Conclusion

Soul Flower Farm sits on the edge of a series of rolling hills in California’s East Bay, in the city of El Sobrante located about ten miles from Berkeley. Goats graze on the hillside, and one can hear chickens clucking in their coop. On a wooden shed nearby is a painting of a giant golden sunflower with a vibrant magenta center, across from which the farm announces its name to visitors. On a crisp summer day in 2015, the mural almost sparkles, its vivid colors accentuating the green of the trees around it, as well as the pale, brittle yellow of the grass beneath it, the result of a five-year drought in California, which the state eventually declared over in 2017. Soul Flower Farm’s website describes it as “a small urban farm … striving to incorporate biodynamic farming methods and permaculture design to be self-sustaining.” Under a photograph of its proprietors, Maya Blow and her husband, Yasir Cross, the description continues: “Raising goats, chickens, ducks, bees, and boys, homeschooling, sustainable building, and practicing holistic medicine keeps us busy.”...

A Third Language

Chapter Five presents the voices of four U.S. Muslim women who actively incorporate social justice practices into their engagements with Islam: Sister Aisha Al-Adawiya, Asifa Quraishi-Landes, Laila Al-Marayati, and Hazel Gomez. Each woman articulates clear relationships with gender justice and feminism in their lives. The chapter explores how their work and perspectives refract the racial and gendered legacies of U.S. Muslim women across the last century. It introduces the concept of Muslim feminism to link their experiences across racial, ethnic, and generational boundaries.

Chadors, Feminists, Terror

Chapter Four examines American media coverage of the Iranian women’s revolution in March 1979. The chapter looks at how the major American television networks and print news media described Iranian Muslim women, covered U.S. feminist Kate Millett’s trip to Iran, and depicted the treatment of Iranian women in the feminist press. Crucial to its analysis is how post-civil rights era racial logics and the mainstreaming of second-wave feminist logics contributed to the construction of contemporary American discourse of the veil, the term used by Leila Ahmed and others to describe the Western fetishization of the Islamic headscarf as a symbol of women’s oppression.

Garments for One Another

Chapter Three examines the lives of two of the most prominent Muslim women in the United States in the 1950s and 60s: wife/and later widow of Malcolm X, Betty Shabazz, and jazz singer Dakota Staton. The Muslim-ness of both women was inexorably linked, and oftentimes, wholly predicated upon, to their status as wives of Black American Muslim men. Through an exploration of how each woman approached Islam and marriage in their daily lives, the chapter argues that Shabazz and Staton viewed their marriage and Muslim identities concurrently, and through racial and gendered contexts in which they approached marriage as an integral component of their practices of Islam.

“Four American Moslem Ladies”

Chapter One is an examination of the earliest known photograph of self-identified Muslim women in the U.S. Taken in 1923, the photo features four African American female converts to the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam (AMI), a South Asia-based missionary movement that attracted significant numbers of Black women, between the 1920 and 1970s. The chapter offers a multilayered and at times, circuitous account of the histories which produced the photograph, specifically the racial politics of 1920s Chicago, the race and gender politics of Ahmadiyya missionary Dr. Mufti Muhammad Sadiq; and the desires for safety and spirituality that led Black American women to Islam.

Insurgent Domesticity

This chapter considers how the domestic spaces of Black American Muslim women were portrayed in photography, media, and literature during the height of the Cold War in the 1950s and 60s. The male gaze and changing gender roles mediated these representations. In analyses of the 1959 CBS news documentary “The Hate That Hate Produced”; The Messenger Magazine, the first official publication of the NOI, edited by Malcolm X in 1959; a 1963 photo essay in Life magazine, photographed by Gordon Parks, and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, the chapter characterizes images of the domesticity of Black Muslim women as “insurgent visions” of American Islam, oftentimes imagined by men, yet enacted with women’s consent and participation.

Introduction

The introduction asks: How do we tell a story of Islam in the United States that foregrounds the lives and experiences of women of color throughout the 20th-21st centuries? The chapter asserts that Black American Muslim women are central to the history of Islam in the United States, and considers the lived experiences of being Muslim, as mediated by categories of race and gender. The chapter introduces the concepts of lived religion and the racial religious form to consider how Islam has existed in the U.S. cultural imaginary as both a lived experience and a racial and gendered trope. It argues U.S. Muslim women navigate Islam’s presence through a process of affective insurgency, in which they create their identities against existing cultural norms.