https://blackgirlnerds.com/book-review-temple-folk-portrays-the-lived-experiences-of-black-muslims-faith-family-and-freedom/

Temple Folk by Aaliyah Bilal surprised me. I have never seen a book of stories focused on the Nation of Islam, though I’ve encountered discussion of the Nation of Islam in reading other books, particularly in the autobiography and other biographies of Malcolm X.

Temple Folk honors the Black American community within the Nation of Islam in a way that I have never seen reflected before. While this is Bilal’s debut book, this collection of ten short stories demonstrates a deep understanding of the human condition and the inner life of Black folks who have chosen to practice faith as a means of survival. 

The book is deeply contextualized within Nation of Islam. Unless you’re familiar with Nation of Islam, you may find yourself confused at points, but it’s no reason to avoid this beautiful prose. As is the case any time you enter into a new cultural environment, you’ll need to do a lot of inferring and will have to accept that you may not grasp the stories’ significance as completely as those who are part of the culture. You may want to do some exploration of the faith’s precepts and history before beginning Aaliyah Bilal’s collection of stories.

Bilal’s stories examine the different ways Nation of Islam has shaped believers and former believers’ lives. She focuses a lot on inconsistency (in some cases hypocrisy) in her characters’ religious beliefs and practices. One thing her characters have in common is a strong ethical sense. These are individuals who take living within a faith and decision-making about right and wrong with deep seriousness.

Temple Folk is informative, challenging, and valuable. Bilal’s book is promising both in terms of her own stance as a writer and in terms of the development of fiction set within a Nation of Islam context. We need more such writing — and also need to see where Bilal will take us as she continues writing.

The stories easily transition from one narrative to another. For me, as a reader, this speaks to how rich the storytelling is in this collection and the common threads that are woven throughout these standalone pieces. 

Each and every one of us deals with certain contradictions in our lives, and this collection of stories examines and exposes these contradictions among “Temple” folk. The struggles around faith, sexuality, ethics, and moral relations are features in these ten stories. We get a glimpse into the conspiracies of Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, although he is never mentioned by name. Some stories end abruptly, and some of the characters are rigid and harsh. Still there is much to like and learn through these stories of regular people trying to navigate through life while remaining faithful to their faith and to their true selves. Sometimes that alignment is not okay.

One standout story for me is “Blue,” which is the first story in the book. It explores the disappointment one contends with when they discover hypocrisies within loved ones. This story begins with an event. It is a special day. The Trailway bus is their transportation. Bilal writes full and wonderful descriptions of people, places, and things. A dark-skinned girl whose mother calls her “a child so black, she blue,” gains a new sense of self in Chicago, where a man addressing a crowd locks eyes with her while praising the virtues of dark-skinned women in the view of the Nation of Islam: “…the real thing…none of the stain of the ol’ master’s blood running in her veins…a taste of chocolate sweetness out of a dream.”

“Woman in Niqab” is another story that explores how we grapple with being disappointed in family members. A daughter’s suspicion of her father’s infidelity prompts her to wear her hair in public. “Candy for Hanif” brought tears to my eyes because it is a story that we don’t often see reflected on the page, particularly in a religious setting where so many families raising individuals with special needs find help and community. Sister Norah cares for her cognitively delayed son after her husband dies. “In that moment,” Bilal writes, “the entire city looked to her like a cage, placing limits on what she could know of the world.” 

This story is told with deep compassion, and Bilal manages to show the impact the mosque had on this family unit. “Candy for Hanif” shows how when you take care of others for so long, sometimes you don’t even know how to ask for the help you need.

Books are meant to entertain us, for sure. Yet, they also have the power to educate and enlighten us about things that we may not know much about, or even feel comfortable with. This is one of those books.

I give this book a 5/5-star review. The stories accomplish presenting moral failures with compassion, as well as humor to remind us that while perfection is what many of us strive for, it’s our faults that really make us human.

Temple Folk is available July 4, 2023, on Amazon.