tend not to be represented within the discourses of either feminism or antiracism,” this book suggests that Muslim women in the United States have historically mobilized their engagements with Islam and articulated ways of being Muslim as simultaneous correctives to patterns of racism and sexism specifically directed at women of color.4 Being Muslim seeks to demonstrate how women’s ways of being Muslim and practicing Islam have continually functioned as a rejoinder and critique of the intersecting politics of race, gender, sexuality, class, and religion. By doing so, it reveals how “Black feminism,” “womanism,” and “woman of color feminism”—terms I explore more fully toward the close of this introduction—constitute integral components not only in approaching U.S. Muslim women’s narratives and representations but also in fully narrating the twentieth- and twenty-first-century story of Islam in the United States. Their histories and meanings also gesture toward how organic forms of “Islamic feminism” and “Muslim feminism”—terms I explore at the close of this introduction and at length in chapter 5—are emerging in the contemporary United States.
Although a great deal of this book’s focus is on the experiences and representations of Black American Muslim women, Being Muslim refuses balkanizing logics that might lead some to call this a book about only “Black American Muslim women,” as opposed to “U.S. Muslim women.” Indeed, I devote much of my focus here—the first three chapters, to be precise—to investigations of Black American Muslim women’s lives owing to the realities of the historical record; prior to the 1960s, almost all U.S. Muslim women who appeared in the press or popular culture were African American. Thus, any historically accurate account of American Islam and U.S. culture must necessarily make central the lives and experiences of Black American Muslims—and in this case, Black American Muslim women—as their contributions have forcefully shaped the meanings and presence of Islam in the United Stated. Instead of stories of Muslims “becoming American,” I suggest that narratives of being Muslim in America are far more flexible (and less exclusionary) in how they are applicable to approaching all U.S. Muslim women’s subjectivities across racial and ethnic categories—and I detail the contexts and processes that women have historically and culturally configured their identities and practices as U.S. Muslims. Whether one is a third-generation Black American Muslim, a recent immigrant from Pakistan, a Mexican American convert, or a Syrian refugee, posing the question of how to be a Muslim woman in the United States offers insights, I suggest, into how Muslim-ness is produced and sustained against white, Christian social and cultural norms, as well as allowing us to see how Islamic identities and practices have evolved in relation to the shifting political exigencies of out times. As such, Being Muslim brings together a series of explorations of U.S. Muslim women’s lives that begins with stories of Black American women and their engagements with Islam as a spiritually embodied practice of social protest. This book moves on a story of the encounter between “Islam” and “feminism” in the media during the late twentieth century, as signified through the bodies of “Middle Eastern,” white, and Black American women, and it closes with a look into how women of color feminism and womanism shape expressions of “Islamic feminism” in the lives of contemporary U.S. Muslim women across racial, class, generational, and regional lines. Because I suggest that the legacies of early twentieth-century Muslim women, such as those featured in the first three chapters, shape present-day formations of being Muslim, the book proceeds chronologically, to show how being Muslim in the United States is an iterative and reiterative practice that arises out of racial and gendered structures of feelings within the domestic United States, as well as through the diverse transnational locales and diasporic cultural spaces that constitute U.S. American Islam.
Throughout the volume, I argue that a central component of Islam’s presence in the United States is its enduring presence and significance as a Black protest religion and expression of Black cultural power.5 Islam’s legacy of Black protest, the book demonstrates, is critical to approaching the study of women, gender, and American Islam, as well as the collective subjectivities of U.S. Muslim women. This argument does not seek to marginalize or displace the experiences of non-Black Muslim women in the United States, nor does it ignore the transnational formation of U.S. Muslim women’s subjectivities and the networks of culture, religious knowledge, economics, and labor that inform their lives. Indeed, blackness itself is always diasporic and cannot be viewed as merely “domestic”; it is also always part of larger Pan-African formations and consciousness. Instead, Being Muslim demonstrates how Islam’s ideological and material presence as a minority religion in the United States is ineluctably linked to histories of blackness and Black people and culture in ways that did not simply disappear after the large-scale arrival of Muslim immigrants from South Asia and the Middle East to America after the passage of the Hart-Cellar Immigration Act in 1965 (which lifted restrictive immigration quotas) or because “Islam” has become conflated with foreign “terror” in contemporary political discourse. In addition, the last two decades have seen a sharp increase in the number of African Muslim immigrants in the United States, who have their own complex relationship with blackness and Black American Islam.6 While I do not explore the nuances of Black American versus African immigrant Islamic practices in the United States, I am aware that this is a rich site of exploration, which deserves further investigation. Yet, as I consider in this volume, the nation overwhelmingly came to know, think about, and discuss “Islam” and “Muslims” in relation to, and in the context of, Black American people and culture for most of the twentieth century (and indeed, even long before then), a discourse that merged and overlapped with orientalized notions of Islam and the Middle East.
Thus I suggest that Islam’s “blackness” in the United States—which dates back to earliest days of chattel slavery but which this book examines most closely from the early twentieth century to the present—continually informs the construction and evolution of contemporary U.S. Muslim identity, politics, and culture in both implicit and explicit ways, as well as in how Islam is discussed and how Muslims are racialized within the national imaginary.7 For this reason, Being Muslim asserts that the lives of Black American Muslim women across the last century present paradigmatic experiences of U.S. Muslim life, insofar as they demonstrate how ways of being Muslim and practicing Islam have consistently been forged against commonsense notions of racial, gendered, and religious belonging and citizenship and require constant attention to, and cultivation of, embodied practices that are articulated against accepted social and cultural norms. Their experiences also reflect how the blackness of American Islam—that is, Islam’s historical and cultural presence in the Unites States as emanating from Black American communities and culture—constitutes a set of racial, religious conditions with which non-Black Muslims must always engage and reckon with, even if this reckoning is characterized by disavowal. It is this continual againstness—which this book calls “affective insurgency”—at the scale of the body, one’s community, the nation, and the ummah that I argue is a central hallmark of U.S. Muslim women’s lives.
“WE ARE MUSLIM WOMEN”
In the early 1970s, the poet, activist, and intellectual Sonia Sanchez composed a series of Muslim poems. One of the leading voices of the Black Arts movement and certainly one of its most prominent female writers, Sanchez joined the Nation of Islam (NOI) in 1972 and remained a member through 1975. During these years, Sanchez, using the name Sister Sonia X Sanchez, wrote prolifically about her experiences of being a Black Muslim woman engaged in the organization’s political, cultural, and spiritual project of Black nationalism and self-determination. When interviewed in 1989 for the documentary Eyes on the Prize, Sanchez said she was initially drawn to the Nation because it represented “this sense of what it meant to be an African American woman or man … this sense of support for Blackness.” She continued on to say that “it [the NOI] was the strongest organization in America.… I had twin sons and I took them into the Nation, in a sense, I think, for probably protection. There was a real atmosphere of strength in the Nation.” She also described its appeal for Black people who were just becoming “receptive” to their own blackness, to Black women who were coming into recognition of their own beauty and power. The NOI told Black women, Sanchez continued, “Yes, I respect your Blackness. I say you are a Black women, and you’re beautiful and you’re queen of the universe.”8
It is important to note that Sanchez became a Muslim following the assassination