Race and Yoga (now Critical Yoga Studies)

This article provides a critical discourse analysis of interviews, speeches, social media posts, and writings produced by members of the Nation of Islam to explore how they define, describe, and use yoga in their holistic medicine practices. I argue that for Black women members of the Nation of Islam, yoga is a tool used to resist white supremacy.

Muslims use yoga to reclaim their health and create new Islamicized bodies by prioritizing self-health, self-care, and physical and spiritual fitness. Furthermore, I argue that Nation of Islam members’ embrace of yoga is a result of the organization’s unique religio-racial identity which defines them as Asiatic Blacks and part of a broader pan-Asian decolonial movement. My research contributes to the growing focus on Black Muslim women’s knowledge production and creative agency.

On the Swahili Island of Lamu, Kenya, global wellness discourses intersect with long-standing Islamic traditions of bodily care, ritual purification, and spiritual discipline. This article examines the introduction of yoga as both a development intervention and a spiritual offering in a historically Sufi Muslim community. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork during the Lamu Yoga Festival and beyond, I analyze how yoga is promoted, practiced, and reinterpreted through the intersecting lenses of gender, race, and religion. While yoga is often framed by organizers as a path to empowerment and stress relief, some local participants engage with it selectively, drawing instead on Islamic practices such as wudhu, salah, and dhikr as embodied techniques of healing and divine presence. Through attention to everyday encounters – in classrooms, on beaches, and in mosques – I trace both the appeal and ambivalence of yoga’s arrival in Lamu. In exploring these frictions, I theorize Islamic bodily practices as counter-histories of wellness and highlight the moral economies embedded in global wellness humanitarianism. Wellness in Lamu, I argue, is not simply gifted or received; it is interpreted, reframed, and morally negotiated in place.

Yogi Haider, a contemporary yoga teacher from Phalia, Punjab, now based in Islamabad, offers a compelling example of what teaching yoga in Pakistan entails. Despite the shared cultural heritage between India and Pakistan, post-Partition tensions have made yoga a controversial practice in Pakistan. This study explores how Yogi Haider’s individual narrative challenges stereotypical portrayals of Pakistan and reveals yoga’s often overlooked presence in the country. It provides an alternative perspective that situates yoga within Pakistan’s cultural, religious, and political landscape, countering its exclusive association with Hindu and Indian identity. This paper argues that Yogi Haider strategically uses social media to display how he localizes his teachings by incorporating poetry, spatial markers, and historical elements. In doing so, he challenges both Pakistan’s global image and India’s sole claim to yoga. His work highlights how yoga in Pakistan is under-represented in academic and media discourse due to prevailing biases. To analyze how Yogi Haider frames his teachings for a Pakistani audience, this study employs digital ethnography and discourse analysis of his public content on Facebook and YouTube posted in both Urdu and English. Digital ethnography enables immersion in his online community to observe how he constructs his persona and represents himself. Discourse analysis offers insight into his language and intertextual references revealing how he positions yoga within the Pakistani context and disrupts dominant narratives linking it exclusively to India and Hinduism.