women have avoided calling themselves “feminists” for a number of reasons. First, in recent decades, feminism has increasingly been deployed to shame Muslim women for their religiosity. As the novelist Mohja Kahf writes in her book The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, which tells the story of a young Syrian American Muslim woman growing up in the in Midwest during the 1970s and 1980s, Muslim women may be subjected to “a broken feminist record” that tells them that religion is an instrument of male dominance, modesty and chastity are forms of patriarchal control over women’s bodies, and thus religious women are stupid, brainwashed, or at the very least, victims of false consciousness.43 Feminism, in contrast, is a “secular” orientation—a positioning that has led many Muslim scholars and clerics, mostly male, to characterize feminism as un-Islamic innovation that is unnecessary, and even dangerous, for Muslim women. Second, then, Muslim women distance themselves from feminism because it is considered to be harmful to one’s deen, or faith, in particular in how it asserts equality between men and women as a goal, whereas Islam is said to promote complimentarity between the sexes, insofar that men and women are equal before God yet should not strive to perform the same tasks or occupy the same roles in society. Many scholars and Muslim women themselves feel that feminism demeans women’s esteemed roles as wives and mothers in Islam, while emphasizing that Islam already grants women rights to own and hold property, to work outside the home, and control their own income. At the same time, though, because of such logics, men “are given the authority to manage the affairs of women and even punish women if they do not obey,” writes the human rights activist and religious studies scholar Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, which “seriously erodes the rights given to women in Islam that Muslim are so quick to brag about.”44
Third, and most important in regard to the narratives in this book, many U.S. Muslim women’s adverse responses to “feminism” stem from the term’s affiliations with a feminism that privileges the epistemologies and interests of white European and American women and thus disenfranchises and marginalizes the voices and subjectivities women of color. As Carolyn Rouse writes, such suspicion is particularly pronounced among Black American Muslim women because of how “Black women’s distrust of ‘feminism’ can be said to be forged over centuries,” from the open racism of white women in the suffrage movement to the second-wave feminists of the 1960s who “were rebelling against a particular ‘Western’ set of gender roles and ideas of femininity” that did not take into account the lived realities of Black women or other non-white women in the United States.45 For example, Amina Wadud, author of Qur’an and Woman—the first gender-inclusive interpretation of Islam’s holy book46—and a Black American convert to Islam who has been a longtime and, at times, controversial advocate for gender justice in Islam,47 conscientiously does not call herself a feminist:
I … describe my position as pro-faith, pro-feminist. Despite how others may categorize me, my work is certainly feminist, but I still refuse to self-designate as a feminist, even with “Muslim” put in front of it, because my emphasis on faith and the sacred prioritize my motivations in feminist methodologies. Besides, as an African-American, the original feminist paradigms were not intended to include me, as all the works on Womanism have soundly elucidated. In addition, socialist feminism has focused clearly on the significance of class as it furthers problematizes the origins of feminism in the West. Finally, Third World feminisms have worked tediously to sensitize women and men to the complexities of relative global realities to resolving universally existing but specifically manifested problems in the areas like gender.48
In Wadud’s words, we see how, even as she rejects the designation of “feminist,” she gestures toward alternative feminist discourses beyond white feminism—namely womanism, socialist feminism, and Third World feminisms—“feminisms” with which she finds affinity and compatibility with her identity as a Muslim woman. Indeed, as stated earlier in the introduction, while many Black and other non-white Muslim women have sought gender justice through Islam, their wariness with whiteness-invested “feminism” and it attendant logics of racism, classism, U.S. exceptionalism, and now, anti-Muslim bias inhibits them from allying themselves with the term or the struggles that organize under its name.
With full acknowledgment of these trepidations regarding “feminism,” however, Being Muslim argues that alternative feminist formations, such as the ones mentioned by Wadud, animate the history of Islam in the United States and have informed women’s ways of being Muslim across the last century. As such, I contend that it is critical to understand the emergence of women’s ways of being Muslim and practicing Islam in relation to such alternative “feminist” histories forged at the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, and religion in the United States. Specifically, I consider “Black feminism,” “womanism,” and “women of color feminism” as terms that have been used to denote women of color’s desires for gendered agency and justice against hegemonic forces of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia, as well as the critical social thought of women of color. While women of color have, of course, always been involved in antiracist struggles, as well as struggles for women’s rights, Black feminism came to the fore forcefully in the 1970s and 1980s, when Black feminists sought to articulate the complexities of their identities and activism and refused the partitioning of their racial, gender, and sexual identities upon a political landscape that often demanded that they choose between their participation in struggles for women’s liberation or Black freedom. As the authors of the Combahee River Collective Statement—one of the key documents of contemporary Black feminism—wrote in 1978, “We believe that sexual politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in Black women’s lives as are the politics of class and race. We also find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are more often experienced simultaneously.”49 The Combahee Statement is largely acknowledged as the first major formulation of intersectional politics and intersectionality—the concept that would be formally coined by the legal scholar and critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw in the 1980s to denote the interconnectedness of systems of oppression and domination. In 1990, the sociologist Patricia Hill Collins offered an expansive analysis of Black feminist thought as an intellectual legacy of critical social theory expressed through “African-American women’s social location as a collectivity [that] has fostered distinctive albeit heterogeneous Black feminist intellectual traditions.”50
Yet while the authors of the Combahee Statement and scholars like Collins defined themselves as Black “feminists,” others rejected the term, opting instead to call themselves “womanists.” The term “womanist” is most often attributed to the writer and poet Alice Walker, who first used the term in a 1979 short story, “Coming Apart,” in which she wrote, “A womanist is a feminist, only more common.”51 She more explicitly defined the term in her 1983 volume In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, in which she stated that a “womanist” is “a black feminist or feminist of color [who] … loves other women, sexually or non-sexually” and “appreciates and prefers women’s culture, women’s emotional flexibility, and women’s strength.”52 In the same spirit as the Combahee Collective, Walker also emphasized that a womanist does not partition her racial, gendered, and sexual identities; a womanist is “committed to the survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female.”53 Walker’s definition famously ends, “Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender,” essentially characterizing “feminism” as just one variant of womanism, which is understood as the broader and more encompassing concept.54
In its centering and privileging of the experiences of Black women, womanism appealed to those committed to Black nationalist and Black Power struggles and who did not wish to ally themselves with the perceived racism and hypocrisy of white feminists. As Collins noted, womanism “seemingly supplie[d] a way for black women to address gender oppression without attacking black men.”55 Womanism also offered, Collins continues, “a visionary meaning,” in that Walker and other womanists saw it not just as a social movement or ideology (like feminism), but “as an ethical system” which was “continually evolv(ing) through its rejections of all forms of oppression and commitment to social justice.”56 In the academy, the womanist imperative to build relationships with Black men, as opposed to the seeming separatist gender ideologies of feminism, as well as its call for social justice, appealed to many Black
