Alberta’s “mental process” is the sacred space that has stayed with me the most since reading Mapping Malcolm. In the chapter entitled “Assembling Sacred Space: A Conversation with Nsenga Knight,” editor Najha Zigbi-Johnson and artist Nsenga Knight map the many sacred spaces touched by El Hajj Malik El Shabazz (Malcolm X) and assembled in the wake of his martyrdom. These include the physical geographies of mosques in Brooklyn: Masjid Abdul Muhsi Khalifah (formerly Temple No. 7C), Masjid At-Taqwa, and Masjid Muhsi Khalifah. They also include the sacred ritual sites and burial grounds, such as Child’s Faith Temple Church of God, where Malcolm’s funeral service and janazah prayer were held, and Ferncliff Cemetery, where both he and Dr. Betty Shabazz are buried. 
 
In Knight and Zigbi-Johnson’s conversation, all of these spaces are understood as simultaneously physical, relational, and spiritual. They are sites of community, ummah, safety, brotherhood, and sisterhood on the map of Malcolm’s life and legacy. The conversation is a dialogue between two Black women, one from Harlem (Zigbi-Johnson) and the other from Brooklyn (Knight), reflecting on Malcolm X’s profound influence on the boroughs they call home. Interspersed across the pages of their conversation are images from Knight’s As the Veil Turns and Last Rite projects—a breathtaking assemblage that turns those who pick up Mapping Malcolm into both readers and viewers. What stood out to me was how the conversation, as it moved from one geography to the next, mapped an often-unspoken sacred space: the internal world, or “mental process,” of Black Muslim women. Here, seen and unseen worlds meet.  
 
For Alberta, the decision to join the Nation of Islam (NOI) didn’t feel like much of a choice. Alberta is one of the women that Knight interviewed from her Brooklyn community for the series As the Veil Turns. Through these interviews, Knightsought to understand why Black women turned to Islam in the sixties and seventies. Knight recalls that when Alberta went to Temple No. 7C for the first time, she was moved by two images and an unseen force. During the meeting, NOI ministers juxtaposed an image of a lynched Black man with the NOI flag. The contrasting images suggested that the NOI would ultimately triumph in the battle between good and evil. This discourse resonated with much of what she had experienced growing up as a Black woman in South Carolina and the first in her family to leave sharecropping. Alberta was so incredibly moved that she leapt straight out of her chair: “I don’t even know who picked me up,” she told Knight. “It just felt like something lifted me up. And all I could say was, ‘Sign me up!’”
 
Alberta’s story underscores existing debate about the Nation of Islam’s appeal to Black women and adds a new dimension to the conversation. As highlighted by Knight and Zigbi-Johnson, the NOI offered what Farah Griffin calls “a promise of protection.” Malcolm X and the NOI appealed to Black women by offering protection from white supremacist assaults on Black beauty and the gendered violence they had endured since slavery. This promise was fulfilled by joining the Nation, which offered Black women racial uplift and community, and principally understood womanhood in relation to the domestic sphere, consistent with the Victorian notions of gender norms that dominated the time. Yet the public portrayals of NOI women as wives and mothers was marked by an “insurgent domesticity” that triggered cultural anxieties around race, religion, and gender by asserting the supremacy of the Black patriarchal family amid the Cold War-era crisis of masculinity, as Sylvia Chan-Malik explains. 
 
The NOI’s  solution to the unequal material realities and racial violence produced under white supremacy nevertheless drew wide-spread appeal as Alberta’s story attests. But something immaterial and interior to her being also catalyzed Alberta’s decision to become a Muslim: NOI ministers offered a compelling vision of a yet-to-be-seen world stripped of anti-Black violence  and an unseen force made her rise to their call.
 
Alberta’s story compels reader-viewers to contend with and hold the material, seen factors that shape Black thinking, as well as the metaphysical, unseen ones. Academic scholarship on Black Islam has importantly focused on the material and relational push-and-pull factors influencing women’s embrace of Islam. In these studies, mid-twentieth century Black women are complexly depicted as seekers of racial uplift, new histories of Blackness, beauty standards that valorized Black women, protection, economic stability, livable material conditions, safety, community, sisterhood, access to leadership roles and the gender norms of their times, and so on. Knight, in retelling Alberta’s story, offers new insight to this academic conversation by foregrounding the unseen forces acting upon and within the Black Muslima thinker: callings, divine guidance, and inspiration.
 
Alberta’s is not the only internal world mapped through Knight’s artistic practice. There is also a photographed portrait of Maryam, part of Knight’s As the Veil Turns series. Maryam is seated on the ground in front of a Qur’an, which sits upon a rehal (foldable book rest). But she is not reading the Qur’an. Instead, she gazes to her right, downward, toward something beyond the camera frame. Her expression appears unfocused, contemplative. In her hand, she holds tasbih (prayer) beads. Perhaps she is silently making dhikr (devotional recitation) as she reflects on the divine in relation to her own life, her reality, her desires. Knight portrays Maryam as a Black Muslim woman in quiet contemplation. This is an image of a woman sitting still and yet moving inward. 
 
Maryam’s portrait appears on the page just before Knight’s reflections on the sacred space assembled for Malcolm’s janazah prayer. Although Zigbi-Johnson and Knight do not discuss the portrait directly, they recount the challenges surrounding Malcolm’s burial. Through her insistence that Malcolm receive a Muslim funeral, Dr. Betty Shabazz, with support from Sheikh Muhammad Jabber and Dr. Ahmed Usman, ensured that the sacred space of the highest station in Jannah, or Heaven, would be accessible to Malcolm in the afterlife. As Knight narrates, the funerary prayer was catalyzed by Shabazz’s call that Malcolm had the “right to be taken care of” as a Muslim, assembled by Usman, performed by Jabber, hosted by the Child’s Faith Temple Church of God,  and witnessed by community in the spirit of brotherhood. Those who participated in Malcolm’s ritualized transition from the seen into the unseen world were unencumbered by sectarian divisions. As Knight maps it, Malcolm’s janazah prayer connected all those “who felt a sense of legacy and attachment to Malcolm X,” revealing “the beauty of Black religion—that a lot of Black people value spirituality—and also speaks to the strength of the Black community.” 
 
The sacredness of this moment is captured in Knight’s Last Rite (Janazah Prayer), a photo-lithographic series that includes images of Jabber leading the funeral prayer at Child’s Faith Temple Church of God in Christ in Harlem and Malcolm’s burial at Ferncliff Cemetery in Westchester, New York. Maryam’s portrait, considered alongside discussion of Knight’s Last Rites and Malcolm’s funeral, is significant. With the Qur’an and tasbih beads arranged in the frame and Maryam’s contemplative gaze just out of center, the image, to my eye, makes a powerful suggestion similar to Alberta’s story: together with ritual prayer, remembrance, and sacred texts, silent interiority is a sacred site in the lives of Black Muslim women and a part of the terrain of Malcolm’s legacy.
 
Knight’s conversation with Zigbi-Johnson also illuminates the internal world shaping her artistic practice. When asked to reflect on the role of art and culture in the Black American Muslim tradition, Knight responds:
 
“I think that, even though I am an artist, art is still something that holds a lot of mystery for me. I believe art is a type of internal spiritual work—it is bringing something from the unseen world into the seen world. As people are seeking nearness to Allah and seek inspiration and awe as spiritually grounded people, it is important that we make it more feasible to traverse from the unseen into the seen world.” 
 
Knight’s work does this literally. In As the Veil Turns, she brings everyday Black Muslim women from her Brooklyn community—those who are overlooked in archives—into view through various mediums. Knight makes visible often invisibilized persons in discussions of Black religion, Malcolm X, spirituality, and sacred space.
 
Ultimately, Knight’s work illuminates the everyday mediation between seen and unseen worlds in the lives of Black Muslimas. Such is the case of Maryam, whose unfocused gaze and meditative ritual practice are memorialized by Knight’s photography. Such is also the case of Alberta, whose inner stirrings are brought out and preserved in the interview conducted by Knight. Knight’s definition of art as making the unseen world visible invites the reader-viewer to see the work that Black folks do in assembling their spiritual life—through the spaces of their interiority, community, and physical sites such as mosques—as art making. Zigbi-Johnson’s inclusion of art and conversation in her cartography of Malcolm’s influence invites critical contemplation of how Malcolm’s influence expanded outward, giving new meaning to New York’s built environment, and also inward, shaping the being and thinking of those inspired by him.  
 
The beauty of Mapping Malcolm is that the assemblage of words, visual art, and dialogue generates an infinite number of connections between Malcolm, Black religion, spirituality, the metaphysical, and the material. Some of these combinations are stated explicitly by the contributors and editor; others are sensed by the reader-viewer between the lines, pages, photographs, and form of the edited volume. Between those lines, in those photos, and through the conversation between Knight and Zigbi-Johnson, Black Muslim women’s interiors are marked on the map of Malcolm’s influence in New York City. Moments of divine calling, quiet meditation, and artistic inspiration experienced by Black women are indexed as critical to Black thought, being, and aesthetics—inspired by Black Islam. The insights gleaned from their conversation point to the utility of mapping not just as a method that indexes physical locations, such as burial grounds, mosques, temples, and other sites of ritual. Instead, in the volume, mapping is a method that has the potential to plot those unseen moments and forces that shape the terrain of Black inner worlds.