Americans, and others hail from families who have been in the United States for over a century. This terminology reflects the distinctive racial composition of U.S. Muslim communities, which, as stated earlier, is approximately one-third Black, one-third South Asian, and one-third Arab/Middle Eastern, although there are also significant and growing numbers of white and Latino converts to Islam.
Finally, I apply the term “Muslim” across sectarian differences in U.S. Muslim communities. As I am interested in the ways people have named and created themselves as U.S. Muslims, not in religious debates, I take an ecumenical approach to Muslim identity and do not engage discussions regarding the permissibility or authenticity of Muslim organizations. I strongly believe each and every group named here is integral to the fabric of U.S. American Islam. I also fully acknowledge that I do not adequately address Shi‘a Muslim women’s experiences of race and gender in the United States, a critical strand of this history I hope to take up in the future and encourage other scholars to explore as well.
* * *
To close, I return to a question I posed at the start of this introduction: What is at stake in articulating a collective experience of being Muslim women? In writing a women- and race-centered narrative of American Islam, I have constructed this book against the rampant discourses of anti-Muslim racism, anti-blackness, sexism, and misogyny that pervade our present. Being Muslim reveals how religion inflects realities of race and gender in this country, how being Muslim is refracted through the lived experiences of race and gender and through the historical and ongoing precarity of Muslim life, which produces women’s continual desire for safety and sanctuary. While my focus here is on Muslim women in the United States and Islam as lived religion and racial form within the nation, I also understand that transnational flows of knowledge and circuits of free-market capitalism produce the “new ethnicities”—to borrow a phrase from Stuart Hall—of a global Islam that defy and challenge national boundaries.73 Being Muslim demarcates its inquiry on the United States, not to reify or celebrate the nation-state or the racial categories produced therein, but to examine Muslim-ness as formed within the specific contexts of what Toni Morrison has called the “wholly racialized society” of the United States.74 Its aim is not to parochialize American Islam but to tell a story of U.S. Muslim women across time, space, and racial difference that allows for more expansive possibilities of affiliation and exchange among vulnerable populations both in the United States and worldwide.
1
“Four American Moslem Ladies”
Early U.S. Muslim Women in the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam, 1920–1923
There is a photo. Because there is a photo, this photo, the story of U.S. Muslim women in the twentieth-century might begin with these women—four African American women in unadorned dresses, blouses, and skirts. Against a dark cloth backdrop, they face the camera wrapped in shawls and blankets fastened (with straight pins, or perhaps clothespins?) to conceal their shoulders, necks, mouths. The wraps appear to be large scarves, or maybe even bedsheets, although one woman is wrapped in a heavy woolen fabric with a carpet-like texture. Three wear church hats, the one who does not has wrapped her shawl around her head and pinned it above her mouth, exposing only her eyes and nose. The women are formal, stiff, and unsmiling, in a style typical of Victorian-era studio portraiture of the late nineteenth-century, although it is 1922. The photo’s setting is simple: There are no ornaments, no frills; wherever the studio, it is modest and spare. Before the black drape, two women stand and the other two sit, one on a carved wooden stool a bit too tall, her feet dangling slightly off the ground, her right hand grasping an armrest. They appear middle-aged, ranging anywhere from their late twenties to their forties. Their eyes gaze in different directions; two of the women look directly at the camera, the two others stare off into the distance.
Figure 1.1. “Four American Moslem Ladies,” from the Moslem Sunrise, January 1923. Image reproduction courtesy of the New York Public Library.
This is the first-known group photo of visibly identifiable Muslim women in the United States. It was originally published in the January 1923 edition of the Moslem Sunrise, the newsletter of the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam (AMI) in the United States, a South Asia–based Islamic missionary movement that was one of the first major Muslim organizations in the United States. On the pages following the photo, there is a “Brief Report of the Work in America,” a recurring feature in the newsletter penned by the AMI’s chief missionary, a man hailing from the Punjab region of India (now Pakistan) named Mufti Muhammad Sadiq, who led the organization’s efforts in the United States from 1921 to 1923 and established the group’s headquarters in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago, where the photo was taken. In his report, Sadiq offers descriptions of his recent lectures on Islam and his other proselytization efforts,1 but he includes no accompanying story or reference to the photo of the four women, making no mention of who they are and why the photo is included with this report, except for this short caption:
FOUR AMERICAN MOSLEM LADIES. Right to left: Mrs. Thomas (Sister Khairat), Mrs. Watts (Sister Zeineb), Mrs. Robinson (Sister Ahmadia), Mrs. Clark (Sister Ayesha)2
Such inclusion of the image alongside the omission of any information about the women themselves has also marked the photo’s contemporary afterlife in the scholarship on Islam in the United States. In this corpus, the photo is generally contextualized through narratives of Black masculinity and nationalism, deployed to demonstrate the presence of Black women in Islamic movements such as the Moorish Science Temple, the AMI, and the Nation of Islam in relation to ideologies of Black nationalism and Marcus Garvey’s Pan-Africanist movement.3 Its placement within such narratives implicitly advances the notion that these Black American Ahmadi Muslim women “saw” Islam and the adoption of Islamic identities in the same ways that many Black American Muslim men did, for example, as intertwined with ideologies of racial separatism, Black uplift, and revolutionary political struggle.
While Islam’s political significance—in particular, the understanding that it was a religious tradition that could foster African nationalism and develop Black racial pride and African civilization—certainly appealed to some Black women who joined early twentieth-century Islamic organizations, such politics were oftentimes not, this chapter suggests, the central or driving reasons that Black migrant women—and in particular, the Four American Moslem Ladies—chose to convert to Islam and adopt Muslim identities and practices in the rapidly industrializing, post–Great Migration North. Between 1921 and 1923, more than one thousand U.S. Americans converted to Islam through the AMI; anywhere from one-third to one-half of these new Muslims were women, and the vast majority of these women were Black. In what follows, I argue that, beyond the discourses and logics of Black nationalism, another set of at once deeply personal and unwaveringly political concerns animated Black American women’s claiming of Ahmadiyya Islam during early decades of the twentieth century. These concerns were rooted in the desire for the safety and stability of themselves and their families and emerged in response to the particular struggles of newly arrived Black migrant women to Northern cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and New York. Thus, although Black freedom—as expressed through Marcus Garvey’s political oratories and the work of his United Negro Improvement Association or in calls for Pan-African solidarity and African liberation—may well have been on Black migrant women’s minds, they also grappled with constant, pressing concerns in their daily lives. Those concerns included such matters as the sexual advances of their work supervisors or landlords, the dangers and stresses of raising children while working long hours, the lack of economic resources and supportive kinship networks, and the securing and maintenance of marital and familial relations in urban environments that were vastly different from what many newly arrived Black women—some former slaves or the children of slaves—had experienced in the South. In the face of such difficulties, “Islam” offered those such as the Four American Moslem Ladies a religious and political ethos that rejected the dehumanization of Black working-class women by white society and the Black bourgeoisie and presented expansive and productive conceptions of citizenship, belonging, and racial and gendered selfhood in a religious framework that was at once politically empowering and adaptable to their existing knowledge of Christianity. Further,