Before moving on, I want to briefly discuss and explain a number of the terms I use in the book. As this is a volume about Islam as a lived religion, about how women have produced ways of being Muslim against fraught political and cultural landscapes, I am mindful of the power of nomenclature. The terms we use matter, both in acts of self-signification and in how others identify us.
To refer to Muslims within the United States, I use the term “U.S. Muslims.” I use this term, as opposed to “American Muslim” or “Muslim American” to clarify that my work does not engage with the diversity of Muslim life across the entirety of the Americas, which includes North, South, and Central America and the Caribbean islands. Furthermore, “U.S. Muslim” does not imply the necessity of formal citizenship or a notion of “claiming America” as a prerequisite for a U.S.-based Muslim identity. However, when speaking of Islam’s historical presence in the nation, or referring broadly to Islamic practices in the United States, I employ the term “American Islam.” This is due to the fact that there has already been a substantive body of work on Islam in the United States that uses this term, which I engage and build upon here.72
I use the term “Black American Muslim,” or “Black Muslim,” to refer to African American Muslims, regardless of the their sectarian or organizational affiliations, although at times I also use the term “African American Muslim.” The idiom “Black Muslims” was once primarily used to describe members of the Nation of Islam and, as a result, was oftentimes rejected by African American Muslims who were not part of the group or who did not want to be affiliated with the NOI’s black nationalist politics. My usage suggests that whether one was or is a member of the Nation of Islam, political insurgency has always marked being at once Black and Muslim in the United States and that it is critical to claim—not elide—this affiliation. As such, African American Muslims in the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam or who follow Sunni Islam are also at times referred to as “Black Muslims” here. I use both the terms “Black American” and “African American” to refer to people of African descent in the Americas.
In the case of U.S. Muslims of other racial and ethnic backgrounds, I aim to be as specific as possible—for example, South Asian Muslim, Lebanese American Muslim, and so on. At times, when discussing interactions between Black Muslims and those of Asian, Arab, or African descent, I employ the terms “Black and non-Black Muslims.” I prefer the latter term to “immigrant Muslim.” Many non-Black Muslims in the United States are not immigrants. Some are second- or third-generation Americans, and others hail from families who have been in the United States for over a century. This terminology reflects the distinctive racial composition of U.S. Muslim communities, which, as stated earlier, is approximately one-third Black, one-third South Asian, and one-third Arab/Middle Eastern, although there are also significant and growing numbers of white and Latino converts to Islam.
Finally, I apply the term “Muslim” across sectarian differences in U.S. Muslim communities. As I am interested in the ways people have named and created themselves as U.S. Muslims, not in religious debates, I take an ecumenical approach to Muslim identity and do not engage discussions regarding the permissibility or authenticity of Muslim organizations. I strongly believe each and every group named here is integral to the fabric of U.S. American Islam. I also fully acknowledge that I do not adequately address Shi‘a Muslim women’s experiences of race and gender in the United States, a critical strand of this history I hope to take up in the future and encourage other scholars to explore as well.
* * *
To close, I return to a question I posed at the start of this introduction: What is at stake in articulating a collective experience of being Muslim women? In writing a women- and race-centered narrative of American Islam, I have constructed this book against the rampant discourses of anti-Muslim racism, anti-blackness, sexism, and misogyny that pervade our present. Being Muslim reveals how religion inflects realities of race and gender in this country, how being Muslim is refracted through the lived experiences of race and gender and through the historical and ongoing precarity of Muslim life, which produces women’s continual desire for safety and sanctuary. While my focus here is on Muslim women in the United States and Islam as lived religion and racial form within the nation, I also understand that transnational flows of knowledge and circuits of free-market capitalism produce the “new ethnicities”—to borrow a phrase from Stuart Hall—of a global Islam that defy and challenge national boundaries.73 Being Muslim demarcates its inquiry on the United States, not to reify or celebrate the nation-state or the racial categories produced therein, but to examine Muslim-ness as formed within the specific contexts of what Toni Morrison has called the “wholly racialized society” of the United States.74 Its aim is not to parochialize American Islam but to tell a story of U.S. Muslim women across time, space, and racial difference that allows for more expansive possibilities of affiliation and exchange among vulnerable populations both in the United States and worldwide.
1
“Four American Moslem Ladies”
Early U.S. Muslim Women in the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam, 1920–1923
There is a photo. Because there is a photo, this photo, the story of U.S. Muslim women in the twentieth-century might begin with these women—four African American women in unadorned dresses, blouses, and skirts. Against a dark cloth backdrop, they face the camera wrapped in shawls and blankets fastened (with straight pins, or perhaps clothespins?) to conceal their shoulders, necks, mouths. The wraps appear to be large scarves, or maybe even bedsheets, although one woman is wrapped in a heavy woolen fabric with a carpet-like texture. Three wear church hats, the one who does not has wrapped her shawl around her head and pinned it above her mouth, exposing only her eyes and nose. The women are formal, stiff, and unsmiling, in a style typical of Victorian-era studio portraiture of the late nineteenth-century, although it is 1922. The photo’s setting is simple: There are no ornaments, no frills; wherever the studio, it is modest and spare. Before the black drape, two women stand and the other two sit, one on a carved wooden stool a bit too tall, her feet dangling slightly off the ground, her right hand grasping an armrest. They appear middle-aged, ranging anywhere from their late twenties to their forties. Their eyes gaze in different directions; two of the women look directly at the camera, the two others stare off into the distance.
Figure 1.1. “Four American Moslem Ladies,” from the Moslem Sunrise, January 1923. Image reproduction courtesy of the New York Public Library.
This is the first-known group photo of visibly identifiable Muslim women in the United States. It was originally published in the January 1923 edition of the Moslem Sunrise, the newsletter of the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam (AMI) in the United States, a South Asia–based Islamic missionary movement that was one of the first major Muslim organizations in the United States. On the pages following the photo, there is a “Brief Report of the Work in America,” a recurring feature in the newsletter penned by the AMI’s chief missionary, a man hailing from the Punjab region of India (now Pakistan) named Mufti Muhammad Sadiq, who led the organization’s efforts in the United States from 1921 to 1923 and established the group’s headquarters in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago, where the photo was taken. In his report, Sadiq offers descriptions of his recent lectures on Islam and his other proselytization efforts,1 but he includes no accompanying story or reference to the photo of the four women, making no mention of who they are and why the photo is included with this report, except for this short caption:
FOUR AMERICAN MOSLEM LADIES. Right to left: Mrs. Thomas (Sister Khairat), Mrs. Watts (Sister Zeineb), Mrs. Robinson (Sister Ahmadia), Mrs. Clark (Sister Ayesha)2
Such inclusion of the image alongside the omission of any information about the women themselves has also marked the photo’s contemporary afterlife in the scholarship
