A Tale of Two First Books
Edward E. Curtis IV
September 18, 2025
I wrote two first books. Not because I wanted to, but because I had to.
I graduated with my doctorate in 2000 and was fortunate to land a job at Trinity University in San Antonio. That year I submitted a revised edition of my dissertation to the State University of New York Press. It was soon accepted, and Islam in Black America: Identity, Liberation, and Difference in African American Islamic Thought, appeared in 2002.
After 9/11, there were new pitfalls but also new opportunities for scholars of Islam, including a noteworthy surge in jobs. I applied for one of the new positions, and I was hired as assistant professor of religious studies at University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. I was told that, because I had published my first book before I arrived, it would not count toward my tenure. There were also rumors that the first book was not theoretically sophisticated enough. My new chair advised me that I would be wise to write another monograph and publish five or six articles that had nothing to do with the books—a publishing record that would have rivaled or bested some of the department’s senior professors.
I got to work on a second first book. I did not have enough time to research a new area, so I decided, with the advice of senior colleagues, to expand on a couple of my best refereed articles. I finished a full draft of the book, Black Muslim Religion in the Nation of Islam, 1960-1975, in 2004-2005, which I spent in residence as an NEH fellow at the National Humanities Center. I also passed my third-year review at UNC. That same year, however, I was offered tenure and an endowed chair at what was then Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (now IU Indianapolis). I published a revised version of Black Muslim Religion in rank as an associate professor in 2006 with UNC Press.
I narrate the circumstances of my two first books because it shows how both were exigent products, fired quickly in the cauldron of probationary faculty status. The reason why I submitted a lightly changed version of my dissertation to SUNY Press during my first year as a new assistant professor was because my chair had suggested I do so. I had little experience in academia, and I felt so grateful to have a good tenure-track job that I had no reason not to follow that advice. I can’t remember even entertaining the notion that I should take more time or substantially revise the dissertation.
According to Google Scholar, my first two books are my first- and third-most cited volumes. But if books are like children, I have an unabashed favorite. Black Muslim Religion, the third most cited, still reads as a fresh, useful approach to understanding not just the Nation of Islam but the history of Islam more generally among U.S. African Americans, as well. Its theoretical and methodological approaches, especially its analysis of ritual, gender, and the body, anticipated future books in Muslim American studies. Arguing that previous studies of the Nation of Islam had not analyzed sufficiently the religious and specifically Islamic nature of the movement, the book examined conversion narratives, sacred histories, bodily ethics, and rituals to understand how rank-and-file members created a novel religious culture, both socially conservative and politically radical, that liberated their minds and bodies. Based on first-person narratives in Muhammad Speaks and supplemented by oral history interviews, other first-person accounts, press reports, and other archival documents, the book was thoroughly researched, as well.
Even if this second first book was born out of necessity, and I had to produce it quickly, it made a worthwhile scholarly contribution. I still open it on occasion and like what I read.
Conversely, I look at its sibling with a feeling of regret but not without sympathy for its aspirations. An analysis of five figures, Edward Wilmot Blyden, Noble Drew Ali, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and W. D. Mohammed, Islam in Black America argued that African American Islamic thought could be understood by examining the tension between their particularistic and universalistic interpretations of Islam. Looking back, I think the book tried to fit its subjects into an intellectual container too narrow and contrived. I sometimes wish that scholars would pay more attention to Black Muslim Religion than to Islam in Black America, but I also recognize that once a book leaves our hands, it is longer ours. Who am I to question its usefulness to those who have cited it?
Having to write two first books changed me. So many of the elite scholars whom I admire take five, ten, even more years to write their books, and I have sometimes wondered if I should slow down, research more, and write less. But I enjoy the act of writing too much to follow their lead. Writing has become a spiritual discipline whose proper pace for me is akin to that of an impressionist painter. In retrospect, I don’t regret having to write two first books, because however much of a miss that first one was, the need to write another so quickly made writing a habit. Writing became a practice, in all the rich meanings of that word. Those who know me in real life are often painfully aware that in addition to being an academic, I am a singer, an operatic tenor who occasionally blurts out an aria at inappropriate times and places. But as much fun as that is, I never liked practicing music in the studio as much as I like writing at my desk.
I don’t mean to redeem the coercive nature of the tenure clock. I wonder, however, if we sometimes do ourselves a disservice in favoring quality over quantity. I have known so many colleagues who can’t seem to write because the quest for perfection results in writer’s block. Such thinking may rely on a false, harmful sense of an individual scholar’s power.
The truth is that all first books are exigent products, shaped by collective forces over which the individual author often has little control. Constrained by our graduate training, the concerns of senior colleagues who will vote on our tenure, the feedback of reviewers, the market worries of publishers, and our own humanity, we write first books as work obligations. I understand why, in this system, spending time at the computer can feel like working on the line. Because I was forced to write two first books, I became alienated from the product of my labor. But such alienation also freed me from the potentially harmful conflation of the work and the self: the writing was mine, but it was not me. It was something I did, often with joy.