In and Out of This World: Material and Extraterrestrial Bodies in the Nation of Islam by Stephen C. Finley (review)

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Reviewed by:

• In and Out of This World: Material and Extraterrestrial Bodies in the Nation of Islam by Stephen C. Finley
• Leonard C. McKinnis

Stephen C. Finley. In and Out of This World: Material and Extraterrestrial Bodies in the Nation of Islam. Durham: Duke UP, 2023. 252 pp. $30.00.

In In and Out of This World, Stephen Finley offers a granular look at conceptions of the body in the Nation of Islam (NOI, or “The Nation”), and how these formations provide a portal of analysis for understanding the theological anthropology of the NOI. Finley is concerned with the body as a site of theological analysis. His work is crucial in understanding the sophistication of the body, its centrality to the theology of the NOI, and how the Nation’s theology of the body—specifically, the racialized body— is at the core of many of the Nation’s most consequential beliefs, particularly vis-à-vis the status of Blacks as the chosen and original people. Finley goes at length to demonstrate how ideas about the body in the NOI complicate narratives of science, history, and race while also providing a closer examination of how race and embodiment are both theorized and woven into a set of ideas that constitutes the belief-world of the Nation of Islam.

The Nation of Islam remains one of the most misunderstood Black religions in the world. In fact, its classification as a religion remains a contested category. Finley, for his part, prefers a hybridized read of the NOI, one characterized under the category of “religious nationalism.” For him, this designation “challenges existing scholarship that defines it as primarily— if not exclusively—black nationalist” (2). Indeed, the very first academic text on the Nation of Islam, C. Eric Lincoln’s The Black Muslims in America (1961), insisted on a Black nationalist lens as the hermeneutical category for an interpretation of the NOI. While Lincoln’s posture toward the NOI is helpful in terms of understanding the intersection of race, religion, and social resistance, Finley’s In and Out of This World asks readers to position their engagement with the NOI squarely within the realm of religious studies. While Finley is not alone in this regard, his work expands our understanding of the religious cosmology within the NOI and its relationship to the body, to race, and to salvation—all important themes for a rigorous understanding of the NOI.

Finley’s text is grounded in a theory that describes Black bodies as being in- and out-of-place. This novel concept of embodiment is derived from the thinking of social anthropologist Mary Douglas, who employs the metaphor of “dirt” to describe cultural notions of purity and contagion. Dirt is out of place and contaminates cultures and environments. For Finley, Black bodies inhabit this conceptual sphere as they are, in one respect, bodies out-of-place in a cultural matrix within which they symbolize a contamination, or bodies that do not “fit” within the context of purity and, at worst, the context of the “human.” Yet, for Finley, these out-of-place bodies also possess the capacity to be in-place when they internalize the fixed normative gaze of Black existence and identity as that which is subservient and reduced to nothingness. It is this paradox of Black embodiment that lies at the center of Finley’s engagement with and interpretation of the NOI.

Navigating his way through speeches, film, writings, and belief systems, Finley surgically dissects the ways in which The Nation traverses through [End Page 244] the malaise of Black embodiment as a mode of constructing theological and cosmological narratives about the origin of Black people and, for that matter, white people. For Finley, the NOI’s orientation toward the cosmological is not only significant in that it permits the NOI to make claims about Black exceptionalism, but by turning toward the cosmos and creation, Finley also reads the NOI as rooted in a religious orientation, one that the speaks to the functioning of Black spirituality in religious movements like the NOI. Finley’s thematic analysis of the Nation’s cosmological Myth of Yakub, which details events from God’s self-creation to salvation, is...