Believing in South Central
Everyday Islam in the City of Angels

By Pamela J. Prickett

The area of Los Angeles known as South Central is often overshadowed by dismal stereotypes, problematic racial stigmas, and its status as the home to some of the city’s poorest and most violent neighborhoods. Amid South Central’s shifting demographics and its struggles with poverty, sociologist Pamela J. Prickett takes a closer look, focusing on the members of an African American Muslim community and exploring how they help each other combat poverty, job scarcity, violence, and racial injustice. This engaging ethnography relates how believers in this longstanding religious community see Islam as a way of life, a comprehensive blueprint for individual and collective action, guiding how to interact with others, conduct business, strive for progress, and cultivate faith. Believing in South Central offers deep insights into the day-to-day lived religion of the Muslims who call this community home, showing how the mosque provides a system of social support and how believers deepen their spiritual practice not in spite of, but through, conditions of poverty.
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"Smart and highly original, Believing in South Central details how a small Muslim community in South Central, Los Angeles, makes meaning of their faith in the midst of a changing racial landscape and a declining community of believers. Prickett brings nuanced analysis, beautiful prose, and seamless narration together in this ethnography that will expand scholars’ understanding of how African Americans practice their Islamic faith outside Arab and South Asian Muslim communities." - Ula Y. Taylor, author The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam

“Believing in South Central is an amazing book. What Prickett has achieved with her writing style is extraordinary. I found myself getting to know the characters, engrossed in each of the rich ethnographic stories that tell us so much about how religion is deeply intertwined with race, class, and gender.” - Melissa Wilde, author Birth Control Battles: How Race and Class Divided American Religion

"When even the methodological appendix brings you to tears, you know you have found a gem of a book." - Grace Yukich, author Religion is Raced: Understanding American Religion in the Twenty-first Century

"...a stunning ethnography." - Shobhana Xavier, host New Books in Islamic Studies and author of Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism

"Believing in South Central marries affectionate respect for the author’s subjects with a deep cultural and historical understanding of the African American Muslim community." - Booklist

"...the book includes a realness and humor in the perplexities of carrying out fieldwork that is often left out of academic works." - Candace Mixon, The Religious Studies Project