Black Muslim Psychology Conference [BMPC]
2026
Black
Muslim
Psychology
Conference
December 17-19, 2026
Dakar & Gorée Island, Senegal
Rasikh: What We Carry Forward
An historic Black Muslim Atlantic gathering. For the first time, the Black Muslim Psychology Conference (BMPC) will gather outside the United States, bringing participants into a transatlantic space rooted in memory, healing, faith, scholarship, dialogue, and collective responsibility. This year’s theme, Rasikh, speaks to what is deeply rooted, firmly grounded, and carried forward with clarity, purpose, and care. The program will explore Black Muslim wellness, family and community healing, leadership, Black Atlantic connection, art and storytelling, youth and future-building, and the ongoing work of reclaiming narrative, knowledge, and care.
presented by Muslim Wellness Foundation
in partnership with Pillars Fund
and with institutional collaboration from
IFAN/Université Cheikh Anta Diop
For the past decade, BMPC has served as the ONLY conference in North America dedicated to centering the voices, experiences, scholarship, and healing practices of Black Muslims in relation to race, religion, trauma, identity, and collective well-being. In this pivotal year, BMPC extends this work, situating Black Muslim psychology within its full historical and diasporic context. Guided by the theme Rasikh: What We Carry Forward, we ask:
What has endured across generations and geographies and what are we called to carry forward now?
With this central guiding question, we are committed to exploring what Black Muslim communities have carried through enslavement, colonization, displacement, migration, racial violence, spiritual disruption, and erasure. It also asks what forms of knowledge, faith, resistance, care, joy, creativity, and obligation have survived—and what must now be reclaimed and protected for future generations to come.
From Southside to Senegal, BMPC2026 is open to all.
BMPC2026 is not a conventional conference organized only around presentations. It is being curated as a shared circle of intellectual, spiritual, and relational inquiry and responsibility. The goal is to create a space where participants can think deeply, listen generously, engage honestly, and build relationships that extend beyond the conference itself. Anyone committed to Black Muslim wellness, history, healing, and collective care is welcome to attend. Learn more about this year's program, our invited speakers, registration and how best to prepare for this transformation journey!
As a flagship initiative of Muslim Wellness Foundation’s Omar ibn Said Institute for Black Muslim Studies & Research, BMPC advances Black Muslim Psychology as an interdisciplinary field of inquiry, practice, and community-rooted knowledge production that centers the lived experiences, strengths, spiritual lives, racial identities, cultural traditions, and psychological well-being of people who identify as both Muslim and of Black/African descent. We seek to understand how Black Muslims make meaning, cultivate belonging, develop healthy racial and religious identities, heal from trauma, resist oppression, and build lives rooted in dignity, faith, joy, and self-determination.
Lastly, Black Muslim Psychology insists that Black Muslim life cannot be understood through suffering and deficit-based frameworks alone. We reject narratives which only ask:
"What harms Black Muslims?"
and ignore deeper, more fundamental questions such as:
"What sustains Black Muslims? What wisdom do Black Muslim communities carry? What forms of healing, leadership, and liberation emerge from Black Muslim life?”
Developed and advanced by Muslim Wellness Foundation since 2015, Black Muslim Psychology responds to a long-standing gap in psychology, counseling, public health, religious studies, and Muslim community life: the failure to adequately understand Black Muslims on their own terms.