Being Muslim

A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam

Sylvia Chan-Malik

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781479804290
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Études islamiques

An exploration of twentieth and twenty-first century U.S. Muslim womanhood that centers the lived experience of women of color For Sylvia Chan-Malik, Muslim womanhood is constructed through everyday and embodied acts of resistance, what she calls affective insurgency. In negotiating the histories of anti-Blackness, U.S. imperialism, and women’s rights of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Being Muslim explores how U.S. Muslim women’s identities are expressions of Islam as both Black protest religion and universal faith tradition. Through archival images, cultural texts, popular media, and interviews, the author maps how communities of American Islam became sites of safety, support, spirituality, and social activism, and how women of color were central to their formation. By accounting for American Islam’s rich histories of mobilization and community, Being Muslim brings insight to the resistance that all Muslim women must engage in the post-9/11 United States. From the stories that she gathers, Chan-Malik demonstrates the diversity and similarities of Black, Arab, South Asian, Latina, and multiracial Muslim women, and how American understandings of Islam have shifted against the evolution of U.S. white nationalism over the past century. In borrowing from the lineages of Black and women-of-color feminism, Chan-Malik offers us a new vocabulary for U.S. Muslim feminism, one that is as conscious of race, gender, sexuality, and nation, as it is region and religion.

1

“Four American Moslem Ladies”

Early U.S. Muslim Women in the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam, 1920–1923

There is a photo. Because there is a photo, this photo, the story of U.S. Muslim women in the twentieth-century might begin with these women—four African American women in unadorned dresses, blouses, and skirts. Against a dark cloth backdrop, they face the camera wrapped in shawls and blankets fastened (with straight pins, or perhaps clothespins?) to conceal their shoulders, necks, mouths. The wraps appear to be large scarves, or maybe even bedsheets, although one woman is wrapped in a heavy woolen fabric with a carpet-like texture. Three wear church hats, the one who does not has wrapped her shawl around her head and pinned it above her mouth, exposing only her eyes and nose. The women are formal, stiff, and unsmiling, in a style typical of Victorian-era studio portraiture of the late nineteenth-century, although it is 1922. The photo’s setting is simple: There are no ornaments, no frills; wherever the studio, it is modest and spare. Before the black drape, two women stand and the other two sit, one on a carved wooden stool a bit too tall, her feet dangling slightly off the ground, her right hand grasping an armrest. They appear middle-aged, ranging anywhere from their late twenties to their forties. Their eyes gaze in different directions; two of the women look directly at the camera, the two others stare off into the distance.

Figure 1.1. “Four American Moslem Ladies,” from the Moslem Sunrise, January 1923. Image reproduction courtesy of the New York Public Library.

This is the first-known group photo of visibly identifiable Muslim women in the United States. It was originally published in the January 1923 edition of the Moslem Sunrise, the newsletter of the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam (AMI) in the United States, a South Asia–based Islamic missionary movement that was one of the first major Muslim organizations in the United States. On the pages following the photo, there is a “Brief Report of the Work in America,” a recurring feature in the newsletter penned by the AMI’s chief missionary, a man hailing from the Punjab region of India (now Pakistan) named Mufti Muhammad Sadiq, who led the organization’s efforts in the United States from 1921 to 1923 and established the group’s headquarters in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago, where the photo was taken. In his report, Sadiq offers descriptions of his recent lectures on Islam and his other proselytization efforts,1 but he includes no accompanying story or reference to the photo of the four women, making no mention of who they are and why the photo is included with this report, except for this short caption:

FOUR AMERICAN MOSLEM LADIES. Right to left: Mrs. Thomas (Sister Khairat), Mrs. Watts (Sister Zeineb), Mrs. Robinson (Sister Ahmadia), Mrs. Clark (Sister Ayesha)2

Such inclusion of the image alongside the omission of any information about the women themselves has also marked the photo’s contemporary afterlife in the scholarship on Islam in the United States. In this corpus, the photo is generally contextualized through narratives of Black masculinity and nationalism, deployed to demonstrate the presence of Black women in Islamic movements such as the Moorish Science Temple, the AMI, and the Nation of Islam in relation to ideologies of Black nationalism and Marcus Garvey’s Pan-Africanist movement.3 Its placement within such narratives implicitly advances the notion that these Black American Ahmadi Muslim women “saw” Islam and the adoption of Islamic identities in the same ways that many Black American Muslim men did, for example, as intertwined with ideologies of racial separatism, Black uplift, and revolutionary political struggle.

While Islam’s political significance—in particular, the understanding that it was a religious tradition that could foster African nationalism and develop Black racial pride and African civilization—certainly appealed to some Black women who joined early twentieth-century Islamic organizations, such politics were oftentimes not, this chapter suggests, the central or driving reasons that Black migrant women—and in particular, the Four American Moslem Ladies—chose to convert to Islam and adopt Muslim identities and practices in the rapidly industrializing, post–Great Migration North. Between 1921 and 1923, more than one thousand U.S. Americans converted to Islam through the AMI; anywhere from one-third to one-half of these new Muslims were women, and the vast majority of these women were Black. In what follows, I argue that, beyond the discourses and logics of Black nationalism, another set of at once deeply personal and unwaveringly political concerns animated Black American women’s claiming of Ahmadiyya Islam during early decades of the twentieth century. These concerns were rooted in the desire for the safety and stability of themselves and their families and emerged in response to the particular struggles of newly arrived Black migrant women to Northern cities such as Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and New York. Thus, although Black freedom—as expressed through Marcus Garvey’s political oratories and the work of his United Negro Improvement Association or in calls for Pan-African solidarity and African liberation—may well have been on Black migrant women’s minds, they also grappled with constant, pressing concerns in their daily lives. Those concerns included such matters as the sexual advances of their work supervisors or landlords, the dangers and stresses of raising children while working long hours, the lack of economic resources and supportive kinship networks, and the securing and maintenance of marital and familial relations in urban environments that were vastly different from what many newly arrived Black women—some former slaves or the children of slaves—had experienced in the South. In the face of such difficulties, “Islam” offered those such as the Four American Moslem Ladies a religious and political ethos that rejected the dehumanization of Black working-class women by white society and the Black bourgeoisie and presented expansive and productive conceptions of citizenship, belonging, and racial and gendered selfhood in a religious framework that was at once politically empowering and adaptable to their existing knowledge of Christianity. Further, the clear organizational structure of the AMI, along with its emphasis on religious education and moral development, constituted a stabilizing force in many women’s lives—a framework that provided safety and sustained them against the harsh and unforgiving environments of Bronzeville and beyond.

This chapter unearths the lives and experiences of the Four American Moslem Ladies. It particularly focuses on one of the women, Florence Watts—Sister Zeineb following her conversion—and explores how and why she and her peers came to claim Islam through the teachings of Mufti Muhammad Sadiq and the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam in 1920s Chicago. While Muslim women were undoubtedly present in the United States prior to 1922 when the photo was taken,4 this image stands as the earliest archival trace of U.S. Muslim’s women’s communal lives and thus, I argue, constitutes a critical, albeit arbitrary, start to a verifiable account of Muslim women’s narratives in the United States. In my investigation, I outline the historical conditions that produced ways of being Muslim for the Four American Moslem ladies as at once grounded in the Black experience of the post–Great Migration urban North and facilitated through international networks of diasporic exchange between the United States and South Asia, specifically interracial interactions between Blacks and South Asians in the United States. Through Ahmadiyya Islam, Black women in 1920s Chicago found “safe harbors”—spaces of kinship-shared spiritual desires and of respite from racial and gendered harm—in which they could protect and nurture their bodies, minds, and souls and cultivate religious and intellectual affinities with Muslim women worldwide while using Islam’s teachings to navigate and find solace from urban life. Building upon existing histories that have heretofore contextualized the lives of Black Muslims in the early twentieth century through the lens of Black nationalism and Pan-Africanist thought,5 this chapter considers how the accounting of categories of race, gender, class, and sexuality critically shift Islam’s historical meanings in the United States, with particular regard to how Black women were central to the making of Islamic practices and community formation, such as cultivating Islamic religious traditions and institutions and utilizing and engaging “Islam” in ways that specifically addressed their struggles as Black women. Above all, this chapter highlights how the construction of Black American Muslim women’s identities during the early twentieth century was deeply informed by the politics of the body, particularly the raced, gendered, and classed bodies of Black migrant women responding to—and oftentimes, insurgently against—their circumscription through the discourses and logics of race, gender, sexuality, and class of the time. In their bodies—indeed, because of their bodies—Black women like the Four American Moslem Ladies chose and claimed Islam, not only because they believed in its teachings and tenets, but also because they felt protected and guided by its presence as they enacted forms of affective insurgency that rejected their constant abjection as working-class Black women. For them, Muslim-ness was fashioned in—and would come to mediate—the contact zone between their bodies and the cultural and political terrains they inhabited in Bronzeville, Chicago, the nation, and the world.

To tell the stories of the Four American Moslem Ladies, this chapter enacts a visual reversal of their image. Instead of seeing them as part of an existing narrative (e.g., of Black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, Black men and masculinity, etc.), I instead consider what they saw in Islam as Black American women from the South arriving in Chicago in the 1910s and 1920s and how their visions were transformed into insurgent modes of feeling and practice through which they made their Muslim-ness. To put it another way, this chapter offers Sisters Khairat, Zeineb, Ayesha, and Ahmadia as visionaries: women who came to look at, inhabit, and experience the world as Black American Muslim women during a time when there was no such thing. To see the world as Muslim women required their continual vigilance and labor, not only in terms of Islamic practices, like praying or fasting, but also in navigating how they as Black women could enact and embody Islamic practices in the racialized and gendered environments in which they lived. To explore their visions, I begin with the story of Florence Watts, a Black working-class migrant woman who moved to Chicago around 1910 and converted to Ahmadiyya Islam in 1922. Through Sister Zeineb’s experiences, I investigate the living conditions of working-class Black women migrants in Bronzeville, the neighborhood’s shifting religious landscape, the rising status of Chicago as a “global” city and of the United States as empire, and the new forms of emotionality, kinship, sexuality, and mobility that emerged in Black centers of the urban North—all factors that shaped Black women’s encounters with and impressions of Islam. I then turn my focus to Dr. Mufti Muhammad Sadiq and his encounters with women in Chicago like Sister Zeineb, exploring how and why his teachings of Islam specifically appealed to Black migrant women. Finally, I close with a historical reconstruction of a typical day in the lives of Sister Zeineb and her peers in Bronzeville following their conversion to Ahmadiyya Islam and imagine how their newfound religious identities shifted their interactions with their neighborhood, the nation, and the world as Black American women.

Before moving on, I find it critical to acknowledge a central factor behind the scholarly inattention to the lives of the Four American Moslem Ladies and, more broadly, to the role of the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam in the histories of Islam in the United States.6 Such elisions stem from the idea that Ahmadiyya Muslims are not “real” Muslims but, even worse, kafirs (or infidels) who purposefully distort the teachings of Islam, an idea generally held by Sunni Muslims, who constitute the largest sect of Muslims both in the United States and worldwide.7 Yet perceptions of Ahmadis as non-Muslims are not only theological but also political, relating directly to the status of the Ahmadiyya in Pakistan, where the group has been the subject of the nation’s blasphemy laws, which have led to their ongoing persecution and oppression for the last century.8 Such differences continue to separate Ahmadi and Sunni Muslim communities in the United States and underscore the highly politicized and sectarian nature of Islam’s presence in the historical record and the existing scholarship on U.S. Muslims, as well as the transnational nature of political and theological debates within even the earliest U.S. Muslim communities. In this instance, it is my contention that the marginalization and omission of the AMI has contributed to the making of an implicitly masculinist narrative of Islam in the early twentieth century. This is not only because of its emphasis on male figures such as Marcus Garvey and Noble Drew Ali and, later, Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, but also because it ignores how U.S. Muslim women—as well as men, families, and communities—from the 1920s onward lived as Muslims and practiced Islam beyond a starkly political realm. They also lived as Muslims and practiced Islam in the “private” spaces of homes, meeting rooms, and mosques—which were themselves always animated by trajectories of cultural and political power—and in forms that were dynamically influenced by local, national, and international/transnational forces and currents. To initiate a story of U.S. American Islam with the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam and the Four American Moslem Ladies calls for alternative, markedly different historical narratives, those that relay Black women’s embrace and embodiment of Muslim feelings and practices as a form of social movement making—a part of what Robin Kelley has called the “freedom dreams” of the Black radical tradition, which “generate[d] new knowledge, new theories, new questions” and produced “cognitive maps of the future, of the world not yet born.”9 In Ahmadiyya Islam, I argue that the Four American Moslem Ladies found solace and safety, community and kinship, and a map for freedom through which they envisioned their future selves, their fullest selves in a future world.

Finding Florence

“Late last night, I sold away and cried,” sings Bessie Smith in “Chicago Bound Blues”—“Had the blues for Chicago, I just can’t be satisfied.” Recorded and released in 1923, the song expressed the thoughts of a Southern woman whose man had migrated to Chicago, leaving “his mama standing there.” Without him, she “just can’t be satisfied” and ultimately kills herself, a death which will wind up a “big red headline [in] tomorrow Defender news,” a reference to the Chicago Defender, the nation’s largest Black newspaper at the time, which had a wide circulation across the U.S. South. As Angela Davis notes, songs like Smith’s offered a rare glimpse into “new forms of emotional pain in the postslavery era” as experienced by Black women10—in this case, the pain and longing of a woman pining for a lover who has left her to seek new opportunities in Chicago, a city known as the “Black Mecca” of the North. Owing to her own lack of mobility, she cannot follow him there and thus must deal with the isolation and despair of their separation, a result of the Great Migration. With the “blues on my brain,” Smith sings, “my tongue refused to talk / I was following my daddy but my feet refuses to walk.” Although she wants to “follow” her man, her body betrays her (a tongue that refuses to talk, feet that refuse to walk). Thus, despite the formal end of slavery, the woman in Smith’s song is ironically not “C...