posed the question, Why anyone would join the NOI in the 1970s, following Malcolm’s murder? In response, Taylor argues that “the religious nature of the Nation of Islam was not the major impetus for new membership” during that period, that it was instead the NOI’s “secular programs, promising power and wealth, [which] were the key to its expansion.”9 In some regards, this was true for Sanchez. Her words demonstrate her attraction to the NOI’s institutional structure and reveal how she saw the group as the strongest, most effective, and most viable group through which to achieve Black self-determination while also finding safety and protection for herself and her sons from the dangers of white supremacy.
Figure I.1. Cover of the January 1974 issue of Black World magazine, featuring Sonia Sanchez.
Yet while such “secular” programs may have drawn Sanchez into the NOI, her poetry from those years is decidedly “religious” in content and tone, specifically in the how it employs Islamic terms and affirms God’s centrality in the construction of Black NOI Muslim women’s identities. In 1973, Sanchez published the poem “We Are Muslim Women,” which first appeared in Black World magazine’s January 1974 issue and was later published as part of Sanchez’s poetry collection A Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women, which she dedicated to her father, Wilson Driver, and her “spiritual father,” NOI leader, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad.10 Written the year after Sanchez joined the NOI, the poem is an unflinching declaration of Black Muslim womanhood, an avowal of black women’s beauty and power, and an expression of devotion to God. In it, she interweaves being Muslim with women’s self-determination and establishes “Islam” as a spiritual landscape and vehicle for Black women’s liberation. The poem opens:
WE ARE MUSLIM WOMEN
wearing the garments of the righteous
recipients of eternal wisdom
followers of a Divine man and Message
listen to us
as we move thru the eye of time
rustling with loveliness
listen to our wisdom
as we talk in the Temple of our Souls.
In this stanza, we immediately notice the embodied and metaphysical nature of Black Muslim womanhood. Muslim women wear specific “garments”—such as head coverings and modest robes—in order to express their spiritual devotion to “a Divine man and Message,” the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and the message of Islam. Sanchez portrays “Muslim women” as righteous and wise and as key figures who transcend temporality, “mov[ing] thru the eye of time” in order to connect Black people to their future liberation. She also affirms their “loveliness” as Muslim women, gesturing toward the admiration Black women are supposedly due in Islam, and establishes women’s knowledge and being as a space of worship, that is, a “Temple of our Souls.”
Across the poem’s five stanzas, Sanchez continually announces “WE ARE MUSLIM WOMEN” as a repeating refrain and intones “MUSLIM” as the signifier and expression of her—and other Black women’s—embrace of blackness through Islam. To be a Muslim woman is to be exalted and to have a direct relationship with God, which is directly addressed in stanza 3:
WE ARE MUSLIM WOMEN
dwellers in light
new women created from the limbs of Allah.
We are the shining ones
coming from dark ruins
created from the eye of Allah:
And we speak only what we know
And we do not curse God
And we keep our minds open to light
And we do not curse God
And we chant Alhamdullilah
And we do not curse God
WE ARE MUSLIM WOMEN
Here, Sanchez writes Black women into the creation myth. Infused with Islamic imagery, this section employs an anthropomorphization of Allah as a being with “limbs” and “eyes” to render “Muslim women” as the corporeal descendants of the divine—“created from the limbs of Allah”—a characterization that subverts Christian teachings that say women are made from Adam’s rib. She names Islam as the state of being and political force in which Black people may “speak only what we know,” as opposed to trumpeting what they now recognize as the lies and hypocrisies of white America, specifically in regard to Black inferiority. Full and shining Black female personhood emerges out of the poem’s proclamation of Muslim-ness. This is not an individualized Muslim-ness: In her usage of the plural pronoun “WE,” Sanchez emphasizes the collective nature of being Muslim as Black women, engaged together in a moral, cultural, political, and spiritual endeavor for which, she states at poem’s end, “the earth sings our gladness.”
In its collective expression of Muslim womanhood, Sanchez’s poem ultimately articulates “Islam” as a set of racial, religious, and gendered affective practices of Black liberation for Black women. Such practices are expressed, not as solely political or secular acts, but as a set of unified moral practices (“we do not curse God”), religious rituals (“We chant Alhamdullilah”), and collective identity formation (the repetition of “WE ARE MUSLIM WOMEN”). The Muslim-ness the poem demonstrates—its feelings, its practices, its desires—is a type of being produced in the racial and gendered contexts and against which it is articulated. Spoken through poetry, Sanchez’s proclamation of Muslim women’s identity is legible because it announces Muslim-ness against the realities of physical and sexual violence directed at Black women; against notions of Black women as ugly, inferior, unwanted; against the sexism and misogyny of the church and patriarchal interpretations of biblical scripture; and against the degradation and subjection of blackness and Black people. Muslim-ness “shines” and Black Muslim women “dwell in light” because of the darkness of the racist and sexist logics against which Islam refracts itself through the bodies, voices, and actions of Black Muslim women. To put it another way, in Sanchez’s poem, being Muslim is not only a set of proscribed religious practices but a state of insurgent being, in which the embodiment of Muslim womanhood itself is a form of unruly and rebellious expression against social, cultural, and political norms of race, gender, and religion. In the early 1970s, the proclamation of Muslim womanhood in Sanchez’s poem announced itself against anti-Black racism, misogyny against Black women, and racist and sexist interpretations of Christian doctrine. Being Muslim, as expressed in “WE ARE MUSLIM WOMEN,” is an insurgent ethical, political, and religious framework in which “Islam” facilitates holistic practices of Black women’s liberation and spiritual awakening.
Sanchez was a member of the Nation of Islam for only three years. Although she would cite the group’s patriarchal tendencies and the stifling of women’s creativity as her reasons for leaving in 1975, Sanchez clearly and unequivocally declared her identity as a Muslim woman both in her poetry and public appearances (as seen in her photo on the cover of Black World magazine) during that time. Thus her words and presence indelibly shape the cultural history of women of color and American Islam and demonstrate how states of being Muslim—of being Muslim women, to be precise—in the United States arise at particular moments in history in response to and against specific racial and gendered iterations of Islam in U.S. culture. Such iterations do not disappear or dissolve in the face of shifting political contexts, I argue, but are negotiated and navigated through in future iterations of U.S. Muslim women’s identities.
In 2015 Duke University student Nourhan Elsayed offered another expression of U.S. Muslim women’s identity formation that reveals its affective nature and the continual racial and gendered insurgency that marks its formation. In an essay titled “Feeling Muslim,” published in the Chronicle (Duke’s student newspaper) on February 16, 2015, Elsayed describes her feelings walking across her college campus as a young, Egyptian American Muslim woman who wears the headscarf. “Before college,” her essay begins, “I never felt Muslim.” Once there, however, she becomes