Being Muslim. Sylvia Chan-Malik

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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

       www.nyupress.org

      © 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

      New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.

      Manufactured in the United States of America

      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

      Also available as an ebook

      For my daughters and Badi

      CONTENTS

       Introduction: Being Muslim Women

       1. “Four American Moslem Ladies”: Early U.S. Muslim Women in the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam, 1920–1923

       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

       Conclusion: Soul Flower Farm

       Acknowledgments

       Notes

       Bibliography

       Index

       About the Author

      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

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