women in Bronzeville—and Americans more broadly—have thought about Islam and Muslims at the time? What impressions could they have had of Islam prior to their eventual conversions, of the regions and peoples of the “Moslem” world? To respond to these questions, one might consider Chicago’s emergence as a global city beginning in the late nineteenth century, a time in which the nation itself transitioned from a modus operandi of nation building to one of empire building. Chicago’s international character was exemplified through the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893.32 At the same time as the exposition, the city also hosted the World’s Parliament of Religions, the first interfaith global dialogue that included representatives of both “Western” and “Eastern” faiths, which, while overwhelmed with white European and Christian representatives, also included representatives of Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, Shintoism, Confucianism, Taoism, and Islam.33 The “worldliness” of Chicago arose in conjunction with how the “East” came to figure more broadly in capitalist consumption in the United States, akin to what John Tchen has called “patrician orientalism” in relation to the ways Chinese culture was consumed by wealthy Americans in the eighteenth century.34 Islamic and Middle Eastern objects and culture served a similar function; to own or engage with them was a way to express and wealth and status for white Americans.
This consumption of the “East,” and specifically of “Moslem” culture, as an exotic commodity coincided with a rise in the notion of Islam as a religious and cultural threat, an idea that came from the efforts of Christian missionaries. By the first decade of the twentieth century, there were numerous efforts by American Protestant organizations to evangelize the Muslim world, fueled by notions that Islam “was a flawed religion that could not save its adherents” and that “the Moslem world was in deep cultural crisis requiring a winsome Christian witness, lest a great moment of opportunity be lost.”35 Further, in the closing decade of the nineteenth century, toward the end of what Mark Twain called the “Gilded Age”—the age when every American “was a potential Andrew Carnegie”—millions of immigrants poured into the country. While most were from Europe, small but significant amounts of Muslims also arrived, mostly from Syria, Lebanon, and the Indian subcontinent. They entered a nation marked not only by its desire for empire, but one of epic inequality, where suddenly rich Americans ostentatiously flaunted their newfound wealth, while countless immigrants and Black Americans lived in squalor. Finally, in the early twentieth century, anti-Asian xenophobia was at an all-time high, as East and South Asian Muslim immigrants who did not phenotypically look “white” experienced intense racism in the forms of violence and hostility, as well as juridical disenfranchisement through immigration and citizenship laws that were constantly changed to prevent their inclusion.36
Yet, as already mentioned, Black Americans themselves were perhaps the strongest force in changing the meaning and presence of “Islam” in the United States, as the religion was praised by thinkers like Marcus Garvey and Edward Wilmot Blyden as a suitable theology for Black empowerment.37 The spirit of Black nationalism animated and amplified the message of Islam for many Black Americans, including those who joined the Moorish Science Temple—the organization founded in 1914 by Timothy Drew, who would later change his name to Noble Drew Ali—and, later, the Nation of Islam.38 Through Noble Drew Ali, Marcus Garvey, Edward Wilmot Blyden, and Mufti Muhammad Sadiq, “Islam” emerged in the early decades of the twentieth century within the discursive lexicon of Black nationalism and liberation. At the same time, as the nation transitioned to empire at the turn of the century, “Islam” existed concurrently as an exotic oddity, an orientalized marker of a mysterious Middle East inhabited by “Moslems” and an ostensible religious threat to Christianity, reflected in the work of Protestant missionaries. As such, the early twentieth century marked the moment in which “Islam” came represent a number of at times opposed—yet always mutually constituted and imbricated—understandings of its meaning in the United States, of a far away, exotic religion and culture associated with the Middle East; a religious threat; a language and logic of Black freedom; and, later, to white Americans, an insurgent Black threat. For Black working-class women like Florence Watts and others, “Islam” was a term they had heard in political discussions of the day in relation to Black nationalism and Pan Africanism, but it was also one linked to notions of refinement or status, as it signaled a world beyond Bronzeville—a world that offered new imaginative geographies and spiritual horizons in which they could find safe harbor and construct expansive identities beyond the U.S. nation-state, beyond the racist terrains that circumscribed their bodies and minds in the post-Reconstruction United States.
“Pastor, Prophet, Proselytizer”
In 1922, Florence Watts lived just blocks away from the AMI mosque, and before eventually going in, she may have walked by on occasion or wondered about the men and women in “exotic” and “Eastern” dress she saw in her neighborhood from time to time. However, the place where many Black women in Bronzeville likely first “saw” Ahmadiyya Islam and learned of its teachings was on the “Woman’s Page” of the Chicago Defender. On August 19, 1922, between the monthly column “News of the Music World” and an advice column titled “Advice to the Wise and Otherwise” by a writer calling herself Princess Mysteria, the paper ran a feature story on this page titled “Those Who’re Missionaries to Christians,” accompanied by the subhead, “Prophet Sadiq Brings Allah’s Message into Chicago and Makes Proselytes.” The piece detailed the scene of one of Dr. Mufti Muhammad Sadiq’s lectures for “a score of worshippers … gathered in the newly-domed ‘mosque’ of the Ahmadia Moslem mission at 4448 Wabash Avenue,” a location at the heart of Bronzeville. Elaborating on Sadiq’s appearance, reporter Roger Didier offered a description reflective of the orientalist and racial logics of the time:
Dr. Mufti Muhammad Sadiq, pastor, prophet, and proselytizer, calmly discoursed on the evident inconsistencies of the Christian faith. Dr. Sadiq looks the part, having the appearance of a brown-skinned Jew, cast in a slender mold with sideburns that grow into a flowing beard of gospel likeness. His brow is narrow, but high; the eyes, brown, clear, and alert; the nose, large and domineering, as with Jews of the older type, and a white moustache covers the ample lips, which are a long way from the top of the head and sit securely on what suggests itself is a square and model chin.39
Didier then went on to describe Sadiq’s wardrobe (“a green baize full-length jacket with scarlet red lining,” “a skull cap with symbolic markings,” and “slippers”) and offered a careful inventory of the audience in the room, which included “a huge, brown individual” with “a ferocious scowl,” “a dental student from Calcutta,” a “fair-skinned Russian [with] sandy or reddish hair,” “the very dark Mr. Augustus who used to belong to St. Mark’s Church in this city,” and “half a dozen Garveyites,” including “one pretty yellow girl and another not so pretty.”40
Figure 1.2. Mufti Muhammad Sadiq. Photograph from the Moslem Sunrise, January 1923. Image reproduction courtesy of New York Public Library.
Figure 1.3. Al-Sadiq Mosque in Chicago. Photograph from the Moslem Sunrise, January 1923. Image reproduction courtesy of New York Public Library.
Following the careful visual descriptors, the reporter finally turned to the content of Sadiq’s lecture, which the missionary delivered while “planted rather leisurely against the wall” and “his small fine hands had just ceased fingering a handsomely bound copy of the Koran.” The article is worth quoting at length:
There is but one God, said he. All the others are mere prophets, including Jesus. Mahomet [sic] was the last and the equal of the others. None is to be worshipped, not even Jesus or Mahomet. Only God, the one God, must be served. The Trinity is an illusion—the word is not found in the Christian Bible and its principle cannot be sustained. God created all races, all colors. The Mohammedan faith makes no difference between race or class. One of Mahomet’s trusted followers, the chief muezzin, was an Abyssinian
