Faculty Advisor

Dr. Youssef Carter is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Kenan Rifai Fellow in Islamic Studies at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. He is currently writing a book called "The Vast Oceans: Remembering God and Self on the Mustafawi Sufi Path" which is a multisite ethnography of a transatlantic spiritual network of African-American and West African Muslims that rely on dhikr as a spiritual technology and deploy certain modes of West African Islamic spiritual training to navigate historical-political contexts around the Black Atlantic. What will hopefully be a groundbreaking contribution to the study of Islamic spirituality and Culture is based upon extensive ethnographic research in South Carolina and in Senegal amongst Muslims who are members of the Mustafawi Tariga. Dr. Carter is also a contributing editor for the Journal of Africana Religions and Transforming Anthropology Journal. He serves as an advisory board member of the 'After Malcolm Digital Archive', sponsored in part by the Abu Suleyman Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University, which chronicles the oral histories of African-American Muslims and serves as a repository for digitized historical documents, newspapers, and memorabilia related to their involvement in the Black Freedom Struggle from 1965 onward.