third, No God but Man forced me to grapple with my own moralism regarding the history of Black radical resistance. The final chapter, “Assata, Black Madonna,” pushed me to recognize how many of us in activist and organizing circles demand a certain kind of moral and legal respectability out of our heroic figures—that our heroic figures be legally innocent. But what if Shakur wasn’t innocent? What if she did break the law? In short, why do we need her to be innocent to support her—and, more to the point, doesn’t affirming her legal innocence (outside of a legal strategy in court) render us subject to the very antiblack laws that enable our suffering and death in the first place? If we are to really engage in a radical politics, we must also radically reassess our relationship to the law, and therefore to the very concept of innocence.
There are other implications of Husain’s text. I cannot offer them all here. But what I can say is this: after having read No God but Man, my thinking has shifted. My politics have changed. And more to the point, my understanding of Blackness, race, and religion, and their relationship, has been unsettled.
I think this is all for the good. After reading this interview, you might find it all for the good, too. –BMG
This interview was conducted over email and therefore has been edited for clarity and readability.
BMG: I think you’re doing something polemical in this book, and I don’t mean that in a bad way! As I read you, it seems that a central—indeed, foundational—claim in the book is that Islam offers a way of countering the violence of Man/man. This unsettles a lot of assumptions, particularly along racial and theological lines.
One of those assumptions regards Blackness: I’m still grappling with your claim about a Blackness that isn’t racialized, as part of me is too Afropessimist to think about Blackness without referring to the confines of racial (which is to say, for you, theological) categories. But I also resonate with thinkers like Fred Moten and Ashon Crawley who speak of Blackness as a force, and therefore as something that is irreducible to the racialized categorical logics of Man/L’homme Moyen.
Maybe we begin here, then: Can you speak to the way the book unsettles, if not disrupts, our longstanding assumptions regarding race (and, in a connected way, theology)?
AH: Thank you for this thoughtful response. The book challenges and unsettles what many of us build our perspectives upon, what I had as well, so I appreciate your immediate recognition of that. That recognition allows for conversations that include productive tensions and differences between perspectives. So, first of all, thank you for your careful attention!
Yes, Islam does have such a space in the book, especially in the case of Assata Shakur. This is one of the things that is unsettling for some readers. My main thought on that concerns evidence, and then, following Wynter’s lead, I suggest that we think critically about our terms of description because they give reality. So the ability of Islam to counter the violence of man is evidenced empirically in Assata Shakur and then also holds theoretically, where man is this secular figure, and Islam has a secularism in a very different way (if you consider Professor Sherman Jackson’s new work) or is that which the secular has been constructed against.
I really appreciate what you’re saying about the racialization claim; it is certainly in tension with Afropessimism. On that, I tend to agree with what Hortense Spillers and Lewis Gordon have argued. And add to that the history of statistics and modeling, where there is excess and a question of how well data fit a model—that’s part of what leads me to the conclusion that there is much about Blackness that does not fit the racial terms set out for it. This is not to say that racism is moot, or anything like that. But the goal is to understand that violence accurately, which is hard when part of the violence is definitional, theoretical, epistemological. So there is something important about moving against definitions and thinking that does the work of racializing African-descended peoples (and everyone else too, really).
BMG: Thanks for clarifying all this. I first want to note the importance of description for you in this text. It seems that you’re following Sylvia Wynter in noting the importance of “descriptive statements” regarding humanity—in other words, how we describe things shapes what we know and can know. As you’ve made clear, there are epistemological and political stakes to our descriptions of humans.
I want to stay with your discussion, and critique, of race and racism. No God but Man produces a compelling account of the earlier debates around the relationship between race and racism, but more to the point here, it suggests that race itself is violent—that there is no way to think about race without invoking the violence of racism. In grappling with this, I couldn’t help hearing the early Du Bois’ “The Conservation of the Races.” Du Bois’s early position was that the classificatory schema of race itself was something worth holding on to. And I dunno: after reading your text, I’m starting to question that claim—that each race, as a race, has something “distinct” to offer.
AH: Description is important because, as you put it so well, race constitutes the condition of possibility for racism. How can we actually understand peoplehood, that we are truly different from each other in some ways that matter, and we have different histories, practices, ways of living, etc.? By what procedures of knowledge can we do this, knowing that racial thinking is a barrier to this path that is put forth as though it were the path? How can we maintain our differences without recreating man—collapsing into a new thing to assimilate into, to be condemned in relation to, to be typologized endlessly in relation to?
I’m so glad you brought up Du Bois’ “The Conservation of the Races.” On my read, following what Nahum Chandler is suggesting in his book on Conservation, Du Bois is thinking through how to maintain this sense of peoplehood and unique contributions in a way that does not preserve the terms of engagement with race even as it uses similar words. If I can say it somewhat flippantly, it is called “The Conservation of the Races,” not “The Conservation of Race.” In this, Du Bois is engaging in the work of revisiting the terms of description in a way that moves against the historical obliterations producing the “Negro.”
BMG: Speaking of the “Negro,” I’m really grappling with what I think is at stake in this project. Part of it, at least to me, is an attempt to expose how racialization is an epistemological-theological tool of disempowerment. Drawing on R. A. Judy, Sylvia Wynter, and others, you suggest that the “Negro”—that invented being who is marked as the expression of racial blackness—is, by necessity, a disempowered being. In multiple places in the text, you demonstrate that the Negro is understood as powerless in large part because it is a racialized being, i.e., a being whose existence is measured in terms of its distance from the (de-godded—which is to say, political-theological entity) man/Man2/L’homme Moyen. There are a few connected implications that I’d like for you to unpack here, if that’s okay:
First, it seems to me that, drawing from your genealogical work in the first chapter, race is already theological. Can you say more here?
AH: Yes, race is already theological. If we take Wynter’s de-godding seriously in our understanding of the figure of man, which is racial, among other things, then race was theological from the very beginning. It does not suddenly become theological only when it is leveraged against religious groups like Muslims. The argument that race has always been theological is a theoretical one but also a historical one. Quetelet was part of a broader process of secularizing statistics. Regularities in social phenomena like births and deaths were explained by early statisticians as the product of divine design. In this example of de-godding, Quetelet, among others, explained these patterns as the outcome of (a secular understanding of) nature. A de-godded nature.
Nature was also that very thing that Quetelet argued l’homme moyen, that peak human, could control in order to bend in ways that benefit him. Man controls nature, man is superior in the hierarchy of humans. If man effectively takes the place of God in the order of knowledge, it becomes impossible to tease out the racial from the religious or theological. It is not even that they are intertwined, entangled, intersecting, or some other metaphor implying separation and then combination. And we are also not talking about identities attached to bodies. Where does race end and theology begin?
BMG: This is a great segue to the second implication I’d like for you to unpack, particularly regarding Islam. In No God but Man, Islam becomes a counter to the racial disempowerment that is the Negro on two levels: first, in the long history of the West, Islam is understood as a rival power to the West (read: Europe/Man), and second, because—as you show in the third chapter—identifiably Muslim people on the MWT list are more often than not raceless. If I’m following you here, it is precisely the racelessness of Islam that demonstrates its ability to counter the violence of man, but it is also this same racelessness that invites violence as well.
AH: What a great summary. Yes, the racelessness of the penultimate Muslim in western race-thinking in the 21st century—that is, the terrorist—represents a sort of glitch in the matrix of race. Race involves the claim that everything can and is categorized because it is natural, but look here. It actually doesn’t do this. Very plainly, some of the most reviled boogeymen of the twenty-first century so far are raceless. This raises questions. My interest is in posing those questions because they have broad implications. What does it mean to have race at all?
Islam is at the heart of those broad implications. There’s something about how Islam is positioned in European and American political thought as a theological enemy, and then there’s also something about Islam itself as the title gestures to. “No God but Man” is a play on the “no God but God” of Islam. Man refers to Wynter’s man (but also paraphrases Huey Newton who meant something very different by it, a different kind of humanism). When put into an Islamic frame, it is the theological dimensions of man that are highlighted and brought to our attention.
BMG: In light of the first and second implications, if I’m hearing you correctly, Assata Shakur’s deployment of Islam was evidence of this power—along with her shifting position on the MWT list.
AH: Assata Shakur’s Islam is important for the argument in part because she does not have a cultural or political place as Muslim; she is not widely acknowledged as such, and she also had her reservations about Islam. Paradoxically, her ambivalence about the theological fundamentals of Islam like belief in God means, in the context of her struggle and the legal system, that we should think about Islam religiously or theologically rather than as an identity marker as many otherwise do. So we’re not thinking about the world of identity and body and color and so on. Assata Shakur engages Islam religiously in her struggle even with this ambivalence, e.g., not standing up for the judge, refusing pork, Fridays away from court. Even when Islam serves a symbolic function for her, it is not divorced from the religious.
This is worth keeping in mind years later when we consider her representation on the Most Wanted Terrorist list next to all of these other kinds of Muslims. It forces us to consider her engagement with Islam as well as the other Muslims on the MWT list in the same framework as opposed to one set of analysis for people like her and another set of analysis for the brown Muslims, foreign Muslims, immigrant Muslims, or whatever other phrases we have in circulation. It is often argued that this group of Muslims is racialized. Is Assata Shakur then racialized as a Muslim? What does that mean anyway when the Muslims on the Most Wanted Terrorist list are systematically without a race category?
It is sometimes understood as sufficient to argue that being Muslim, understood as a racialized religious status, “intersects” with blackness and other statuses and systems, but this is where “intersectionality” seems to function more as a placeholder than as sufficient, departing from the precision of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work on legal categories. So we must have a different analysis of what race is, and what its relationship to Islam is, in order to think about the complexities of the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist list, and for me that involves getting a good historical sense of their relationship without making race bigger than it is, and without engaging it or analyzing it on its own terms and thus reproducing its limitations and indignities.
BMG: As we draw this to a close, I want to focus on the international implications of the text. This should come as no surprise to you because, as you well know, the Black Panther Party was an internationalist organization. It understood its struggles to be in solidarity with other oppressed people across the world.
I bring this up here because you have extended meditations on Gaza in this text—meditations that do not feel forced but instead seem of a piece with the line of thinking and argumentation that you’ve laid out.
What’s striking to me about your work is how clearly you delineate what I, as a philosopher of religion, might understand as a Hegelian struggle between Islam and the Western understanding of L’homme moyen/Man. As I’ve mentioned already, No God but Man compellingly demonstrates that Islam opposes and counters the hegemonic theological, anthropological, epistemological, and sociopolitical assumptions and structures that mark Western thought. Operation Al Aqsa Flood and Israel’s genocidal actions in its aftermath strike me as one of the clearest examples of this: The near-immediate international support for Israel in the wake of October 7th was suffused with a pervasive discourse regarding “terrorists,” a term that you clearly articulate as having connections to Islam. As such, the Western support for Israel after Al Aqsa Flood was as much about an anxiety—perhaps even a fear—regarding the power of Islam as it was about the alleged rights of the Israeli nation-state. I’m curious if you have any thoughts about how your book might speak to this moment. How do you see your work speaking to those international struggles?
AH: This book took so long to write, and the final stages of the writing process were completed after October 7, 2023. For those who think Palestinians and Muslims are terrorists, it then followed that October 7 was just another proof of it. But then there were cracks in this narrative, and those cracks grew, due in part to visual exposure to firsthand accounts via social media of the war on Gaza that followed October 7. Palestinians are recording and sharing what they are going through. The brutality and its extensive documentation and visibility on social media platforms, the sheer imbalance in bloodshed, led many people in the US to ask questions they previously did not ask about Israel. Why is it bombing hospitals? Why is it killing children? Why is this six-year-old girl in an ambulance a target?
This is what Eqbal Ahmad talks about in his speech “Terrorism: Theirs and Ours.” Selective definitions of terrorism make one kind of violence appear to come out of nowhere as the expression of some inherent bloodlust, i.e., that Islamophobia you’re talking about, and such selective definitions allow larger scale violence like genocide to escape challenge, to simply be normal. Seeing genocide play out live challenged this fantasy of innocence quite a bit. Many who were previously supporters of Israel shifted, both globally and domestically. A more holistic understanding of the situation—a more accurate understanding based on material, observable reality—became possible.
This is a significant shift for the US. It drives home one of the main points of the book about seeking clarity of vision in the face of the skewing and distorting quality of race-based thinking that makes power or weakness appear as a permanent feature of a people.
BMG: Lastly, I have to say that I am grateful for your emphasis on the religiosity of Assata’s actions. It is precisely in the practices that you name—not going to court on Fridays, not eating pork, etc.—that we get a glimpse of a mode of life that is irreducible to the racial blackness of L’homme moyen/Man. Perhaps it is in the religious/theological that we can find other, and maybe even better, ways of understanding and relating to one another.
In this regard, perhaps a term like inshallah offers something more than an aspiration. Maybe it stands as a theological invitation to a different, more radical, epistemology grounded in something other than the colonialist and racist (pseudo-)scientific discourses Europe has developed and used as tools of domination. If so, perhaps the invocation of the divine—inshallah—demonstrates that one need not make Man their God.
AH: I appreciate your focus on the place of religious practice. As our relations with one another are already infused with a religion and theology based on man, it makes sense that relating to one another differently would also involve these. To reject the divinity of that presumed superior human is an example, like you rightly point out. Our relations with one another can have their basis in a different understanding of humanity and divinity, and, without flattening all our many differences from one another, perhaps we can agree that we do not wish to live as though Man is God, which is to say, with the material advancement of a small proportion of humanity as the goal that orders our lives.
The word inshallah, “if Allah wills,” has quite a life. It is a ubiquitous phrase that infuses everyday speech. It is not something said only on special occasions, and for many Muslims it has many tones: hope, fear, superstition, suspicion, weariness, fortitude, sarcasm, and humor. A running joke is that if someone says inshallah in response to a proposed plan they are clearly not very interested in, it is their way of saying no without saying no. Kids know that if they want ice cream for breakfast tomorrow and their parent says inshallah in response, it does not bode well for them!
The everydayness of the phrase is also evident in how it has appeared in Joe Biden’s speech as well as Alexandria Ocacio-Cortez’s social media. Its ubiquity does not make it small, however. It speaks to the cultural place of a divine check on human capacity for action, even when this meaning is not always at the forefront of the awareness of those who use this phrase. The phrase is suggestive of the structural arrangement of a worldview, suggestive of who God is in relation to humans. Everywhere there are indicators that presumed superior humans, whether called man or l’homme moyen, or another name, do not have a totalizing, permanent control.
