Being Muslim. Sylvia Chan-Malik
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as political ideology.
What is not divergent, however, is that all of these tropes are wholly gendered and almost always signify Muslim men. Yet, whether for the Radical Black Muslim or the foreign Islamic Terrorist, the female counterpart to such stereotypes is the figure of the Poor Muslim Woman, who is perceived to be oppressed by Islam and coerced into subjugation by Muslim men. Even in understandings of Islam as a religion or ideology of Black protest, Muslim women are portrayed—if they are represented at all—as silent supporters of Black men, relegated to domestic space. In their subjugation, Muslim women are understood to be tacitly supporting Islam’s racial and religious insurgency. In Being Muslim, I identify the Islamic Terrorist, the Poor Muslim Woman, and the Radical Black Muslim as primary manifestations of Islam’s racial-religious form in the United States, all of which are tied, I argue, to tropes of cultural insurgency and rebellion—racial, gendered, and religious—against white Anglo-Saxon Protestant norms. In the case of the Radical Black Muslim, I identify both the “positive” and “negative” aspects of Islam’s racial meanings—that is, Islam as Black liberation, Islam as anti-white threat—and argue that both produce distorted images and understandings of Muslim women’s lives. Throughout the book, I consider how U.S. Muslim women grapple and negotiate with Islam’s unruly insurgent presence and how they themselves in turn work against such logics to produce their identities in affective and embodied ways.37
As stated above, this book understands being Muslim, or “Muslim-ness,” as I call it at times, as emerging out of the engagement between Islam as lived religion and racial-religious form, which produces being Muslim as a continual process of affective insurgency, at times forged against Islam’s own insurgent presence in the nation’s cultural and political imaginaries. Islam is lived and practiced by U.S. Muslims as a non-white, non-Christian religion that is largely perceived in the last century as beyond the pale of Western values and liberalism, as well as an unruly, dangerous, and monstrous ideology, associated with blackness and Black people, as well as foreign terrorist threat. As such, Muslim-ness arises not only from enacting Islamic religious or cultural practices, but from the feelings and modes of embodiment that emerge in response to and against the ineluctable non-white and non-Christian presence of Islam in the United States. I argue that this process is always affective, enacted through the movements and negotiation of the body, how a body relates to the world around it, how a person feels in their own body and makes relationships with others, and perhaps most important, in the connections imagined and manifested between the self, heaven, and earth. As the influential work of the anthropologist Saba Mahmood demonstrates, the body as engaged in acts of religious and/or ethical formation is a vehicle of self-making, but one that takes place in “the technical and embodied armature” of a religion’s moral-ethical frameworks and/or state power.38 Thus, while the affective insurgency of U.S. Muslim women’s bodies I identify here are undoubtedly agential—that is, it is produced through acts of agency on the part of women enacting them—they do not necessarily connote acts of resistance or subversion to hegemonic norms of race and gender. Indeed, at the same time that I seek to locate the social justice impulses of women of color within American Islam, I am also incredibly mindful of how the experiences and actions of many of the individuals documented here may reinforce “nonliberal” ideas (i.e., of heteronormative gendered and sexual relations, Victorian models of womanhood, polygamy, etc.). To characterize the actions and choices of U.S. Muslim women as insurgent is not advance their actions and modes of being as some sort of unified resistance to oppression or to advance Islam as an inherently counterhegmonic force against Western forms of racist, sexist, and imperial power. Instead, the recognition of processes of affective insurgency in U.S. Muslim women’s lives is a means of making legible how religious identities and practices are animated in the “contact zones” between bodies and the social worlds around them—locations defined by the literary and cultural theorist and scholar Mary Louise Pratt as those “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today.”39 Muslim identities and practices have always been expressed in such exceedingly uneven relations of power in the United States, with women’s identities further circumscribed by hierarchies of gender and sexuality against which they meet, clash, and grapple.
Islam, Women of Color, and Feminism in the United States
Being Muslim situates “feminism” as critical to approaching women’s ways of being Muslim in the United States during the past century, both in how Islam has constituted a religious framework of gendered agency for primarily women of color, and in how Muslim women have constantly negotiated their identities against Western feminist logics that categorize them as submissive, inferior, and unfree. In regard to the latter, in the United States and Europe, feminism and Islam are often posed as oppositional terms. As discussed in the previous section, the idea that Islam itself is somehow inherently oppressive and/or dangerous to women—and is thus antithetical to feminism—has become part of Islam’s racial form in America. The Poor Muslim Woman is a static and essentialized trope that is deployed to justify U.S. military attacks and military occupation in the Middle East, the profiling and surveillance of Muslim communities in the United States, even the notion of “banning” Muslims altogether from the country.40 To borrow the title of a 2013 book by the anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod, the notion that Muslim women “need saving” by the West, or by Western feminist ideals, is a primary logic through which Muslim women are seen in the United States, while Islam is continually portrayed as an inherently misogynist religion that sanctions and promotes the oppression of women.41 Such logics are rooted in the long history of what the scholar of religion and Islamic feminist Leila Ahmed calls “colonial feminism,” a discourse that I discuss further in chapter 4, which, Ahmed argues, arose as late nineteenth-century European colonizers in the Middle East cited women’s seemingly low status in the region to show the cultural inferiority of Islamic societies, which justified colonial occupation.42 The “feminism” of the colonizing/occupying power—whether it be the British in nineteenth-century Egypt or the United States in 2002 Afghanistan—is thus prescribed as a tonic to Muslim women’s oppression: an ideology Muslim women should and must subscribe to in order to throw off the sexist yoke of Islam (not to mention their veils).
In the United States, many Muslim 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