of Black masculinity and nationalism, deployed to demonstrate the presence of Black women in Islamic movements such as the Moorish Science Temple, the AMI, and the Nation of Islam in relation to ideologies of Black nationalism and Marcus Garvey’s Pan-Africanist movement.3 Its placement within such narratives implicitly advances the notion that these Black American Ahmadi Muslim women “saw” Islam and the adoption of Islamic identities in the same ways that many Black American Muslim men did, for example, as intertwined with ideologies of racial separatism, Black uplift, and revolutionary political struggle.
While Islam’s political significance—in particular, the understanding that it was a religious tradition that could foster African nationalism and develop Black racial pride and African civilization—certainly appealed to some Black women who joined early twentieth-century Islamic organizations, such politics were oftentimes not, this chapter suggests, the central or driving reasons that Black migrant women—and in particular, the Four American Moslem Ladies—chose to convert to Islam and adopt Muslim identities and practices in the rapidly industrializing, post–Great Migration North. Between 1921 and 1923, more than one thousand U.S. Americans converted to Islam through the AMI; anywhere from one-third to one-half of these new Muslims were women, and the vast majority of these women were Black. In what follows, I argue that, beyond the discourses and logics of Black nationalism, another set of at once deeply personal and unwaveringly political concerns animated Black American women’s claiming of Ahmadiyya Islam during early decades of the twentieth century. These concerns were rooted in the desire for the safety and stability of themselves and their families and emerged in response to the particular struggles of newly arrived Black migrant women to Northern cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and New York. Thus, although Black freedom—as expressed through Marcus Garvey’s political oratories and the work of his United Negro Improvement Association or in calls for Pan-African solidarity and African liberation—may well have been on Black migrant women’s minds, they also grappled with constant, pressing concerns in their daily lives. Those concerns included such matters as the sexual advances of their work supervisors or landlords, the dangers and stresses of raising children while working long hours, the lack of economic resources and supportive kinship networks, and the securing and maintenance of marital and familial relations in urban environments that were vastly different from what many newly arrived Black women—some former slaves or the children of slaves—had experienced in the South. In the face of such difficulties, “Islam” offered those such as the Four American Moslem Ladies a religious and political ethos that rejected the dehumanization of Black working-class women by white society and the Black bourgeoisie and presented expansive and productive conceptions of citizenship, belonging, and racial and gendered selfhood in a religious framework that was at once politically empowering and adaptable to their existing knowledge of Christianity. Further, the clear organizational structure of the AMI, along with its emphasis on religious education and moral development, constituted a stabilizing force in many women’s lives—a framework that provided safety and sustained them against the harsh and unforgiving environments of Bronzeville and beyond.
This chapter unearths the lives and experiences of the Four American Moslem Ladies. It particularly focuses on one of the women, Florence Watts—Sister Zeineb following her conversion—and explores how and why she and her peers came to claim Islam through the teachings of Mufti Muhammad Sadiq and the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam in 1920s Chicago. While Muslim women were undoubtedly present in the United States prior to 1922 when the photo was taken,4 this image stands as the earliest archival trace of U.S. Muslim’s women’s communal lives and thus, I argue, constitutes a critical, albeit arbitrary, start to a verifiable account of Muslim women’s narratives in the United States. In my investigation, I outline the historical conditions that produced ways of being Muslim for the Four American Moslem ladies as at once grounded in the Black experience of the post–Great Migration urban North and facilitated through international networks of diasporic exchange between the United States and South Asia, specifically interracial interactions between Blacks and South Asians in the United States. Through Ahmadiyya Islam, Black women in 1920s Chicago found “safe harbors”—spaces of kinship-shared spiritual desires and of respite from racial and gendered harm—in which they could protect and nurture their bodies, minds, and souls and cultivate religious and intellectual affinities with Muslim women worldwide while using Islam’s teachings to navigate and find solace from urban life. Building upon existing histories that have heretofore contextualized the lives of Black Muslims in the early twentieth century through the lens of Black nationalism and Pan-Africanist thought,5 this chapter considers how the accounting of categories of race, gender, class, and sexuality critically shift Islam’s historical meanings in the United States, with particular regard to how Black women were central to the making of Islamic practices and community formation, such as cultivating Islamic religious traditions and institutions and utilizing and engaging “Islam” in ways that specifically addressed their struggles as Black women. Above all, this chapter highlights how the construction of Black American Muslim women’s identities during the early twentieth century was deeply informed by the politics of the body, particularly the raced, gendered, and classed bodies of Black migrant women responding to—and oftentimes, insurgently against—their circumscription through the discourses and logics of race, gender, sexuality, and class of the time. In their bodies—indeed, because of their bodies—Black women like the Four American Moslem Ladies chose and claimed Islam, not only because they believed in its teachings and tenets, but also because they felt protected and guided by its presence as they enacted forms of affective insurgency that rejected their constant abjection as working-class Black women. For them, Muslim-ness was fashioned in—and would come to mediate—the contact zone between their bodies and the cultural and political terrains they inhabited in Bronzeville, Chicago, the nation, and the world.
To tell the stories of the Four American Moslem Ladies, this chapter enacts a visual reversal of their image. Instead of seeing them as part of an existing narrative (e.g., of Black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, Black men and masculinity, etc.), I instead consider what they saw in Islam as Black American women from the South arriving in Chicago in the 1910s and 1920s and how their visions were transformed into insurgent modes of feeling and practice through which they made their Muslim-ness. To put it another way, this chapter offers Sisters Khairat, Zeineb, Ayesha, and Ahmadia as visionaries: women who came to look at, inhabit, and experience the world as Black American Muslim women during a time when there was no such thing. To see the world as Muslim women required their continual vigilance and labor, not only in terms of Islamic practices, like praying or fasting, but also in navigating how they as Black women could enact and embody Islamic practices in the racialized and gendered environments in which they lived. To explore their visions, I begin with the story of Florence Watts, a Black working-class migrant woman who moved to Chicago around 1910 and converted to Ahmadiyya Islam in 1922. Through Sister Zeineb’s experiences, I investigate the living conditions of working-class Black women migrants in Bronzeville, the neighborhood’s shifting religious landscape, the rising status of Chicago as a “global” city and of the United States as empire, and the new forms of emotionality, kinship, sexuality, and mobility that emerged in Black centers of the urban North—all factors that shaped Black women’s encounters with and impressions of Islam. I then turn my focus to Dr. Mufti Muhammad Sadiq and his encounters with women in Chicago like Sister Zeineb, exploring how and why his teachings of Islam specifically appealed to Black migrant women. Finally, I close with a historical reconstruction of a typical day in the lives of Sister Zeineb and her peers in Bronzeville following their conversion to Ahmadiyya Islam and imagine how their newfound religious identities shifted their interactions with their neighborhood, the nation, and the world as Black American women.
Before moving on, I find it critical to acknowledge a central factor behind the scholarly inattention to the lives of the Four American Moslem Ladies and, more broadly, to the role of the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam in the histories of Islam in the United States.6 Such elisions stem from the idea that Ahmadiyya Muslims are not “real” Muslims but, even worse, kafirs (or infidels) who purposefully distort the teachings of Islam, an idea generally held by Sunni Muslims, who constitute the largest sect of Muslims both in the United States and worldwide.7 Yet perceptions of Ahmadis as non-Muslims are not only theological but also political, relating directly to the status of
