At the same time, as the nation transitioned to empire at the turn of the century, “Islam” existed concurrently as an exotic oddity, an orientalized marker of a mysterious Middle East inhabited by “Moslems” and an ostensible religious threat to Christianity, reflected in the work of Protestant missionaries. As such, the early twentieth century marked the moment in which “Islam” came represent a number of at times opposed—yet always mutually constituted and imbricated—understandings of its meaning in the United States, of a far away, exotic religion and culture associated with the Middle East; a religious threat; a language and logic of Black freedom; and, later, to white Americans, an insurgent Black threat. For Black working-class women like Florence Watts and others, “Islam” was a term they had heard in political discussions of the day in relation to Black nationalism and Pan Africanism, but it was also one linked to notions of refinement or status, as it signaled a world beyond Bronzeville—a world that offered new imaginative geographies and spiritual horizons in which they could find safe harbor and construct expansive identities beyond the U.S. nation-state, beyond the racist terrains that circumscribed their bodies and minds in the post-Reconstruction United States.
“Pastor, Prophet, Proselytizer”
In 1922, Florence Watts lived just blocks away from the AMI mosque, and before eventually going in, she may have walked by on occasion or wondered about the men and women in “exotic” and “Eastern” dress she saw in her neighborhood from time to time. However, the place where many Black women in Bronzeville likely first “saw” Ahmadiyya Islam and learned of its teachings was on the “Woman’s Page” of the Chicago Defender. On August 19, 1922, between the monthly column “News of the Music World” and an advice column titled “Advice to the Wise and Otherwise” by a writer calling herself Princess Mysteria, the paper ran a feature story on this page titled “Those Who’re Missionaries to Christians,” accompanied by the subhead, “Prophet Sadiq Brings Allah’s Message into Chicago and Makes Proselytes.” The piece detailed the scene of one of Dr. Mufti Muhammad Sadiq’s lectures for “a score of worshippers … gathered in the newly-domed ‘mosque’ of the Ahmadia Moslem mission at 4448 Wabash Avenue,” a location at the heart of Bronzeville. Elaborating on Sadiq’s appearance, reporter Roger Didier offered a description reflective of the orientalist and racial logics of the time:
Dr. Mufti Muhammad Sadiq, pastor, prophet, and proselytizer, calmly discoursed on the evident inconsistencies of the Christian faith. Dr. Sadiq looks the part, having the appearance of a brown-skinned Jew, cast in a slender mold with sideburns that grow into a flowing beard of gospel likeness. His brow is narrow, but high; the eyes, brown, clear, and alert; the nose, large and domineering, as with Jews of the older type, and a white moustache covers the ample lips, which are a long way from the top of the head and sit securely on what suggests itself is a square and model chin.39
Didier then went on to describe Sadiq’s wardrobe (“a green baize full-length jacket with scarlet red lining,” “a skull cap with symbolic markings,” and “slippers”) and offered a careful inventory of the audience in the room, which included “a huge, brown individual” with “a ferocious scowl,” “a dental student from Calcutta,” a “fair-skinned Russian [with] sandy or reddish hair,” “the very dark Mr. Augustus who used to belong to St. Mark’s Church in this city,” and “half a dozen Garveyites,” including “one pretty yellow girl and another not so pretty.”40
Figure 1.2. Mufti Muhammad Sadiq. Photograph from the Moslem Sunrise, January 1923. Image reproduction courtesy of New York Public Library.
Figure 1.3. Al-Sadiq Mosque in Chicago. Photograph from the Moslem Sunrise, January 1923. Image reproduction courtesy of New York Public Library.
Following the careful visual descriptors, the reporter finally turned to the content of Sadiq’s lecture, which the missionary delivered while “planted rather leisurely against the wall” and “his small fine hands had just ceased fingering a handsomely bound copy of the Koran.” The article is worth quoting at length:
There is but one God, said he. All the others are mere prophets, including Jesus. Mahomet [sic] was the last and the equal of the others. None is to be worshipped, not even Jesus or Mahomet. Only God, the one God, must be served. The Trinity is an illusion—the word is not found in the Christian Bible and its principle cannot be sustained. God created all races, all colors. The Mohammedan faith makes no difference between race or class. One of Mahomet’s trusted followers, the chief muezzin, was an Abyssinian brought from slavery to the royal household. The sultan had no special seat in the mosque. All worshippers are equal in the sight of God. The Koran is the unadorned word of God, the Bible is much the word of man. Mohammedanism is practical, Christianity is not.41
Through Didier’s article, one sees the appeal of Sadiq’s message to the multiracial, but mostly Black, audience in attendance at the mosque that day. As Moustafa Bayoumi has written of the early Ahmadiyya mission, Sadiq’s words conveyed a universalist message that was carefully attuned to U.S. racial logics of the time. Through his exhortations of Islam’s egalitarianism—for example, Islam did not make differences between race and class, and the mention of Islam’s first muezzin, Bilal, who was Black—Sadiq opened “a critical space for race in the realm of the sacred” that enabled Black Americans to “metaphorically travel beyond the confines of national identities [to] become ‘Asiatics’ and remain Black … to be proud of their African heritage and feel a sense of belonging to the participation with Asia.”42 In other words, Sadiq conveyed Islam as a belief system that offered an expansive network of kinship and connection both in the physical and spiritual world, specifically in the direct relationship between the individual and God that would not require Black Americans to forsake the feeling of race pride or anger at white supremacy.
Yet as Bayoumi points out, a strong orientalist logic shaped the appeal of Islam to Black, as well as other, Americans in the 1920s; Sadiq’s “slippers” and his “small fine hands” are exotic and attractive signifiers of a faraway “East” that stand in strong contrast to the reporter’s descriptions of the “ferocious scowl” and “the very dark” skin of Black audience members. As such, the Defender article highlights a critical factor in understanding Islam’s appeal to Black Americans, and particularly to Black women: that the allure and promise of Ahmadiyya Islam was largely premised upon the complex relationships forged between Sadiq and other Ahmadi missionaries and the movement’s followers. In the case of Florence Watts and the rest of the Four American Moslem Ladies, the relationships were between a South Asian man and Black migrant women. To the latter, it was significant that Sadiq was neither Black nor White—and thus not a bearer or embodiment of white supremacy—and conjured impressions, as Didier’s article states, of “a brown-skinned Jew.” This description simultaneously allied the missionary to the faraway geography of the Middle East and a non-Christian religion, while positioning Sadiq and his “brown skin” as an intermediary presence within the color-conscious, black-white racial hierarchies of the United States at the time. Combined with his egalitarian message and his exotic aura, Sadiq’s racial intermediary status was critical to spurring interest and shaping the appeal of his teachings to women like Florence and her peers.
For two months following the publication of the article, throughout August and September 1922, the AMI’s meetings were advertised in the “Churches” section of the Defender’s Woman’s Page, with this brief listing:
Ahmadia Moslem mosque, 4446 Wabash avenue—Sunday evening meeting, 8 p.m. Sermon by M. M. Sadiq of India. All welcome.
Owing to its placement on the “Woman’s Page,” Black women—not men—would be the first to learn of the AMI’s meetings and thus, convey information about them to their husbands, families, friends, neighbors, and so on. Why the original story on Sadiq, as well as the subsequent listings, were published on the “Woman’s Page” of the Defender is unclear; it is likely that since much of the paper’s reporting on religion and church life ran in the women’s section, it was a natural fit to run to piece on the AMI there as well. While there is no way to substantiate