asserts Karim, “they are certainly acting as Islamic feminists.”69
As the works of Majeed and Karim demonstrate, forms of Islamic feminism are expressed and signified in the United States through the lived experiences of race and gender and against the realities of racism, sexism, and social inequality. Throughout this book, I identify and approach the stories and representations of the U.S. Muslim women gathered here as part of a broader tradition of Muslim women seeking forms of racial, gendered, and religious justice during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, one that is rooted in the experiences of Black women but that has evolved in ways that inform the lives of all U.S. Muslim women, both Black and non-Black. Like Karim, I identify their desires and labors as part of the broader Islamic feminist tradition as well as being inexorably linked to histories of Black feminism, womanism, and WOC feminism in the United States, the intersections of which I argue produce a legacy of “U.S. Muslim feminism.” In the stories of Black women in the Ahmadiyya Movement in the 1920s and 1930s, or of the women of Islam or of the Nation of Islam from the 1950s through the 1970s, or of Sisters Betty Shabazz and Dakota Staton, I highlight the complex matrices of power in and through which their desires for gender justice arose and manifested themselves in their relationship with Islam.
Finally, Being Muslim centers how issues of safety and security are critical to all discourses and ideologies of feminism and gender justice, and in particular for women of color, and thus to the examinations of U.S. Muslim women lives. To consider how Islam has functioned as a space of safety for women, as well as a source of violence directed toward women, a number of my chapters employ the concept of the safe harbor as defined by Toni Morrison in her 1973 novel Sula. Morrison uses the term to describe the relationship between the novel’s two female protagonists, Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who realize, as young Black girls growing up in Medallion, Ohio, in 1922, “that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them,” and thus they “set about creating something else to be.”70 “In the safe harbor of each other’s company,” Morrison writes, “they could afford to abandon the ways of other people and concentrate on their own perception of things.”71 In this space, at least momentarily, they do not fear bodily harm; they forget that they are targets of physical, emotional, and psychological violence. Yet while their safe harbor provides solace, it ultimately owes its existence to the dehumanizing forces of racism, sexism, poverty, and white supremacy: the very catalysts of the safe harbor’s creation. Thus Nel and Sula’s “safety” is premised on violence, a desire to create “something else” only because what already exists is fatal. Their safe harbor is ephemeral, shifting and evolving in response to external circumstances. Indeed, as those familiar with the novel know, Nel and Sula’s adult relationship becomes marked by competition, disdain, jealousy, and ultimately, betrayal—emotions brought about by their struggles with the limits of race, gender, sexuality, and class that inform the trajectories of each of their lives.
Being Muslim argues that such safe harbors are integral to the lives and histories of U.S. Muslim women. They are spaces of respite; they may be cultural, political, and religious; they can be physical and ideological; they may span the space of a home, a masjid, a community, a classroom, a Facebook group, or an email Listserv. They are the spaces where Muslim women in the United States have been able to “abandon the ways of other people and concentrate on their own perception of things,” where they need not explain away their bodies or the engagements of their bodies with Islam but simply focus on and proceed with relationships premised upon their worldviews as shaped by their understandings and lived practices of Islam. Yet U.S. Muslim women are never, truly safe, because safe harbors themselves are contingent upon the continual presence of racist, patriarchal, and imperial violence that necessitate their formation in the first place. As such, U.S. Muslim women, like the ones gathered here, know that it is precisely due to the ephermerality of such safe harbors that being Muslim enjoins practices of social justice, so they may work, worship, and live, insurgently, against that which endangers them.
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As I stated earlier, the first three chapters of this book focus on the lives and representations of Black Muslim women. Chapter 1, “‘Four American Moslem Ladies’: Early U.S. Muslim Women in the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam, 1920–1923,” begins with an examination of the earliest known photograph of self-identified Muslim women in the United States. Taken in 1922, the photo features four African American female converts to the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam, a South Asia–based missionary movement that attracted significant numbers of Black women between the 1920 and 1960s. I offer a multilayered and, at times, circuitous account of the histories that produced the photograph, specifically the racial politics of 1920s Chicago, the race and gender politics of the Ahmadiyya missionary Dr. Mufti Muhammad Sadiq, and the desires for safety and spirituality that led Black American women to Islam.
In chapter 2, “Insurgent Domesticity: Race and Gender in Representations of NOI Muslim Women during the Cold War Era,” I consider how the domestic spaces of Black Muslim women were portrayed in photography, media, and literature of the 1950s and 1960s and how the male gaze mediated these representations. In analyses of the 1959 CBS news documentary “The Hate That Hate Produced”; The Messenger magazine, the first official publication of the Nation of Islam, edited by Malcolm X in 1959; a 1963 photo essay in Life magazine, photographed by Gordon Parks; and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, the chapter characterizes images of the domesticity of Black Muslim women as “insurgent visions” of American Islam, oftentimes imagined by men yet enacted with women’s consent and participation.
Chapter 3, “Garments for One Another: Islam and Marriage in the Lives of Betty Shabazz and Dakota Staton,” examines the lives of two of the most prominent Muslim women in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s: the wife and later widow of Malcolm X, Betty Shabazz, and the jazz singer Dakota Staton. The Muslim-ness of both women was inexorably linked to, and oftentimes wholly predicated upon, their status as wives of Black American Muslim men. Through an exploration of how each woman approached Islam and marriage in their daily lives, I argue that Shabazz and Staton viewed their marriages and Muslim identities concurrently and through the racial and gendered contexts in which they approached marriage as an integral component of their practices of Islam.
In chapter 4, “Chadors, Feminists, Terror: Constructing a U.S. American Discourse of the Veil,” I shift focus away from Muslim women in the United States to examines American media coverage of the Iranian women’s revolution in March 1979. I look at how the major American television networks and print news media described Iranian Muslim women, covered the U.S. feminist Kate Millett’s trip to Iran, and depicted the treatment of Iranian women in the feminist press. Crucial to my analysis is how post–civil rights era racial logics and the mainstreaming of second-wave feminist logics contributed to the construction of contemporary American “discourse of the veil,” the term used by Leila Ahmed and others to describe the Western fetishization of the Islamic headscarf as a symbol of women’s oppression.
Chapter 5, “A Third Language: Muslim Feminism in America,” presents the voices of four U.S. Muslim women who actively incorporate social justice practices into their engagements with Islam and who articulate a clear relationship with gender justice and feminism in their lives. I explore how their work and perspectives refract the racial and gendered legacies of U.S. Muslim women across the last century, and I introduce the concept of Muslim feminism to link their experiences across racial, ethnic, and generational boundaries.
In the conclusion, “Soul Flower Farm,” I visit a small urban farm in the East Bay Hills in California run by Maya Blow, a Muslim homeopath and herbalist. Through Blow’s work, I consider the ways U.S. Muslim women, and Muslims more broadly, are engaging urban farming, environmentalism, and movements for food justice as “Muslim” issues
