Making Original Men: Elijah Muhammad,The Nation of Islam,and The Fruit of Islam

Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam converted thousands of African American men to Islam during the height of the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement. Muhammad's men neither protested for Civil Rights nor subscribed to the militancy of the Black Power Movement. Indeed, they construed both to be fundamentally flawed routes to justice, freedom, and equality. Nation men, or Fruit of Islam (FOI) as they are more commonly known, believed that through Islam, racial separation, and community building initiatives they could ultimately reclaim their freedom, self-respect, and manhood. The NOI provided men with a newfound sense of self and purpose and in doing so imbued them with a deep-rooted appreciation for Islam, as taught by Elijah Muhammad. Rank-and-file male members of the faith community remain largely overlooked in the extant scholarship on the NOI. This article seeks to recover the stories of rank-and-file FOI. It assesses the organisation's appeal to men, the varied means by which it challenged them and the burdens the community placed on FOI.     

Bodies in Motion: Narratives and Counter Narratives of Gendered Mobility in European Later Prehistory

Normative notions of sex and gender were prevalent in discussion of European prehistoric societies until the last quarter of the 20th century. The progressive work that challenged a binary approach, published particularly in the 1990s, created an anticipation for further nuanced interpretation. This paper argues that, in contrast to this expectation, there was a surprising return to narrating a past of binary sex and gender. Societal roles have continued to be imagined as formalised through structures based on biological sex, with men seen as active mobile agents, while women were passive and static homemakers. We argue that not only is this unhelpful, the archaeological evidence renders it incorrect. We highlight the inherent conflicts in the data to show that investigating sex and gender in the past is difficult with imperfect and complex archaeological evidence. It requires careful and deliberate consideration to avoid normative explanations. In conclusion, we propose that investigating mobility is a particularly effective topic for examining past gendered societal roles.