is an insurgent ethical, political, and religious framework in which “Islam” facilitates holistic practices of Black women’s liberation and spiritual awakening.
Sanchez was a member of the Nation of Islam for only three years. Although she would cite the group’s patriarchal tendencies and the stifling of women’s creativity as her reasons for leaving in 1975, Sanchez clearly and unequivocally declared her identity as a Muslim woman both in her poetry and public appearances (as seen in her photo on the cover of Black World magazine) during that time. Thus her words and presence indelibly shape the cultural history of women of color and American Islam and demonstrate how states of being Muslim—of being Muslim women, to be precise—in the United States arise at particular moments in history in response to and against specific racial and gendered iterations of Islam in U.S. culture. Such iterations do not disappear or dissolve in the face of shifting political contexts, I argue, but are negotiated and navigated through in future iterations of U.S. Muslim women’s identities.
In 2015 Duke University student Nourhan Elsayed offered another expression of U.S. Muslim women’s identity formation that reveals its affective nature and the continual racial and gendered insurgency that marks its formation. In an essay titled “Feeling Muslim,” published in the Chronicle (Duke’s student newspaper) on February 16, 2015, Elsayed describes her feelings walking across her college campus as a young, Egyptian American Muslim woman who wears the headscarf. “Before college,” her essay begins, “I never felt Muslim.” Once there, however, she becomes painfully aware of her Muslim-ness, especially in light of certain events that took place between 2013 and 2015. Of this awareness, she writes:
When the Boston marathon bombings occurred—I felt Muslim. I felt what it meant to walk into a store and have 10 years of inaccurate media fueled hate projected on to my body by someone who knew nothing of me. When the adhan was going to be announced from the Chapel, I felt Muslim. When people’s comments about my faith were wrought with a brand of animosity I still wish I didn’t know existed so close to home, when people threatened to hurt Muslim students on this campus, I felt Muslim.… In post-9/11 mainstream America, to be Muslim is to be the bearer of evil.11
In referencing the Boston marathon bombings of 2013, the January 2015 controversy on the Duke campus regarding the calling of the adhan (Islamic call to prayer),12 media coverage of Islam and Muslims, and threats to Muslim students at Duke and beyond, Elsayed articulates feeling Muslim as a type of fraught, ontological response, in which her sense of being is determined by a constant awareness of how her presence connotes distorted conceptions of Islam and Muslims.
This feeling is further heightened because Elsayed’s essay was written as a response to the murders of three U.S. Muslim university students—Deah Barakat, Yusor Abu-Salah, and Razan Abu-Salah—the week prior. On February 10, 2015, at approximately 5:11 P.M., a forty-six-year-old white man named Craig Stephen Hicks murdered Deah, Yusor, and Razan execution style in their home in a condominium complex in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Deah and his wife Yusor were dentistry graduate students at the University of North Carolina, and Razan, Yusor’s younger sister, was a first-year student at North Carolina State University’s College of Design. All were of Palestinian descent.13 The two young women, Yusor and her younger sister Razan, like Elsayed, wore headscarves. Police reports later confirmed that all three—Deah at age 23, Yusor at 21, and Razan at 19—had died from gunshot wounds to the back of the head. Hicks, also a resident in the same complex, confessed to the murders, and news soon emerged that he was an unemployed gun enthusiast and atheist who had actively disdained religion on social media, particularly Islam. Many in the Muslim community in North Carolina viewed the murders as an anti-Muslim hate crime, and the killings sent shock waves through American Muslim communities as an example of an ever-rising tide of anti-Muslim sentiment across the country.14
Against these events and a tide of larger anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States and Europe, Elsayed closes the essay with the prayer that “feeling Muslim [doesn’t] mean fearing for your life.”15 Beyond her religious practices or cultural affiliations, she has come to feel Muslim through the experience of knowing she is a trope of terrorism, of being aware that her body conjures notions of violent jihadists, suicide bombers, and oppressed women. Her essay reveals how feeling Muslim is to move through the world with the knowledge that both your body and your religious beliefs—the misperceptions of your internal and external states—rouse fear, loathing, and violence in others. Yet though she inspires fear, it is, in fact Elsayed, as a Muslim woman, who expresses fear that she is not safe, who fears she is vulnerable to attack, and who must always be on guard. Unlike the years before college, Elsayed may no longer forget that she is Muslim, that she wears a headscarf, that feeling Muslim means she is constantly fearful of threats to her safety and well-being. She is now ineluctably aware—and thus must carry in her body—what people think of her faith in constructing her own racial, gendered, and religious being in America. Some solace comes, however, as she stands “side by side in the crowd of over 5,000 people asking God to grant mercy” at a candlelight vigil for Yusor, Razan, and Deah—a space in which she finds temporary respite from her fears.16
In contrast to Sanchez’s poem, Elsayed’s essay articulates “Muslim-ness” against the ongoing logics of the War on Terror and its effects on U.S. racial politics. A decade and a half after President George W. Bush introduced the term to the U.S. public as formal set of state military and securitization strategies in response to the 9/11 attacks, “terror” has become a normalized presence in American life, which has sutured Islam and Muslims to notions of terrorist threat and anti-Americanism. Elsayed also voices her Muslim-ness against the demographic shifts of U.S. Muslim communities in the decades since the publication of Sanchez’s poem. Whereas in 1974 the majority of Muslims within the United States were still African American (whether part of the Nation of Islam or other Islamic organizations), by 2015 immigration from South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa in the ensuing decades had transformed Islam’s domestic presence, with Black Muslims by then making up approximately one-fourth to one-third of the U.S. Muslim community, South Asians one-fourth, and those from the Middle East and North Africa one-third.17 Alongside these demographic shifts, changing geopolitical and economic relations between the United States and the Middle East around issues of oil production and supply in the 1970s and 1980s, and then subsequent American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, profoundly influenced cultural discourses around Islam and Muslims and normalized “Muslim” and “Arab” as interchangeable terms in the national lexicon. As such, in the almost fifty years between the publication of Sanchez’s poem and Elsayed’s essay, the nature of being Muslim in the United States had been reshaped and recontextualized by the changing nature of domestic racial politics, racial and ethnic demographics of U.S. Muslim communities, and projects of U.S. militarism and empire in the Middle East.
Yet despite these shifts, Elsayed is engaged in Muslim-ness as a state of insurgent being against hegemonic norms of race, gender, and religion in America. In 2015, Elsayed’s experience of being Muslim is forged vis-à-vis orientalist constructions of Islam as a signifier of foreignness and terrorism, as well as against ongoing logics of white and Christian supremacy that produce U.S. Muslims as lesser citizens. Like Sister Sonia Sanchez before her, Elsayed incorporates the charged political nature of Islam and being Muslim in the nation’s cultural imaginary into her processes of identity formation as a U.S. Muslim woman. Unlike being Muslim in Sanchez’s poem, however, Elsayed’s Muslim-ness in 2015 is not a pronouncement of political or spiritual empowerment, nor is it a means to reject the violence and dehumanization of racism; instead, it is a grappling with her existence as its constant projection. For Nourhan Elsayed, fifteen years after the start of the War on Terror, in the face of the demographic shifts within U.S. Muslim communities and in U.S.-Middle East relations, and following the horrific murder of three young U.S. Muslims in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, being Muslim is to feel profoundly unsafe because of one’s Muslim-ness while seeking solace or refuge in her Islamic beliefs and practices. Thus, whereas Sonia Sanchez and other Black women embraced Islam as space of safety and sanctuary from anti-Black racism and sexual violence, young women like Elsayed struggle with whether to even express their Muslim identity in public spaces for fear of recrimination while navigating
