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BEING MUSLIM
Being Muslim
A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam
Sylvia Chan-Malik
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
© 2018 by New York University
All rights reserved
References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Chan-Malik, Sylvia, author.
Title: Being Muslim : a cultural history of women of color in American Islam / Sylvia Chan-Malik.
Description: New York : New York University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017044860| ISBN 9781479850600 (cl : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479823420 (pb : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Muslim women—United States. | African American women. | Muslims, Black.
Classification: LCC HQ1170 .C486 2018 | DDC 305.48/697—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017044860
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For my daughters and Badi
CONTENTS
Introduction: Being Muslim Women
2. Insurgent Domesticity: Race and Gender in Representations of NOI Women during the Cold War Era
3. Garments for One Another: Islam and Marriage in the Lives of Betty Shabazz and Dakota Staton
4. Chadors, Feminists, Terror: Constructing a U.S. American Discourse of the Veil
5. A Third Language: Muslim Feminism in America
Introduction
Being Muslim Women
This is a book about being Muslim. More precisely, this is a book about how women of color, primarily within, but not limited to, the United States, have crafted modes of Muslim being and practice that constitute critical histories of Islamic life and culture in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century United States. At the same time, this is a book about how women of color have continually shaped Islam’s presence in the nation’s racial and gendered imaginaries during this time and how women and issues of race and gender are essential to understanding Islam’s cultural meanings in the United States. Stated another way, Being Muslim is an exploration of women—primarily Black, but also Asian, Arab, Latino, African diasporic, white, and multiracial—producing Muslim-ness as a way of racial, gendered, and religious being—for example, as both “American” and “global” subjects, as U.S. Muslims, and as part of the ummah, the global community of believers. This book is also an investigation of Islam’s significant historical-cultural presence in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century United States as a religion, political ideology, and racial marker, with a focus on how this has been produced and signified by women.
A series of questions drives its inquiry: How do we tell a story of Islam in the United States that foregrounds the lives, labors, presence, and perspectives of women of color throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? How does a focus on women of color produce alternative narratives of Muslim life and Islam’s historical presence in the United States? How have Black women shaped histories of American Islam, and what are the legacies of their labors? What is the role of race in the formation of U.S. Muslim women’s religious practices and cultural expression, and how have desires for agency and discourses of feminism influenced U.S. Muslim women’s lives? How have Muslim women in the United States engaged questions of social justice and struggles for freedom through Islam? How do race and gender shape modes of religious practice and identity construction? Finally, is it possible—or for that matter, necessary—to articulate a collective experience of being Muslim women in America across time, space, and racial difference? If so, what does this experience tell us? And what is at stake in its telling?
In its response to these queries, Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam presents a series of previously untold or underexplored narratives that explore U.S. Muslim women’s lives, subjectivities, representations, and voices during the last century. In the existing literature on American Islam, men’s voices and perspectives dominate. Further, in the handful of texts addressing U.S. Muslim women’s issues, there is generally a separation between the stories of Black American and non-Black American Muslim women, who are primarily Arab and South Asian American, although not at all exclusively.1 As a result of such divisions, a number of texts on U.S. Muslim women, perhaps inadvertently, privilege the stories of non-Black Muslim women of Arab and South Asian backgrounds and relay U.S. Muslim subject formation as a process of immigrant Muslims “becoming American.”2 Such language enacts an erasure of the lives and representations of Black Muslim women (who are already American) and generally relegates their experiences to a separate chapter or section, as opposed to situating them as a central component of Islam’s historical narrative in the United States. In addition, “becoming American” also marginalizes the experiences of many Latina and white female converts, who are also already American.
In Being Muslim, I instead place these varied narratives on a historical continuum and argue that a desire for gender justice as expressed and conceived of by women of color has continually impelled and informed the construction of U.S. Muslim women’s lives. While a number of scholars have noted Islam’s affiliations with movements of Black liberation, antiracism, and anti-imperialism in the United States,3 few have contextualized Islam in relation to women’s participation in these movements or through desires for gendered agency and freedom as expressed by women of color. Indeed, if