Being Muslim. Sylvia Chan-Malik
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Black Folk, published in 1903, “The Negro church of today is the social center of Negro life in the United States.”26 In many regards, Chicago was headquarters for the Black Church’s social center; indeed, even prior to the Great Migration, the city had long been known as a center of Black American religious life, specifically of Black mainline Christianity. In his study of Black Protestantism in migration-era Chicago, Wallace Best asserts that the city held out a mythic allure to its new arrivals not only as a promised land of higher-paying work, equality, and educational opportunities but also as the destination of their religious pilgrimage from South to North. Best writes that “in escaping the harsh living conditions, severe discrimination, and mob rule [of the South], the migration [to Chicago] was very much a religious sojourn. The biblical imagery of the Exodus, flight from Egypt, and crossing over the Jordan were routinely invoked by Black Southerners to characterize their own migration.”27 These new migrants would bring elements of Southern folk religion into their worship that highlighted themes of exile, sojourn deliverance, and the “moral obligation” of the Church to the community, as well as more animated forms of worship, such as shouting, physical movement, laughter, and weeping to church pews. This ruffled the feathers of many of the congregants of existing mainstream Black churches in Chicago, which generally discouraged expressive worship and viewed community outreach as unnecessary. Yet churches still needed to draw new members. Thus, while Black Church leaders may have disdained migrants as unschooled in the “respectable” bourgeois mannerisms of the North, they would begrudgingly make changes to draw them in, including the implementation of community outreach programs and incorporating entertainment and performance into worship services. Ultimately, the new Chicagoans and their approaches to worship brought about “a new sacred order,” one that altered existing class divisions in the Black community and shifted notions of Black “respectability.”
Black women intimately shaped the logics and discourses of respectability politics, both in the church and beyond. It is critical to note that, in addition to the social phenomenon that affected Florence Watts’s life as discussed here so far—the Great Migration, racial tensions in the North, the evolution of the Black Church—the early decades of the twentieth century also marked growing support across the country for women’s suffrage movements and the coming of age of the women’s movement in the Black Church, which reached its apex between 1900 and 1920. Yet these latter two events worked against each other in some ways; as Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham notes, as “support for women’s rights grew in intensity and sympathy, racial prejudice became acceptable, even fashionable in America.”28 Thus Black women, especially in the context of the Church, sought to mobilize the language of women’s rights in their efforts to combat structural racism. Yet as new forms of sexuality and mobility emerged for Black women, as expressed in the blues and in other modes of expression, many Black Church women viewed such practices as sinful, reflective of low moral character that would ultimately harm Black communities and the broader Black struggle. In their fight for “equality,” female activists in the Black Church “combined both a conservative and radical impulse [that] offered women an oppositional space in which to protest vigorously social injustice … situated within the larger structural framework of America and its attendant social norms.”29 These social norms were, of course, dictated by the white gaze; as Higginbotham writes: “There could be no laxity as far as sexual conduct, cleanliness, temperance, hard work, and politeness were concerned. There could be no transgression of [white] society’s norms.”30 Such judgmental attitudes and the policing of poor black migrant women’s behavior turned away many migrant women from the church. Yet even for women who were not part of a congregation, the Black Church and the politics of respectability functioned as moral and ethical arbiters of social boundaries, barometers of what was proper and improper, “clean” and “unclean.”
Still, migrant women like Florence Watts desired community, religious or otherwise, oftentimes in ways that attempted to “re-create the intimacy of village life they left behind.”31 Beyond the church, there were few alternatives. While Chicago had an established network of African American Women’s Clubs—from 1890 to 1920, there were over one hundred fifty on record—most were affiliated with churches, and such organizations were generally not welcoming to most working-class migrant women, as they were often unable to accommodate the busy schedules of those who had to both work and manage their households, as well as, oftentimes, caring for extended family and neighbors. Finally, many of the migrant women, like Florence, had encountered difficult situations in their marital and family relationships, whether the death of a spouse, which left one a widow, or divorce or separation, or having children out of wedlock, or extreme poverty or destitution, or drug or alcohol abuse, and so on. While some churches and women’s groups were certainly welcome to all, their strong emphasis on respectability discouraged many and sent them toward other spaces of community and kinship, such as those fostered by Mufti Muhammad Sadiq and the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam. I next turn to Florence’s encounter with the AMI and the work of the group’s central missionary, Mufti Muhammad Sadiq, to invite Black American migrant women into the AMI’s fold.
But before I move on to Sadiq and Florence Watts’s meeting, however, it is important to pause briefly and ask, How might Black women in Bronzeville—and Americans more broadly—have thought about Islam and Muslims at the time? What impressions could they have had of Islam prior to their eventual conversions, of the regions and peoples of the “Moslem” world? To respond to these questions, one might consider Chicago’s emergence as a global city beginning in the late nineteenth century, a time in which the nation itself transitioned from a modus operandi of nation building to one of empire building. Chicago’s international character was exemplified through the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893.32 At the same time as the exposition, the city also hosted the World’s Parliament of Religions, the first interfaith global dialogue that included representatives of both “Western” and “Eastern” faiths, which, while overwhelmed with white European and Christian representatives, also included representatives of Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, Shintoism, Confucianism, Taoism, and Islam.33 The “worldliness” of Chicago arose in conjunction with how the “East” came to figure more broadly in capitalist consumption in the United States, akin to what John Tchen has called “patrician orientalism” in relation to the ways Chinese culture was consumed by wealthy Americans in the eighteenth century.34 Islamic and Middle Eastern objects and culture served a similar function; to own or engage with them was a way to express and wealth and status for white Americans.
This consumption of the “East,” and specifically of “Moslem” culture, as an exotic commodity coincided with a rise in the notion of Islam as a religious and cultural threat, an idea that came from the efforts of Christian missionaries. By the first decade of the twentieth century, there were numerous efforts by American Protestant organizations to evangelize the Muslim world, fueled by notions that Islam “was a flawed religion that could not save its adherents” and that “the Moslem world was in deep cultural crisis requiring a winsome Christian witness, lest a great moment of opportunity be lost.”35 Further, in the closing decade of the nineteenth century, toward the end of what Mark Twain called the “Gilded Age”—the age when every American “was a potential Andrew Carnegie”—millions of immigrants poured into the country. While most were from Europe, small but significant amounts of Muslims also arrived, mostly from Syria, Lebanon, and the Indian subcontinent. They entered a nation marked not only by its desire for empire, but one of epic inequality, where suddenly rich Americans ostentatiously flaunted their newfound wealth, while countless immigrants and Black Americans lived in squalor. Finally, in the early twentieth century, anti-Asian xenophobia was at an all-time high, as East and South Asian Muslim immigrants who did not phenotypically look “white” experienced intense racism in the forms of violence and hostility, as well as juridical disenfranchisement through immigration and citizenship laws that were constantly changed to prevent their inclusion.36
Yet, as already mentioned, Black Americans themselves were perhaps the strongest force in changing the meaning and presence of “Islam” in the United States, as the religion was praised by thinkers like Marcus Garvey and Edward Wilmot Blyden as a suitable theology for Black empowerment.37 The spirit of Black nationalism animated and amplified the message of Islam for many Black Americans, including those who joined the Moorish Science Temple—the organization founded in 1914 by Timothy Drew, who would later change his name to Noble Drew Ali—and,