Being Muslim. Sylvia Chan-Malik
supremacy: the very catalysts of the safe harbor’s creation. Thus Nel and Sula’s “safety” is premised on violence, a desire to create “something else” only because what already exists is fatal. Their safe harbor is ephemeral, shifting and evolving in response to external circumstances. Indeed, as those familiar with the novel know, Nel and Sula’s adult relationship becomes marked by competition, disdain, jealousy, and ultimately, betrayal—emotions brought about by their struggles with the limits of race, gender, sexuality, and class that inform the trajectories of each of their lives.
Being Muslim argues that such safe harbors are integral to the lives and histories of U.S. Muslim women. They are spaces of respite; they may be cultural, political, and religious; they can be physical and ideological; they may span the space of a home, a masjid, a community, a classroom, a Facebook group, or an email Listserv. They are the spaces where Muslim women in the United States have been able to “abandon the ways of other people and concentrate on their own perception of things,” where they need not explain away their bodies or the engagements of their bodies with Islam but simply focus on and proceed with relationships premised upon their worldviews as shaped by their understandings and lived practices of Islam. Yet U.S. Muslim women are never, truly safe, because safe harbors themselves are contingent upon the continual presence of racist, patriarchal, and imperial violence that necessitate their formation in the first place. As such, U.S. Muslim women, like the ones gathered here, know that it is precisely due to the ephermerality of such safe harbors that being Muslim enjoins practices of social justice, so they may work, worship, and live, insurgently, against that which endangers them.
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As I stated earlier, the first three chapters of this book focus on the lives and representations of Black Muslim women. Chapter 1, “‘Four American Moslem Ladies’: Early U.S. Muslim Women in the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam, 1920–1923,” begins with an examination of the earliest known photograph of self-identified Muslim women in the United States. Taken in 1922, the photo features four African American female converts to the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam, a South Asia–based missionary movement that attracted significant numbers of Black women between the 1920 and 1960s. I offer a multilayered and, at times, circuitous account of the histories that produced the photograph, specifically the racial politics of 1920s Chicago, the race and gender politics of the Ahmadiyya missionary Dr. Mufti Muhammad Sadiq, and the desires for safety and spirituality that led Black American women to Islam.
In chapter 2, “Insurgent Domesticity: Race and Gender in Representations of NOI Muslim Women during the Cold War Era,” I consider how the domestic spaces of Black Muslim women were portrayed in photography, media, and literature of the 1950s and 1960s and how the male gaze mediated these representations. In analyses of the 1959 CBS news documentary “The Hate That Hate Produced”; The Messenger magazine, the first official publication of the Nation of Islam, edited by Malcolm X in 1959; a 1963 photo essay in Life magazine, photographed by Gordon Parks; and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, the chapter characterizes images of the domesticity of Black Muslim women as “insurgent visions” of American Islam, oftentimes imagined by men yet enacted with women’s consent and participation.
Chapter 3, “Garments for One Another: Islam and Marriage in the Lives of Betty Shabazz and Dakota Staton,” examines the lives of two of the most prominent Muslim women in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s: the wife and later widow of Malcolm X, Betty Shabazz, and the jazz singer Dakota Staton. The Muslim-ness of both women was inexorably linked to, and oftentimes wholly predicated upon, their status as wives of Black American Muslim men. Through an exploration of how each woman approached Islam and marriage in their daily lives, I argue that Shabazz and Staton viewed their marriages and Muslim identities concurrently and through the racial and gendered contexts in which they approached marriage as an integral component of their practices of Islam.
In chapter 4, “Chadors, Feminists, Terror: Constructing a U.S. American Discourse of the Veil,” I shift focus away from Muslim women in the United States to examines American media coverage of the Iranian women’s revolution in March 1979. I look at how the major American television networks and print news media described Iranian Muslim women, covered the U.S. feminist Kate Millett’s trip to Iran, and depicted the treatment of Iranian women in the feminist press. Crucial to my analysis is how post–civil rights era racial logics and the mainstreaming of second-wave feminist logics contributed to the construction of contemporary American “discourse of the veil,” the term used by Leila Ahmed and others to describe the Western fetishization of the Islamic headscarf as a symbol of women’s oppression.
Chapter 5, “A Third Language: Muslim Feminism in America,” presents the voices of four U.S. Muslim women who actively incorporate social justice practices into their engagements with Islam and who articulate a clear relationship with gender justice and feminism in their lives. I explore how their work and perspectives refract the racial and gendered legacies of U.S. Muslim women across the last century, and I introduce the concept of Muslim feminism to link their experiences across racial, ethnic, and generational boundaries.
In the conclusion, “Soul Flower Farm,” I visit a small urban farm in the East Bay Hills in California run by Maya Blow, a Muslim homeopath and herbalist. Through Blow’s work, I consider the ways U.S. Muslim women, and Muslims more broadly, are engaging urban farming, environmentalism, and movements for food justice as “Muslim” issues in the twenty-first century by building upon existing legacies of women of color in American Islam.
Terminology
Before moving on, I want to briefly discuss and explain a number of the terms I use in the book. As this is a volume about Islam as a lived religion, about how women have produced ways of being Muslim against fraught political and cultural landscapes, I am mindful of the power of nomenclature. The terms we use matter, both in acts of self-signification and in how others identify us.
To refer to Muslims within the United States, I use the term “U.S. Muslims.” I use this term, as opposed to “American Muslim” or “Muslim American” to clarify that my work does not engage with the diversity of Muslim life across the entirety of the Americas, which includes North, South, and Central America and the Caribbean islands. Furthermore, “U.S. Muslim” does not imply the necessity of formal citizenship or a notion of “claiming America” as a prerequisite for a U.S.-based Muslim identity. However, when speaking of Islam’s historical presence in the nation, or referring broadly to Islamic practices in the United States, I employ the term “American Islam.” This is due to the fact that there has already been a substantive body of work on Islam in the United States that uses this term, which I engage and build upon here.72
I use the term “Black American Muslim,” or “Black Muslim,” to refer to African American Muslims, regardless of the their sectarian or organizational affiliations, although at times I also use the term “African American Muslim.” The idiom “Black Muslims” was once primarily used to describe members of the Nation of Islam and, as a result, was oftentimes rejected by African American Muslims who were not part of the group or who did not want to be affiliated with the NOI’s black nationalist politics. My usage suggests that whether one was or is a member of the Nation of Islam, political insurgency has always marked being at once Black and Muslim in the United States and that it is critical to claim—not elide—this affiliation. As such, African American Muslims in the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam or who follow Sunni Islam are also at times referred to as “Black Muslims” here. I use both the terms “Black American” and “African American” to refer to people of African descent in the Americas.
In the case of U.S. Muslims of other racial and ethnic backgrounds, I aim to be as specific as possible—for example, South Asian Muslim, Lebanese American Muslim, and so on. At times, when discussing interactions between Black Muslims and those of Asian, Arab, or African descent, I employ the terms “Black and non-Black Muslims.” I prefer the latter term to “immigrant Muslim.” Many