Being Muslim. Sylvia Chan-Malik
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not enough. We must perform visible and public acts that may make us more vulnerable to the very oppressions we are fighting against. But our vulnerability can be the source of our power—if we use it.60
The passage demonstrates how religion, as lived and practiced in “the everyday world” (i.e., as a lived religion), is a critical force in formations of women of color feminism, as a catalyst and/or vehicle for their “visible and public acts” of struggle. To put it another way, Moraga and Anzaldúa explain how religion and spirituality shape the lived experiences and, thus, affective insurgencies that make women of color “more vulnerable to the very oppressions we are fighting against,” oppressions that are signified through racial, religious, and gendered forms and tropes that constrict women’s lives. Yet in crafting identities that fully acknowledge the rituals and religion of women of color, the authors assert, women of color may also produce a sense of shared experience, of shared vulnerability, that “can be the source of our power.”
Although the experiences of U.S. Muslim women may not be unproblematically mapped upon ideologies of Black feminism, womanism, and women of color feminism—for example, regarding LGBTQ communities and issues of sexuality, which many in U.S. Muslim communities continue to grapple with—I strongly contend that all three represent crucial systems of thought that have shaped the lives of U.S. Muslim women from the early twentieth century to the present. In particular, they are central to understanding the intersections of the personal and the political, the private and the public, and the religious and the secular in U.S. Muslim women’s identity formations as well as to acknowledging how the experiences of Black American Muslim women and non-Black Muslim women in the United States are interconnected through histories of struggle. Perhaps most important, these alternative feminisms deeply inform how a multiracial and multiethnic generation of religiously observant, politically engaged Muslim women in the post-9/11, Trump-era United States are crafting relationships around race, gender, and faith to produce new modes of gender justice in Islam from which are emerging discourses of Islamic feminism and what I call U.S.-based “Muslim feminism,” a term I use to situate the lives of the women discussed in this book into a larger history of Islam and feminism in the United States.
While I further elaborate upon Muslim feminism in chapter 5 in the specific contexts of U.S. racial politics, Islamic feminism, as Margot Badran writes, is “a term created and circulated by Muslims in far-flung corners of the global umma” which she notes began to have widespread purchase in the 1990s.61 In her 2009 book, Feminism in Islam: Secular and Religious Convergences, Badran defines the term, stating, “What is Islamic feminism? Let me offer a concise definition: It is a feminist discourse and practice articulated within an Islamic paradigm. Islamic feminism, which derives its understanding and mandate from the Qur’an, seeks rights and justice for women, and for men, in the totality of their existence. Islamic feminism is both highly contested and firmly embraced.”62 Islamic feminism, Badran continues, is “being produced by Muslim women from both majority and minority communities in the African and Asia as well as from immigrant and convert communities in the West.”63 miriam cooke adds that Islamic feminist discourse operates as “multiple critique” that responds to the various forms of subjugation Muslim women encounter in transnational systems of power and is deployed as “a multilayered discourse that allows them to engage with and criticize the various individuals, institutions, and systems that limit and oppress them while making sure they are not caught in their own rhetoric.”64 It is of note—and, indeed, cooke cites the work of the Black feminist sociologist Deborah King on “multiple consciousness” in her essay—that multiple critique bears a strong resemblance to intersectionality theory. It is also significant that the world’s best-known “Islamic feminist”—although, as stated above, she does not self-identify as such—is Amina Wadud, who writes frequently about the intersections of race, gender, and religious identity and references Black feminist, womanist, and WOC feminist paradigms in her advocacy of gender justice in Islam. Such connections indicate how, within the United States, expressions of Islamic feminism have consistently been—and will continue to be—shaped and influenced by discourses and ideologies of Black feminism, womanism, and WOC feminism.
A critical point of convergence between Black/WOC feminism and Islamic feminism occurs in the work of the U.S. Muslim scholar and theologian Debra Majeed, who advances a theory of “Muslim womanism” in her research on polygyny in Black American Muslim communities. She states that Muslim womanism is premised upon “the multiple and interlocking experiences of African American and other Muslim women of color” and constitutes “an epistemology, or way of knowing, that positions the experiences and wisdom of women at the forefront of any consideration of Muslim family life.”65 Muslim womanism, Majeed continues, overlaps with aspects of womanism (as espoused by Walker and others) and Black feminism (such as that expressed by the Combahee Collective), but it also “contains elements distinct from both, particularly in regard to its attentions to the varied conditions of black womanhood and diverse perceptions of justice as experienced by African American Muslims and the values of Islam they articulate.”66 In other words, Muslim womanism is grounded in the lived experiences of Black Muslim women, in ways of being Muslim and practicing Islam as enacted and embodied by Black women, an assertion of gendered power and agency that is, to return to Moraga and Anzaldúa’s words in This Bridge Called My Back, “derive[d] specifically from our [in this case, Black women’s] racial/cultural background and experience.”67 Furthermore, the Islamic and religious studies scholar studies scholar Jamillah Karim names the work of U.S. Muslim women in various racial and ethnic communities who are fighting issues of gender injustice “as embodying dimensions of Islamic feminist practice.”68 She identifies these issues in racially specific ways, citing how African American (Muslim) women might criticize some of the misogynistic attitudes and practices of African American men, whereas South Asian or Arab American Muslim women might decry cultural norms in their communities that prohibit women’s participation in mosque spaces. “When women resist race, class, and gender inequalities and hold their ethnic Muslim communities to ummah ideals of justice and equality,” asserts Karim, “they are certainly acting as Islamic feminists.”69
As the works of Majeed and Karim demonstrate, forms of Islamic feminism are expressed and signified in the United States through the lived experiences of race and gender and against the realities of racism, sexism, and social inequality. Throughout this book, I identify and approach the stories and representations of the U.S. Muslim women gathered here as part of a broader tradition of Muslim women seeking forms of racial, gendered, and religious justice during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, one that is rooted in the experiences of Black women but that has evolved in ways that inform the lives of all U.S. Muslim women, both Black and non-Black. Like Karim, I identify their desires and labors as part of the broader Islamic feminist tradition as well as being inexorably linked to histories of Black feminism, womanism, and WOC feminism in the United States, the intersections of which I argue produce a legacy of “U.S. Muslim feminism.” In the stories of Black women in the Ahmadiyya Movement in the 1920s and 1930s, or of the women of Islam or of the Nation of Islam from the 1950s through the 1970s, or of Sisters Betty Shabazz and Dakota Staton, I highlight the complex matrices of power in and through which their desires for gender justice arose and manifested themselves in their relationship with Islam.
Finally, Being Muslim centers how issues of safety and security are critical to all discourses and ideologies of feminism and gender justice, and in particular for women of color, and thus to the examinations of U.S. Muslim women lives. To consider how Islam has functioned as a space of safety for women, as well as a source of violence directed toward women, a number of my chapters employ the concept of the safe harbor as defined by Toni Morrison in her 1973 novel Sula. Morrison uses the term to describe the relationship between the novel’s two female protagonists, Nel Wright and Sula Peace, who realize, as young Black girls growing up in Medallion, Ohio, in 1922, “that they were neither white nor male, and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden to them,” and thus they “set about creating something else to be.”70 “In the safe harbor of each other’s company,” Morrison writes, “they could afford to abandon the ways of other people and concentrate on their own perception of things.”71 In this space, at least momentarily, they do not fear bodily harm; they forget that they are targets of physical, emotional, and psychological