The Vast Oceans

“The Vast Oceans is luminous. Youssef Carter traces how Mustafawiyya remembrance binds more than a community. It sanctifies movement and reorders Black Atlantic life into networks of belonging and repair.”—Zain Abdullah, author of Black Mecca: The African Muslims of Harlem

“Carter’s study shatters stereotypes about both Islam and inequity, revealing Sufism as a corrective to generations of disinheritance. It demonstrates that spirituality can endow agency among those shaping community. Inspiring!”—Beverly Mack, author of Equals in Learning and Piety: Muslim Women Scholars in Nigeria and North America

“A luminous transatlantic ethnography, The Vast Oceans reframes Sufi practice as spiritual pedagogy and Black Atlantic thought, joining sacred knowledge, place, and political life with rare intimacy and rigor. Through this work, I understand home anew.”—LeRhonda Manigault-Bryant, author of Talking to the Dead: Religion, Music, and Lived Memory Among Gullah/Geechee Women

“Personal and analytically sharp, this groundbreaking work takes readers on a journey as it illustrates the Black Atlantic as a vast ocean, where embodied Sufi remembrance becomes insurgent spiritual practice against institutional forgetting and toward collective healing.”—Jeanette S. Jouili, author of Pious Practice and Secular Constraint: Women in the Islamic Revival in Europe

“Oceans do not merely divide; they also connect. The Vast Oceans is a thoughtful participant-observant scholarship that continues the recent trend of locating African American Islam in a wider transatlantic context.”—Omid Safi, translator and editor of Radical Love: Teachings from the Islamic Mystical Tradition

“A narrative masterpiece of learning and self-transformation that will enrich the study of race, the anthropology of religion, and global Muslim identities for years to come.”—Zachary Valentine Wright, author of Realizing Islam: The Tijaniyya in North Africa and the Eighteenth-Century Muslim World

“An incredibly rich and novel ethnography, The Vast Oceans creates and documents conversations between voices that are rarely brought together to show how much has been lost by their separation.”—Oludamini Ogunnaike, author of Deep Knowledge: Ways of Knowing in Sufism and Ifa, Two West African Intellectual Traditions

Youssef J. Carter is assistant professor of religious studies and Kenan Rifai Fellow in Islamic Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.