instances—whether in the embrace of “Islam” and Muslim womanhood as an ethos of Black liberation and protection, or in the awareness of “Islam” and Muslim womanhood as signifiers of terrorism and thus catalysts for racial-religious hatred directed at Muslims—being a Muslim woman in the United States is always a deeply political and politicized process, in which women must continually create themselves as Muslims against the fraught intersections of race, gender, Islam, and the nation that circumscribe their lives.
In Being Muslim, I want to suggest that ways of being Muslim constructed by Black American Muslim women like Sister Sonia X Sanchez (and many others before her) operate as a historical index for the lives of women such as Nourhan Elsayed, who are part of a racially and ethnically heterogeneous generation of U.S. Muslim women made up not only of Black, Arab, and South Asian Americans but also of large numbers of Latino, white, and multiracial Muslims. Through the stories of women in the Nation of Islam, of Black women in the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam, and of public figures like Betty Shabazz and the jazz singer Dakota Staton, I reveal ways of being Muslim in the United States that are steeped in the broader struggles of women of color in the United States while also intersecting with other domestic and transnational struggles of Muslim women worldwide. In linking their experiences, I seek to show how the “hate” directed at Muslims in the United States should be framed not only through logics of orientalism and xenophobia but also through the historical legacies and contemporary expressions of anti-blackness, misogyny, sexual violence, and the acknowledgment of the United States as an imperial settler colonial nation. At the same time, I want to show how women’s ways of being Muslim in the United States, while seemingly partitioned by race and class, share common characteristics with how Islam signals a type of ontological response to notions of race and gender in the political realm. To understand anti-Muslim racism in the contemporary United States requires careful attention to the complex and multiple meanings Islam has historically held in our national imaginary, as well to the multifaceted ways race, gender, and class have produced Muslim-ness in the United States. As such, the stories of Black American Muslim women like Sanchez and others demonstrate how Islam has been historically mobilized by women of color to counteract the dehumanizing logics of racism and sexism and how being Muslim has been enacted and reenacted by women of color as a type of political, cultural, and spiritual ontology against white supremacy, gendered violence, and state terror.
American Islam as Lived Religion and Racial-Religious Form
To understand varied formations and expressions of being Muslim as expressed by women such as Sonia Sanchez, Nourhan Elsayed, and others, this book approaches Islam in the United States as a “lived religion” and “racial-religious form,” paying careful attention to how gender informs understandings of each term, as well as how Islam has historically functioned at times as a signifier of political ideology. The encounter between Islam as lived religion and racial form in the United States, I argue, produces Muslim women’s being as a continual process of “affective insurgency,” a concept I have already mentioned. By “affective insurgency,” I refer to the multiscalar, diffuse, and ever-shifting forms of againstness that this book argues are the hallmark of U.S. Muslim women’s lives. As I will discuss, this againstness is not, nor has ever been, directed at a singular target; instead, it is a set of affective responses that emerge out of the ways Islam is consistently lived insurgently by women, responses that arise out of the ways U.S. Muslim women engage, navigate, and counter the ways Islam is imagined as an unruly and insurgent political presence at various moments in history.18 In this section, I seek to bring together a set of terms from varying scholarly disciplines and discourses—namely, religious studies, ethnic studies, American studies, and women’s and gender studies—to instigate a more robust conversation around U.S. Muslim women’s lives and representations and to show how interdisciplinarity is always crucial to this endeavor. It is important to note that, as a scholar of race and gender in the United States—not a theologian, a scholar of Islamic studies, or even a scholar of religious studies—I do not attempt to address Islam through interpretations of its texts and teachings; instead, I focus on its presence and influence in people’s lives and how this shapes the making of culture.
The concept of lived religion is drawn from the field of religious studies, where scholars such as Robert Orsi, David D. Hall, and Meredith McGuire have argued for an approach to the study of religious practices and impulses that is rooted in people’s everyday lives.19 As Orsi writes in his essay “Everyday Miracles,” individuals “do not merely inherit religious idioms, nor is religion a fixed dimension of one’s being, the permanent attainment of a stable self. People appropriate religious idioms as they need them, in response to particular circumstances. All religious ideas and impulses are of the moment, invented, taken, borrowed, and improvised at the intersections of life.”20 As this quote demonstrates, scholars of lived religion consider how religious meanings and actions are enacted and felt through the social environments of their practitioners’ daily lives and acknowledge the presence of religion beyond holy texts and organized religious spaces and institutions. In the field of religious studies, lived religion has marked an attempt by scholars to abandon—or at least look more critically at—established categories of orthodoxy (correct belief) and orthopraxy (correct practice) and instead consider how religious beliefs and practices emerge through culture, lived experiences, and daily life, and not only in spaces of worship and religious institutions. Yet, as with the larger field of religious studies itself, there has been an absence of analysis in discussions of lived religion in regard to how race influences these everyday contexts in which religion takes place.21
In my considerations of U.S. American Islam as a lived religion, I engage closely with the existing scholarship on Muslim women in the United States and, in particular, research and writing on and by Black American Muslim women that closely examines intersections of race, gender, religion, and sexuality and acknowledges “Islam” not only as religious tradition or a set of religions practices but also as a signifier of political insurgency. The scholar Sherman Jackson forcefully situates “Blackamerican Islam” (as he calls it) within the “thoroughly American phenomenon of ‘Black Religion,’ essentially a pragmatic, folk-oriented, holy protest against anti-black racism”22—in other words, a form of U.S.-based liberation theology. In addition to Islam’s “protest against anti-black racism,” as described by Jackson and others, for many Black women, the religion also operated, as the Islamic studies scholar Amina Wadud writes, “an escape from the overwhelming phenomenon of double oppressions as an African-American woman,” a spiritual tradition that seemingly offers “care, protection, financial support, and adoration for (Black) women.”23 Whereas Wadud goes on to say that many of these promises went unfulfilled, her words reflect how Black American Muslim women, in addition to a theology of racial liberation, also engaged Islam as protest against sexism and misogyny enacted upon Black women in the United States. As such, the experiences of Black American Muslim women reveal historical legacies of Islam in the United States as lived and practiced that directly contradict orientalist constructions of the religion as inherently oppressive to women and Muslim women as being forced to practice Islam. This is not say, however, that women of color only engaged Islam as politics. As I will demonstrate, women’s reasons for being Muslim were, and are, always at once, political, cultural, moral, ethical, and deeply religious.24
The notion that Islam itself holds the potential for women’s liberation has been central to women’s ways of being Muslim in America, particularly for Black American Muslim women and, subsequently, other women of color. Although most of the Black American Muslim women I discuss here would not call themselves “feminists,” they certainly implemented Islamic teachings and scriptures into their lives as potential sources of emancipation from racism and sexism, whether in the home, their communities, or in the public sphere. (I discuss the tensions produced by the term “feminism” in the next section, as well as in chapter 5.) The work of the anthropologist Carolyn Moxley Rouse is especially illuminating for understanding Islam’s emancipatory significance in lives of Black American women. In her influential 2004 work on Black Sunni Muslim women in Los Angeles, Engaged Surrender: African American Women and Islam, Rouse argues that “African American Islam is a political stance of engaging the world,
