In the mid-1990s, Shaykh Arona Rashid Faye al-Faqir arrived in South Carolina from Senegal. Settling in Moncks Corner, he brought with him the Mustafawiyya Tariqa, a Sufi movement that emphasizes remembrance and inward cultivation, which he inherited from its founder, Shaykh Muhammad Mustafa Gueye. Today, Masjid Muhajjirun wal Ansar in Moncks Corner remains the center of this North American transnational community despite the Mustafawiyya Tariqa’s spread to larger cities like Philadelphia and Atlanta. Monck’s Corner serves as a haven for Muslims to build community and, as Youssef J. Carter argues, to construct diasporic consciousness as they connect with Muslims across the Atlantic.
In The Vast Oceans, Carter shows that this expansion of a West African Sufi movement in the Black Atlantic offers those traveling the Mustafawiyya path empowerment through spiritual care as they confront historical and contemporary anti-Blackness. As Carter tracks the community’s thought and practice over time and space, he examines how practices of solidarity and remembrance aid in healing. Ultimately, his richly textured depiction of lived religion expands our understanding of global Islam, particularly the dynamic Black Muslim devotional practices of study and remembrance that span from West Africa to the American South.