itself encourages terrorism. Thus, to name Islam as both a racial and religious form—a racial-religious form—in the United States is to note how not only Muslim bodies but also Islamic beliefs and practices are marked by abject monstrosity.
In addition to monstrosity, Being Muslim argues that within the United States during the course of the last century, Islam’s racial-religious form has been signified through insurgency—the notion that Muslims are actively engaged in activities that rebel against and undermine Western “freedoms and democracy.” Beyond orientalism, this form emerges through historical contexts of anti-blackness, U.S. foreign policy, and anti-immigrant sentiment. They have been primarily manifest in the tropes of the Radical Black Muslim and the foreign Islamic Terrorist (which I explore at length in chapters 2 and 4). Both are linked to notions of national threat, explicitly as threats to white, Christian, Anglo-Saxon norms and beliefs (as Rana details above), with the latter emerging as a ubiquitous, and menacing, figure in the post-9/11 United States. Yet in regard to the trope of the Radical Black Muslim, perhaps most famously represented through the figure of Malcolm X, it is critical to note that Islam’s racial-religious form operates differently in the mainstream (white) and Black cultural imaginaries; whereas it functions as a symbol of threat and violence in the former, within Black cultural politics and discourses, as already discussed, Islam is oftentimes viewed as a religion of Black liberation, associated with representations of strong Black manhood and morality, antiracist struggle, revolutionary nationalism, and/or principled political protest, as exemplified by Malcolm X, as well as by the late boxer Muhammad Ali, by the basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and, for some, by the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Thus such racial difference fractures the racial-religious form of the Black Muslim radical in the U.S. cultural imaginary, as Islam holds divergent—and oftentimes contradictory—meanings, which are dependent upon racial affiliation as well as political ideology.
What is not divergent, however, is that all of these tropes are wholly gendered and almost always signify Muslim men. Yet, whether for the Radical Black Muslim or the foreign Islamic Terrorist, the female counterpart to such stereotypes is the figure of the Poor Muslim Woman, who is perceived to be oppressed by Islam and coerced into subjugation by Muslim men. Even in understandings of Islam as a religion or ideology of Black protest, Muslim women are portrayed—if they are represented at all—as silent supporters of Black men, relegated to domestic space. In their subjugation, Muslim women are understood to be tacitly supporting Islam’s racial and religious insurgency. In Being Muslim, I identify the Islamic Terrorist, the Poor Muslim Woman, and the Radical Black Muslim as primary manifestations of Islam’s racial-religious form in the United States, all of which are tied, I argue, to tropes of cultural insurgency and rebellion—racial, gendered, and religious—against white Anglo-Saxon Protestant norms. In the case of the Radical Black Muslim, I identify both the “positive” and “negative” aspects of Islam’s racial meanings—that is, Islam as Black liberation, Islam as anti-white threat—and argue that both produce distorted images and understandings of Muslim women’s lives. Throughout the book, I consider how U.S. Muslim women grapple and negotiate with Islam’s unruly insurgent presence and how they themselves in turn work against such logics to produce their identities in affective and embodied ways.37
As stated above, this book understands being Muslim, or “Muslim-ness,” as I call it at times, as emerging out of the engagement between Islam as lived religion and racial-religious form, which produces being Muslim as a continual process of affective insurgency, at times forged against Islam’s own insurgent presence in the nation’s cultural and political imaginaries. Islam is lived and practiced by U.S. Muslims as a non-white, non-Christian religion that is largely perceived in the last century as beyond the pale of Western values and liberalism, as well as an unruly, dangerous, and monstrous ideology, associated with blackness and Black people, as well as foreign terrorist threat. As such, Muslim-ness arises not only from enacting Islamic religious or cultural practices, but from the feelings and modes of embodiment that emerge in response to and against the ineluctable non-white and non-Christian presence of Islam in the United States. I argue that this process is always affective, enacted through the movements and negotiation of the body, how a body relates to the world around it, how a person feels in their own body and makes relationships with others, and perhaps most important, in the connections imagined and manifested between the self, heaven, and earth. As the influential work of the anthropologist Saba Mahmood demonstrates, the body as engaged in acts of religious and/or ethical formation is a vehicle of self-making, but one that takes place in “the technical and embodied armature” of a religion’s moral-ethical frameworks and/or state power.38 Thus, while the affective insurgency of U.S. Muslim women’s bodies I identify here are undoubtedly agential—that is, it is produced through acts of agency on the part of women enacting them—they do not necessarily connote acts of resistance or subversion to hegemonic norms of race and gender. Indeed, at the same time that I seek to locate the social justice impulses of women of color within American Islam, I am also incredibly mindful of how the experiences and actions of many of the individuals documented here may reinforce “nonliberal” ideas (i.e., of heteronormative gendered and sexual relations, Victorian models of womanhood, polygamy, etc.). To characterize the actions and choices of U.S. Muslim women as insurgent is not advance their actions and modes of being as some sort of unified resistance to oppression or to advance Islam as an inherently counterhegmonic force against Western forms of racist, sexist, and imperial power. Instead, the recognition of processes of affective insurgency in U.S. Muslim women’s lives is a means of making legible how religious identities and practices are animated in the “contact zones” between bodies and the social worlds around them—locations defined by the literary and cultural theorist and scholar Mary Louise Pratt as those “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today.”39 Muslim identities and practices have always been expressed in such exceedingly uneven relations of power in the United States, with women’s identities further circumscribed by hierarchies of gender and sexuality against which they meet, clash, and grapple.
Islam, Women of Color, and Feminism in the United States
Being Muslim situates “feminism” as critical to approaching women’s ways of being Muslim in the United States during the past century, both in how Islam has constituted a religious framework of gendered agency for primarily women of color, and in how Muslim women have constantly negotiated their identities against Western feminist logics that categorize them as submissive, inferior, and unfree. In regard to the latter, in the United States and Europe, feminism and Islam are often posed as oppositional terms. As discussed in the previous section, the idea that Islam itself is somehow inherently oppressive and/or dangerous to women—and is thus antithetical to feminism—has become part of Islam’s racial form in America. The Poor Muslim Woman is a static and essentialized trope that is deployed to justify U.S. military attacks and military occupation in the Middle East, the profiling and surveillance of Muslim communities in the United States, even the notion of “banning” Muslims altogether from the country.40 To borrow the title of a 2013 book by the anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod, the notion that Muslim women “need saving” by the West, or by Western feminist ideals, is a primary logic through which Muslim women are seen in the United States, while Islam is continually portrayed as an inherently misogynist religion that sanctions and promotes the oppression of women.41 Such logics are rooted in the long history of what the scholar of religion and Islamic feminist Leila Ahmed calls “colonial feminism,” a discourse that I discuss further in chapter 4, which, Ahmed argues, arose as late nineteenth-century European colonizers in the Middle East cited women’s seemingly low status in the region to show the cultural inferiority of Islamic societies, which justified colonial occupation.42 The “feminism” of the colonizing/occupying power—whether it be the British in nineteenth-century Egypt or the United States in 2002 Afghanistan—is thus prescribed as a tonic to Muslim women’s oppression: an ideology Muslim women should
