Being Muslim. Sylvia Chan-Malik
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such frameworks by examining how Muslim women in the United States have engaged questions of religious agency and feminist practice, within and through American contexts of race and gender. I point out that long before the War on Terror, Black American Muslim women infused Islamic religious practices with social consciousness, which they carried out in different spaces than Black men and which may not have been recognizable as “political,” in practices such as prayer, fasting, dress, dietary restrictions, and so forth. In the contemporary era, I contend that social consciousness continues to motivate religious, cultural, and political ways of being for a new, multiracial generation of young U.S. Muslim women who have come of age in the decade and a half following 9/11 and, now, under a Donald J. Trump presidency. Being Muslim demonstrates how the lives and labors of Black Muslim women critically underwrite and inform ways of being Muslims among a new generation of U.S. American Muslims, specifically in the ways that Islam has been at once lived as a religious identity, a political stance, and an expression of racial and gendered agency in the twenty-first century.
At the same time, in order to track how “Islam” has been produced through racialized logics for much of the last century, this book engages the notion of Islam as a racial-religious form, in which categories of gender and sexuality are always constitutive. The term “racial-religious form” builds on the concept of “racial form,” borrowed from the work of the literary scholar Colleen Lye in her America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893–1945, in which she considers how stereotypes of “yellow peril” and “model minority” inform Asian racialization in the United States, what she calls “the Asiatic racial form.” Through materialist analysis of literary texts, Lye interrogates the putatively paradoxical nature of the terms “yellow peril” and “model minority” and argues that both are actually “two aspects of the same, long-running racial form,” owing to how Asians in both are continually tied to “the trope of economic efficiency.”27 The Asiatic racial form, she argues, is the product of shifting U.S.-Asia relations within contexts of globalization that produce “the historical conditions,… social terrains,… and representational material” of race making, that is, of ascribing meanings to certain groups of bodies on the basis of race.28 To put it another way, changing economic, political, and social circumstances engender varying racial tropes or stereotypes of particular groups, which all coalesce into the racial form, in which meanings do not disappear but actually accrue to produce “mythic persistence into the present.”29
In the case of Muslims in the United States, the idea of the racial form is useful, as “Islam” and “Muslim,” while religious signifiers, have continually been characterized through racial terms. In addition, as the United States has increased its military presence in the Middle East and as Muslims from Southwest Asia have increasingly entered the U.S. economy as migrant workers and refugees from the latter decades of the twentieth century, it is important to acknowledge, as Junaid Rana does in his work on transnational Pakistani labor migrants in the wake of the War on Terror,30 that “Muslims” have also accrued negative racial meanings in relation to capital, what Iyko Day has described as the type of “bad capital” that has been historically associated with Asian bodies in the United States.31 Rana traces the historical construction of the Muslim through European and U.S.-based racial logics in his 2007 article, “The Story of Islamophobia,” in which he writes, “Without a doubt, the diversity of the Islamic world in terms of nationality, language, ethnicity, culture, and other markers of difference, would negate popular notions of racism against Muslims as a singular racial group. Yet, current practices of racial profiling in the War on Terror perpetuate a logic that demands the ability to demand what a Muslim looks like from appearance to visual cues. This is not based purely on superficial cultural makers such as religious practice, clothing, language, and identification. A notion of race is at work in the profiling of Muslims.”32 Rana elaborates by identifying how Muslims were associated with indigenous peoples during the Reconquista, as they were the infidels and heathens who needed to be destroyed within Europe, while indigenous people in the United States were those who were to be conquered in the New World. This affiliation shifted with the forced arrival of African slaves to the Americas, many of whom were Muslim, an affiliation that continued with Black conversion to Islam during the early mid-twentieth century. At this time, Islam came to “represent a liberatory racial identification for African Americans” and became affiliated with blackness, specifically, the desire for Black freedom—for many within Black communities—and Black rebellion—in the eyes of the state and the white cultural mainstream. Finally, Rana discusses how in the U.S. War on Terror, the Muslim has come to be conflated with Arabs and South Asians and “is incorporated into a racial formation that is adamantly anti-immigrant,” that is, produced through anti-immigrant sentiment. Through his genealogy, Rana clearly shows how “the Muslim” has been iterated and reiterated through various racial logics and has taken numerous forms.
Yet Islam as merely a “racial” form is insufficient to capture the complexities of anti-Muslim sentiment that have become part and parcel of U.S. political discourse. As Sophia Rose Arjana argues in her 2015 study, Muslims in the Western Imagination, while negative constructions of Islam and Muslims have certainly been racial, they are also about “anxieties surrounding categories beyond race—in particular, those related to religion, gender, and sexuality.”33 Arjana articulates the intersection of these anxieties through the figure of the “Muslim monster” within the “West’s imaginaire of Islam: the idea of the Muslim as a frightening adversary, an outside enemy that doesn’t belong in modernity, who due to an intrinsic alterity, must be excluded from the American and European landscapes.”34 Working from the medieval period to the present, Arjana presents an array of Muslim monsters in the Western literary, cultural, and political imagination and charts the myriad ways that Muslims, in particular Muslim men, are rendered monstrous, “as interruptions that disturb normative humanity, civilization, and modernity”35—which she demonstrates long precedes the advent of orientalism as a field of study in the eighteenth century. In Arjana’s analyses, it becomes apparent that Islam is monstrous because it exceeds race into the ideological. Its monstrosity arises because of Western beliefs that it is a pathological religious system, which marks Muslim bodies, as well as infecting their hearts and minds.36 As Islam is a religion—not a race—with a set of foundational texts and practices (i.e., the Qur’an and hadith, the Five Pillars) in which all its practitioners engage, the West conceives of Muslims as following its “monstrous” ideology in lockstep; for example, if one Muslim is a terrorist, they all support terrorism, that “Islam” 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