In light of His [God's] injunctions, then, we may fashion our lives and those of our children along the path of Islam at this time in our history, using methods and approaches which our situation necessitates within the framework of Islamic principles and behavior. Thus, as pioneer Muslim parents in the Western hemisphere, we will demonstrate to ourselves and to our children that Islam is as practicable and as valuable today as it has been and will always be until the end of the world. To the waiting eyes of the world we will show both that it can be done and that it is being done, insha'Allah (God-willing), with great success.Footnote 1
These buoyant statements concluded the Parents’ Manual: A Guide for Muslim Parents Living in North America, published by the Muslim Students Association (MSA) Women's Committee in 1972. The Parents’ Manual reflected the early MSA's revivalist ethos, which was centered on the mission of daʿwa, or renewing and correcting other Muslims’ devotional practice according to the MSA's understanding of “Islamic principles.”Footnote 2 In its American context, daʿwa included work to improve the public image of Islam and attention to the particular conditions presented by the “situation” in the United States.Footnote 3 These dual goals meant that, from its inception, MSA activities extended well beyond university campuses and included efforts to reach out to non-Muslim Americans. By the 1970s, MSA members had founded mosques, started financial trusts, created educational programs for both adults and children, and published copious periodicals, pamphlets, and other devotional and didactic literature such as the Parents’ Manual. These diverse activities all fell under the daʿwa umbrella, representing MSA members’ ambitious efforts to lead the reform and revival of Islam not just in the United States but also across the umma, or global Muslim community.Footnote 4
Because of the MSA's revivalist orientation, extant scholarship portrays the organization as ambivalent, if not antagonistic, toward U.S. society during the Cold War.Footnote 5 For example, Christoph Schumann has argued that the MSA held an “undifferentiated,” wholly negative view of American culture because its publications articulated staunch critiques of many American norms and practices rooted in its members’ diasporic attachments and revivalist ideologies.Footnote 6 Other accounts emphasize the “utopian” character of the MSA and its adherence to Islam as a set of ideological principles and a “complete way of life.”Footnote 7 Even when scholars maintain that the MSA was shaped by American religious politics from an early stage, they do not explore the practices through which such a transformation occurred.Footnote 8 As a result, the MSA has been depicted as isolated from its U.S. context, at least until the 1980s, when the organization began to serve primarily undergraduate students and when other Muslim umbrella institutions, such as the Islamic Society of North America, were formed.Footnote 9
I offer a different view by examining female-authored writings published under the auspices of the national MSA organization between 1963 and 1980.Footnote 10 Aspirational in scope and pedagogical in approach, MSA women's literature demonstrates how one critical group of American Muslims conceived of building a robust Muslim community in Cold War America. I show that, although female MSA members saw the United States as awash in challenges for living as devout Muslims, this oppositional stance did not preclude various kinds of cultural engagement, nor did it entail a rejection of all things American. As early as the late 1960s, these authors argued that building friendships with non-Muslims and embracing certain American consumer practices would facilitate the mission of daʿwa.Footnote 11
This article makes three main interventions. First, it demonstrates that a focus on the publications of MSA female members yields a more robust understanding of how American Muslims articulated daʿwa as a local and global project of religious revival during the Cold War. This project was predicated on a critique of American society as excessively consumerist and sexually licentious. It was also predicated, however, on the conviction that the United States was an especially promising site for Muslim reform and renewal. Second, it shows that, to achieve their revivalist aims, female MSA members identified points of affinity with certain religious non-Muslim Americans, namely, upwardly mobile Christians and Jews, whom they saw as shared partners in mitigating the many dangers posed by American society.Footnote 12 Reflecting their racial, gendered, and classed position, these authors imagined a thriving Muslim community that maintained its distinctiveness while inhabiting emergent multicultural and interreligious spaces.Footnote 13 Finally, this article examines how female MSA authors conceived of the patriarchally organized yet maternally driven nuclear family as essential for reinvigorating Muslim practice.Footnote 14 The MSA Women's Committee tasked mothers, in particular, with navigating the daily dangers, as well as opportunities, that American family culture afforded them.Footnote 15
These female-authored publications shift conceptions of the MSA's political and religious priorities during this period from one of detachment to one of selective engagement with American culture. Attending to women's writings shows how, in fact, some American Muslims were not only deeply familiar with, but also deeply invested in, some of the most contested and enduring religious and political debates in the twentieth-century United States. To make this case, I focus on literature published by the MSA Women's Committee, which was formed in 1965. Many Women's Committee members were the spouses of male Muslim students enrolled in graduate programs. The MSA Women's Committee published numerous books, articles, and pamphlets in this period; I focus here on the 1972 Parents’ Manual: A Guide for Muslim Parents Living in North America, which was collectively authored by members of the Women's Committee. When relevant, I also examine other MSA Women's Committee writings, including articles from the MSA's quarterly newsletter, al-Ittihad (Unity), and the Muslim World Cook Book (1973).Footnote 16 These sources have received scant attention in the scholarship even though they offer a vital window into how MSA members and, by extension, educated, middle-class Muslims envisioned an Islamic way of life in the United States during the Cold War.
Women in the Cold War MSA
Founded in 1963 at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign by immigrant students hailing primarily from Arab and South Asian countries, the Muslim Students Association of the United States and Canada reflected the broader, although uneven, diversification of American university campuses in the postwar and Cold War periods.Footnote 17 Several trends in postwar higher education facilitated greater entry of Muslim students to American universities. The GI Bill accelerated the demand for university education, and new and growing universities met that demand by appealing to broader constituencies in terms of race, class, and gender. American universities also became much more religiously diverse as they created opportunities for foreign students, who had fewer options as European institutions sought to rebuild themselves in the postwar era, to pursue their education in the United States. These students brought with them a range of religious identities and practices. Meanwhile, the 1965 Hart-Celler Act lifted longstanding quotas and ushered in thousands of immigrants from Asia and the Middle East, many of them professionals recruited to take white-collar jobs and to meet the burgeoning demand for scientific and technical training in their countries of origin and in the United States.Footnote 18
During this period, the MSA relied primarily on volunteer labor and small donations from its members, although it did receive some funding from foreign governments, including those of Kuwait and Pakistan.Footnote 19 In the mid-1960s, MSA branches were quickly established in other midwestern public universities and across the mid-Atlantic and northeastern regions, with scattered chapters in the south and southwest. By 1968, the organization had expanded to 116 local chapters, with members representing more than forty countries. Throughout the 1970s, the MSA was one of the few Muslim organizations in the United States that boasted a national reach, with chapters in every geographic region and a membership of mainly men who had come to the United States to pursue undergraduate and advanced degrees in engineering, medicine, and the sciences.Footnote 20 The Cold War–era MSA made Black Muslim communities a focal point of their outreach efforts as a way to promote Muslim unity, although it incorporated very few African Americans into its leadership ranks.Footnote 21
The MSA of the 1960s and 1970s was a diffuse, loosely organized network of local chapters based at individual university campuses whose members spearheaded significant institutionalizing processes both on and off campus, such as building mosques and establishing educational institutes. The national organization, led by a board, was responsible for coordinating chapter activities around common goals; raising funds; publishing and distributing books, journals, and other print materials; and planning national conferences and retreats. Universities proved excellent organizational locales for launching local and international MSA projects.Footnote 22 College campuses had ample facilities for hosting events, financial resources to support various kinds of student initiatives, many campus religious groups committed to missionary and devotional activities, and a base of operations to generate enthusiasm for the revivalist cause.Footnote 23
The MSA Women's Committee, which was formed in 1965, coordinated daʿwa initiatives for women and children through the national MSA organization.Footnote 24 Many male MSA leaders were already married and arrived in America with young families. Women's Committee members were spouses and, less frequently, female students. The newly created H1-B and student visas, through which many Muslims immigrated and then often stayed in the United States, made it possible for entire families to come together. As a result, the MSA saw itself as serving a far wider community than just students enrolled in university courses. A significant portion of MSA programming centered on nuclear-family activities involving wives and children, including educational programs, social events, and summer camps.
From the beginning, too, women were involved in MSA leadership, although in much smaller numbers than their male peers and in roles that reflected the organization's emphasis on gendered, complementary spheres of social influence.Footnote 25 Like evangelical Christian campus groups of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Campus Crusade for Christ, the MSA recruited married couples to lead its activist efforts on and off campus.Footnote 26 At times, women also occupied leadership roles in the MSA by serving on its national board. In the 1970s, this spot was held by Zeba Siddiqui, a white convert, and Maysoon Kahf, a recent Syrian immigrant, who were both spouses of MSA board members.Footnote 27
The MSA Women's Committee took charge of educational initiatives for children, helped to plan regional and national conferences, and wrote prodigiously through the MSA's various publishing arms, such as American Trust Publications and the Islamic Book Service. These publishers distributed material produced both in the United States and abroad, seeking to reach far-flung Muslim publics pursuing daʿwa projects.Footnote 28 Advertisements for the 1976 revised edition of the Parents’ Manual identified Siddiqui as the manual's “preparer,” although the book's Foreword states that the volume was collectively written by the entire MSA Women's Committee.Footnote 29 Like the MSA as a whole, the Women's Committee had members from a range of immigrant backgrounds and, as the role of Siddiqui demonstrates, white converts also participated in smaller numbers. While the Parents’ Manual’s circulation is difficult to ascertain, full-page ads for the volume appeared in MSA periodicals such as al-Ittihad, MSA News, and Islamic Horizons throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The volume was updated and republished in 1976 and 1992, and it remains widely available today. The Women's Committee also published the collectively authored Muslim World Cook Book in 1973, and its individual members contributed regularly to al-Ittihad throughout its publication.
As relatively affluent and educated Muslim women, the Women's Committee pursued forms of engagement with non-Muslim Americans with whom they shared aspirational class and racial status. MSA members of this period were geographically mobile, fluent in multiple languages, and either already financially secure or pursuing careers that promised stable earnings. Many of the proposals put forward in MSA publications suggest that its members had disposable income to engage in a wide variety of religious and political action: traveling long distances to national MSA conferences; raising money for mosques and Sunday School programs in the United States and for various political and humanitarian causes abroad; organizing prison missions; and attending international education programs. As the first educators of Muslim children, members of the MSA Women's Committee saw their work in the United States as one step in a much longer process of Muslim revival and renewal.
Gender and the Revivalist Critique of American Society
The Parents’ Manual devoted considerable space to cautioning its readers about the many dangers they faced in raising their children in the United States.Footnote 30 In its first pages, the manual warned against American society's potential to destroy the Muslim faith, especially among the next generation:
In truth, apart from strongly religious circles in this country, these are the attitudes and standards of jahiliyyah—of a society which is ignorant of the purposes of man's creation, his relationship and responsibility to his Creator, and the goals for which he should strive in this world… . Let us strive to keep our Islam and the Islam which we pass on to our children pure and uncontaminated by the attitudes of this jahiliyyah, and let us at the same time strive to change this jahiliyyah little by little into Islam.Footnote 31
Jāhiliyya refers to a condition of ignorance, especially with respect to God's will. Designating the United States as jāhiliyya meant that its social and cultural norms and institutions ran counter to a Muslim way of life that was superior in all respects.
The manual's use of the term reflects the influence of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood leader Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966) on the MSA. In the Qurʾan, the word refers to the time before the revelation of the Qurʾan to the Prophet Muhammad, a period during which humans disregarded God's revelation and law. In Maʿalim fi al-Tariq (“Milestones”), Qutb's 1964 manifesto, he appropriated the term to instead describe the condition of any society that did not uphold Islam.Footnote 32 Communist and democratic societies were clearly labeled as jāhiliyya, but so were many Muslim-majority societies, including Egypt under the secular authoritarian rule of Gamal Abdel Nasser.Footnote 33 Restoring God's exclusive sovereignty (ḥākimiyya) over human laws and social institutions was the only way to bring the contemporary world out of its state of ignorance.Footnote 34
Qutb's theory of jāhiliyya had been shaped by his own experiences traveling in the United States. In 1948, the Egyptian government sent Qutb, then an employee of the Ministry of Education, to the United States to observe educational practices. The trip was intended to allay his denunciations of the Egyptian government by showing him the achievements that could be unlocked by embracing technological and scientific progress.Footnote 35 The experiment failed, and Qutb returned to Egypt convinced that the United States had abandoned God for the empty promise of economic prosperity. According to Qutb, this apostasy had resulted in many ill effects, especially in the areas of gender and sexuality. In his 1951 essay “The America I Have Seen,” he railed against America's “primitive” sexual decadence. His well-known description of a church dance in Greeley, Colorado, portrays a “dance floor replete with tapping feet, enticing legs, arms wrapped around waists, lips pressed to lips, and chests pressed to chests” as couples swayed to the preacher's chosen song, Frank Loesser's sexually charged 1944 duet, “Baby, Its Cold Outside.”Footnote 36 The fact that the scene took place in a church exemplified for Qutb the damaging effects of excessive materialism on America's moral and religious fabric.Footnote 37
In its assessment of U.S. society, the Parents’ Manual reiterated Qutb's opinion concerning the connections among America's technological prowess, consumerist orientation, and sexual immorality. The nation's economic success, born of scientific and technological “genius,” was also the root of the decline of the family. For Qutb, this interlocked depravity marked America as jāhiliyya. MSA's female authors echoed Qutb's diagnosis of America's afflictions, expressing alarm about what they perceived as disregard for traditional gender roles and excessive consumerism. The manual's authors were particularly concerned by American sexual mores, especially the “vulgar, foul, and incorrect attitudes so common among young people today,” and the sartorial practices that “Muslims can only consider grossly insulting and regard as the degradation of the woman into a sex object.”Footnote 38 The excesses of capitalism facilitated social disintegration, injustice, and sexual decadence, evils that MSA members, like Qutb, believed were linked by the false promises of pursuing individualist desires over the will of God.
By contrast, Islam represented a distinct and superior system that was the source of all that was just and good. The Parents’ Manual, embracing Qutb's vision of Islam as fundamentally different and superior, declared that “the Islamic attitude toward relations between the sexes, modesty, propriety, and dress—and thereby toward family life and the life of the entire society—is directed toward a completely different goal.”Footnote 39 This goal was serving God, a task that could be accomplished by upholding “Islamic attitudes” through pious Muslim practice.
Although they took up Qutb's appraisal, the manual's authors also maintained that Muslims had allies to combat jāhiliyya in the United States. Devout, “strongly religious circles” represented potential kindred spirits in navigating the moral hazards of the Cold War, especially as shared partners against contemporary dangers. Despite the manual's oppositional language that rendered American culture as antithetical to Islam, the authors found within other religious communities the ideals that they wanted to implement and grow in the American context. Women's Committee publications made much use of this ideological opening, seeking to find multiple pathways for reforming and renewing Islam in the American context.
MSA publications of this period increasingly focused on another perceived threat to marriage and family: feminism. This concern first appeared in the pages of al-Ittihad in the early 1970s, and, thereafter, most articles on women, marriage, and the family named feminism as an existential threat to Islam. In fall 1973, the magazine reprinted a Criterion article, “The Feminist Movement versus the Muslim Woman,” by Maryam Jameelah.Footnote 40 Alongside Qutb, Jameelah (1934–2012) was one of most important Muslim revivalist voices of the twentieth century. An American Jewish convert to Islam, she moved to Pakistan in 1962 at the invitation of the prominent reformer Abul A'la Mawdudi (1903–1979).Footnote 41 In 1941, Mawdudi had founded the Jamaat-i-Islami, an Islamist political party that sought to implement Muslim values and practices across society and in government, first in India and then in newly created Pakistan. By the 1960s, Mawdudi's message, which focused on the reinvigoration of Muslim identity and unity, drew broad readership outside of Pakistan. The MSA published excerpts of Mawdudi's works in al-Ittihad throughout the 1960s and 1970s, taking particular inspiration from his writings on daʿwa as a project of individual renewal that held the potential for establishing a new Islamic order.Footnote 42
For her part, Jameelah was a prolific and significant author, producing dozens of books and pamphlets that were translated into Urdu, Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, among other languages.Footnote 43 Reprints of Jameelah's writings in al-Ittihad evince the complex transnational webs of revivalist influence through which the MSA advanced its vision for Muslim life in America.Footnote 44 As an American writing from Pakistan, Jameelah combined firsthand experience of social dynamics within the United States and Pakistan, a convert's zeal, and an impressive command of Muslim and Euro-American sources. Much like Mawdudi and Qutb (with whom she corresponded prior to his death), Jameelah saw “Islam” and “the West” in oppositional terms, condemning the United States as replete with problems including sexual decadence, rampant individualism, and moral bankruptcy.Footnote 45 She also held Muslims themselves responsible for importing and imitating Western cultural norms, which she argued destroyed the social status of traditional Muslim authorities and eroded religious identity and practice.
In “The Feminist Movement versus the Muslim Woman,” Jameelah denounced American feminism. She expressed horror at the movement's agenda, which included, according to Jameelah, the abolition of marriage, “unqualified equality for men and women,” and unrestricted access to contraception and abortion.Footnote 46 She traced the history of this vision through the nineteenth-century women's suffrage movement, John F. Kennedy's Commission on the Status of Women, and finally the 1960s reinvigoration of feminism on college campuses.Footnote 47 Jameelah argued that Western women had become trapped in the dual expectation that they “act like men” by pursuing professional careers while “exhibiting their maximum beauty and charm in public.”Footnote 48 Feminism, she maintained, was an “unnatural, artificial, and abnormal product of contemporary social disintegration.” She added that “the disintegration of the home and the family, the loss of the authoritarian role of the father, and sexual promiscuity, have been directly responsible for the decline and fall of every nation in which these evils became prevalent.”Footnote 49 For Jameelah, only Islam offered the path for women to fulfill their divine roles as caregivers to children, responsible for imparting Islamic teachings and practices to the next generation.
Jameelah's piece demonstrates the transnational lens through which MSA members assessed gendered practices in their American milieu. For converts like Jameelah, Islam was appealing because of what they saw as its adherence to “traditional” gendered norms and practices. Many of MSA's female authors had lived in at least two countries, and detected the erosion of complementary gender roles in multiple contexts. Moreover, the MSA's immigrant female members did not only encounter efforts to reform gender norms in the United States. Various forms of feminism and women's rights organizations emerged in many Muslim-majority contexts during the early twentieth century. These strands of feminism sought to improve female education, called for legal reform to protect women's rights, pushed for women's political representation, and often challenged dominant interpretations of Muslim texts, such as the Qurʾan.Footnote 50 Either through personal experience or through transnational text circulation (women reading Jameelah's writings in the United States would have seen her take on the Pakistani “modernists” seeking various reforms, such as ending purdah or gender separation and veiling), MSA members would have formed opinions about developments about the status of women in their homelands and in other Muslim contexts. The MSA's female members also encountered, however, the effects of rapid social change in the United States as American women entered educational institutions, the workplace, and other public spheres in far greater numbers. These writers thus saw themselves as intervening in both local and global debates concerning the status of women, marriage, and the family in the mid 1970s.
The Parents’ Manual also attests to rising second-wave feminist presence on college campuses as well as in neighborhoods and other social circles. This presence was felt not just by middle-class, white women but also among diverse religious and ethnic minorities.Footnote 51 Like prominent Catholic and evangelical Christian antifeminist activists, the MSA Women's Committee articulated the most concern about second-wave feminism, which they saw as an attempt to erode divinely sanctioned gender complementarianism. Recent scholarship on second-wave feminism has demonstrated how feminist activists sought to build coalitions, to varying degrees of success, with diverse groups of women.Footnote 52 They did so through a range of activities that sought to elevate women's status and achieve equality in a variety of social spaces, including the workplace, health, education, and even the domestic spheres of housewives.Footnote 53
During a time in which feminist writers produced a vast corpus of literature advocating for women's empowerment and liberation, the MSA Women's Committee responded by claiming their spiritual equality with men. They insisted that this spiritual parity went hand in hand with their roles as wives and mothers.Footnote 54 The Parents’ Manual and other publications were platforms through which these women could affirm mothers’ labor and activity within the home as their greatest responsibility and the primary source of their spiritual fulfillment. The MSA's female members did not oppose all work outside the home; they understood, for example, that sometimes financial constraints made it necessary for women to work.Footnote 55 The problem, as they saw it, was that American women increasingly prioritized their professional careers and personal interests at the expense of focusing on their children's moral and educational development.Footnote 56 This threatened the very foundation of a Muslim way of life by leaving children without the constant moral presence of their mothers. A strong maternal presence was a particular necessity in the United States, where the larger society could not be relied on to offer such guidance and where extended kin networks were absent.Footnote 57
The Parents’ Manual emphasized that cultivating Muslim selves depended on maintaining complementary gender roles in the nuclear family household:
While a Muslim man is the head of the household and is responsible for his wife and children, he is not the “boss,” for husband and wife are partners working together to build their family, with defined responsibilities of manhood and womanhood as they grow up because they will—insha'Allah [God-willing]—be mature through the love and direction which they will have received through their childhood and youth from their righteous and loving parents.Footnote 58
From this perspective, the family was essential to the preservation of Islam in a society replete with moral corruption and the absence of religious piety.Footnote 59 The manual's authors idealized complementary gender roles as the basis for a harmonious family life that would, in turn, serve as the foundation of a robust Muslim community.Footnote 60 Because Islamization began from below, the husband-wife pair played an essential role in cultivating Muslim identity and practice by providing a nurturing, religiously centered household.Footnote 61
Cultivating Parental Religious Authority
The Women's Committee's choice of genre for their major intervention on gender roles—a parents’ manual—reflected the influence of Cold War ideologies that sought to establish the nuclear family as a bastion of security and comfort in an uncertain, fraught world.Footnote 62 The demand for parenting manuals grew as suburban families became more isolated from extended kin networks and as various international crises stoked fears over human survival. Doomsday narratives about the state of the American nuclear family only increased the monumental pressures placed on parents.Footnote 63 Like other manuals of this period, the Parents’ Manual declared parenting to be much more than a religious obligation; although it was indeed a responsibility, parenting was articulated primarily as an opportunity for emotional and spiritual fulfillment.
According to this logic, being a spouse and parent would enable MSA members to reach new spiritual insights and to become better Muslims.Footnote 64 The Parents’ Manual tacked between cataloging America's social problems and reassuring readers that they had ample resources to successfully meet these challenges. This was also the message of popular experts from this period, such as Dr. Benjamin Spock, who counseled parents that, in the anxious time of modernity, parents must trust their instincts and meet their children where they were. The MSA Women's Committee maintained that parents ought to exercise leniency and generosity with their children, an approach they saw as compatible with maintaining Muslim practice in the long term.Footnote 65
The Parents’ Manual shows how female MSA members embraced their social roles as parents within a revivalist-oriented Muslim community and a Cold War suburban American milieu, both of which saw the nuclear family as the linchpin of a robust society. Members of the MSA Women's Committee asserted the importance of mothers, in particular, for creating the ideal Muslim family. In doing so, they contributed to what Kathryn Lofton calls the “elaborate discursive regime of parenting” that emerged in the twentieth-century United States. Authors of prescriptive parenting literature during the Cold War, Lofton argues, shared a common conviction that parents “had the capacity to determine individual and national futures.”Footnote 66 The Women's Committee aimed their volume at a growing audience of American Muslim parents, especially mothers, who approached the domestic practice of child rearing as crucial terrain for the cultivation of both parents’ and children's Muslim selves.Footnote 67
This emphasis on parental judgment also reflected the proliferation of new religious authorities among revivalists, who often circumvented the interpretative authority of classically trained Muslim scholars.Footnote 68 In this vein, the Parents’ Manual advised parents to take on the functions of religious authority by consulting the Qurʾan and reflecting on their understanding of Muslim ethics, ultimately coming to a decision about what they ought to do in a particular situation. Moreover, as members of a diaspora, the authors cautioned against the parenting models of earlier generations because “they lived in a far less complex society (no matter whether they lived in a Muslim country or elsewhere).” Instead, the manual encouraged parents to examine the particular circumstances of their social location, not just as an American minority religious community, but also in their specific neighborhoods, schools, and social circles.Footnote 69 The Parents’ Manual made it incumbent on parents to make ethical decisions independent of scholarly dictates and the example of their own parents: to ascertain the effects of decisions in their particular social circumstances.
The Parents’ Manual eschewed certain forms of authority, and it also testifies to the importance of a diverse print media as sources of religious guidance for revivalist-oriented MSA members. The MSA published many pedagogical works, including pamphlets, books, and correspondence courses, all geared toward promoting the correct practice of Islam in daily life, including areas such as prayer, dress, familial relations, and education. Whatever their topical focus, these texts focused on a core set of principles and practices as essential to correct Islamic practice and foregrounded the importance of cultivating a strong, unified Muslim identity to meet the many challenges of modernity, not just in the United States but also around the globe. Like the Parents’ Manual, many of these publications stressed the importance of the nuclear family for instilling in children the essential pious dispositions of Muslim life.
Female-authored MSA publications also promoted the work of other U.S.-based Muslim intellectuals as guides for daily practice. In the realm of family life and economics, the approach of the Parents’ Manual suggests the influence of Muhammad Abdul Rauf (1917–2004). Born in Egypt and educated at Al-Azhar in Cairo, Abdul Rauf founded the Islamic Center of New York and served as its imam from 1965 to 1970. He then became the imam for the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., where he served until 1980. During this period, he wrote prolifically on a number of topics but especially on capitalism and family life. A 1973 al-Ittihad book review praised Abdul Rauf's pamphlet Marriage in Islam Footnote 70 for correctly identifying the demise of the family as the source of America's “malaise” and for its assertion that a woman's “true liberation” lay in her service to her family. Nassera Hamed, in her 1974 al-Ittihad piece, “The Muslim Woman: Her Role and Responsibility,” used Abdul Rauf's arguments to disparage second-wave feminism:
Women's Liberation in the Western sense has not led to such harmony between men and women, but rather to discord. Islam, however has its own type of liberation which is not epitomized by the “bra-less look” or demonstrating by fighting to work in the same hazardous occupations as men.Footnote 71
The pressures of modernity rendered the historical importance of women's responsibility of raising children in a pious Muslim home all the more essential. Islam promised liberation for women in this world and the next by first promoting harmonious, complementarian family life and then by offering eternal rewards to women who fulfilled their gendered religious obligations on Earth.
For the manual's authors, as well, women's greatest contribution to society rested in channeling their God-given gifts toward nurturing and raising future generations of good Muslims who would be confident in their identity and faith. Mothers provided their children with the institutional site—the family—through which their daily practices could be directed to God. The parent-child relationship was a primary mechanism through which the mother guarded against the myriad dangers posed by contemporary society as she imparted the correct Islamic values of “marriage, chastity, and fidelity” that would replicate harmonious family lives in the next generation. In particular, the mother had a special role to play in ensuring that her daughter followed modesty norms and “guarded her chastity like a jewel.” To ensure that children, both boys and girls, learned these Islamic attitudes, the manual counseled that “there is simply no substitute for close communication about these matters between parent and child.”Footnote 72
Echoing the very feminist discourse they saw themselves as critiquing, the manual's authors sought to challenge sexual objectification and the devaluation of women. Their answer to these social evils was the reinvigoration of domestic religious practice and a reassertion of gender complementarianism. Although the manual mentioned the necessity of modesty for men and boys, the authors made clear that women and girls bore the greater share of the responsibility for upholding norms of sexual propriety through modest dress and behavior. Muslim parents, especially mothers, should be prepared to serve as their children's guide to sexuality, providing them the proper vocabulary for body parts, discussing hygiene and personal care, and stressing that sex should only take place within loving, companionate marriage. By maintaining open lines of communication, the Parents’ Manual assured its readers that their children would come to see the “the double standard” in American society that made girls and women into sexual objects.Footnote 73
To guide their children effectively, the Parents’ Manual counseled parents to become their children's emotional confidantes, especially during the confusing stage of adolescence. To be sure, for boys, “the father is the best person to talk with him but a mother can do it just as well. There should be no sense of shame between parent and son in talking about sex, for the matter is not shameful, and we see that it is discussed quite frankly and explicitly, although in very polite terms, in Islamic literature.”Footnote 74 Fathers might have a special and preferential role in some circumstances, but it was mothers, as the constant presence at home, who would address most of the questions and conflicts that arose in much of daily life.
According to the Parents’ Manual, the revitalization of Muslim identity in the particular circumstances of its readers required highly individualized processes of everyday negotiation rather than unwavering obedience to a set of regulations. The Women's Committee used the language of developmental psychology to stress the importance of choice over compulsion and to identify the multiple factors that parents should consider when advising their teenagers on sartorial choices.Footnote 75 The opportunity to choose was especially important when it came to parenting girls, as the manual acknowledged that young Muslim women faced a plethora of restrictions in the American context that their male counterparts did not. Regarding dress, the text encouraged the covering of the hair and face, citing a hadith (a saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad) that says, “after a girl attains puberty, nothing should be seen except her face and hands.” Yet, following strict guidelines, the Parents’ Manual told its readers, simply would not help them or their children to do God's work in the United States. Each family had to find its own way.Footnote 76 Because parents had special access to their children's personalities and emotional needs, they were uniquely situated to guide ethical decision-making in their particular context.
As a result, the Parents’ Manual stressed the importance of guiding Muslim girls toward choosing to dress modestly by wearing hijab rather than requiring them to do so. The authors conceded that such an approach might delay this practice, while allowing that later was better than never. They also acknowledged that such a choice required “considerable courage and determination on her [the Muslim girl's] part” as a member of a religious minority in the United States. Open communication between parent and child allowed young people to accept the “wisdom of Islamic injunctions” even if such a process took time and patience.Footnote 77 That is, the child's emotional well-being outweighed following a set of strict commands or rules. This emphasis on the individual child's specific emotional makeup meant that a girl who had reached puberty might not wear the hijab right away, even though, as the manual took pains to emphasize, wearing a headscarf was indeed the correct way to preserve a woman's purity and modesty, especially in a society that they saw as so bent on taking those qualities away.
Promoting Compromise Solutions
In addition to promoting Islamic gender norms, the Parents’ Manual also looked to combat the excessive materialism that its authors observed in their neighborhoods and schools. The Women's Committee argued that rampant consumerism was the root cause of numerous problems they observed in public schools, such as drug use and sexual promiscuity. To meet these challenges, the Parents’ Manual’s authors promoted a parenting approach that directed children's energies toward God by mitigating these dangers. This approach centered the role of mothers in adjudicating the everyday negotiations of faith and culture their children brought home.
To do so, the Parents’ Manual recommended that its readers embrace certain consumer practices. The lengthy section on American holidays, which focused on Christmas, Valentine's Day, Halloween, and Mother's Day, demonstrates how critique and compromise were intertwined for the manual's authors. Valentine's Day drew particular ire from the manual's authors:
Much of the subject matter and slogans of Valentine's Day are vulgar and should not be used by Muslim boys and girls… . Valentine's Day has, in short, become meaningless, as any would on which every young child tells every other one, “Be Mine!” “You're Groovy” “Be My Valentine!” “Sail Along with Me, Valentine!”, etc. It has also been vulgarized to an appalling extent… . It is imposed upon unknowing children by adults, so that even the smallest kindergarten tot takes delight in receiving meaningless cards which he cannot even read (nor does he know who they were sent by, as he cannot read the names), just because everyone has them.Footnote 78
In objecting to the consumerism of modern Valentine's Day celebrations, the MSA Women's Committee participated in an enduring debate within American cultural politics. From Coca-Cola's Santa Claus to Mother's Day cards, capitalist enterprise had helped to build demand for holidays such as Christmas since at least the mid-nineteenth century. Yet religious opposition to mass commercialization has always accompanied these developments. As Leigh Schmidt has demonstrated, consumerism became integral to these holidays through uneven and unpredictable processes involving the negotiation of gender, ritual, and materialism in particular religious and cultural settings.Footnote 79 A similar process unfolded as American Muslim families were confronted with these practices in their children's schools. The MSA manual maintained that the holiday once had a laudable purpose: for friends and even “sweethearts” to express their affection. However, “this holiday has, like so many other aspects of American life, become an outlet for commercialism, mass production of sentiment, and cheapening of finer feelings which makes it very repugnant to many Muslims.”Footnote 80 The writers lamented the commodification of genuine emotion but not the holiday's origin as a Christian saint's day.
In the case of Valentine's Day, the Parents’ Manual raised the possibility that Muslims could outright refuse to participate in American holidays on account of their depraved moral effects. But the Parents’ Manual ultimately rejected this approach as untenable, a pragmatic stance that speaks to the multiple motivations and concerns stemming from the authors’ social positions as well as their religious proclivities. As mothers of children in public schools, where they interacted with non-Muslim parents, teachers, children, and administrators on a regular basis, members of the MSA Women's Committee weighed the social benefits and religious risks of participating in these holiday celebrations.Footnote 81 Although the authors told their readers that they must warn their children of the moral hazards of these celebrations, they also did not wish unduly to alienate or isolate their children. Nor did they want to preclude Muslim children from participating in holiday parties, which they believed would only further exacerbate the discrimination and mistrust that their children encountered as members of religious and ethnic minority groups. As a result, the authors suggested “compromise” solutions, such as making valentines with age-appropriate messages of friendship and exchanging them only with their friends.Footnote 82 Of course, making valentines at home is a time-honored Valentine's Day tradition.Footnote 83 The Parents’ Manual envisioned enabling Muslim kids to be a part of their school communities while continuing to guard against the threats that these social connections posed.
When it came to other holidays, the Parents’ Manual identified both dangers and protections that consumerism afforded their children. The authors described Halloween as “meaningless” because of the “production or purchase of costumes (commercialized and hideous) year after year.” Purchasing costumes and eating candy lured children and their parents into morally questionable, even un-Islamic, territory. But the Women's Committee also acknowledged the appeal of the holiday to children: the “opportunity, beloved by all youngsters, to dress up and pretend to be someone else.” As an alternative to outright condemnation (which the manual acknowledged could be easily be made), the authors counseled parents to make “beautiful costumes from crepe paper” to avoid “diabolical and bizarre” costumes. Children should be permitted to attend Halloween parties with proper supervision by the host's parents.Footnote 84
In the case of Halloween, the Parents’ Manual presented the mechanics of industrial food production as reassuring for Muslim parents because it provided a degree of defense against predators lurking in their neighborhoods and ensured that eating the candy received through trick-or-treating was, indeed, safe. Trick-or-treating was therefore an acceptable practice as long as parents screened out any treats “not commercially pre-wrapped because of the increased incidence of poisoned sweets given out by sick members of the society.”Footnote 85 Alongside the proactive steps parents could take by making costumes at home, the internal workings of the capitalist system alleviated the perils that emerged out of Halloween's consumer rituals.
The Women's Committee's efforts to mitigate the negative effects of American consumerism resonate with Abdul Rauf's later recommendations for American Muslims. Like Qutb, Mawdudi, and Jameelah, Abdul Rauf saw Islam and democratic capitalism as distinct “systems.”Footnote 86 In contrast to these authors, however, Abdul Rauf viewed the two systems as commensurable, although Islam was morally superior. In fact, for Abdul Rauf, Islam and democratic capitalism shared many of the same goals, particularly the promotion of human freedom. The differences lay in their origins and intent. He argued:
Islam is amenable to all these features of the democratic capitalist economy. A Muslim can easily and successfully survive and prosper under democratic capitalism with very little need for adjustment. How, then, does Islam, differ economically from democratic capitalism? … Whereas democratic capitalism is a development of human experience, the basis of economic doctrine of Islam is divinely inspired. Therefore, the economic life of a Muslim is not entirely materialistic or this-worldly vocation. Its stimulus is derived both from the individual's drive to gain wealth and from his wish to be an obedient servant of God. Thus, intent counts and the type of economic activity a Muslim engages in must be legitimate… . Otherwise, Islam and democratic capitalism have much in common. Like democratic capitalism, Islam favors open, free markets, free enterprise, and an economy that is privately owned, though a Muslim believes that his ownerships of wealth is not absolute.Footnote 87
In this and other publications on Islamic economics, Abdul Rauf sought to correct misconceptions regarding Islam's supposed unsuitability for capitalism. These misconceptions, which he largely attributed to colonialism, hampered the ability of American Muslims to assert their status as a distinctive minority with much to contribute to the economic engine of the United States. Religious faith enabled practitioners, whether Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, to accumulate wealth without making material acquisition an end in itself. Rather, Muslims understood their wealth as ultimately belonging to God. For Abdul Rauf, American Muslims could be successful capitalists and good Muslims. Similarly, the Women's Committee was not opposed to capitalism per se but, rather, to its materialist extremes.
As a result, there were both challenges and opportunities in holiday consumer rituals. Instead of attempting to practice a pure version of Islam, the manual counseled compromise necessitated by the higher good of maintaining social ties. The Parents’ Manual’s authors believed that participating in some consumer practices did not undermine their religious commitments. The reason was because consumer practices facilitated building social connections in local communities with particular non-Muslims. Withdrawal and isolation were either impossible or, more plausibly, given the manual's careful detailing of the benefits and risks of holidays, were not seen as a desirable position relative to MSA members’ everyday experiences, in which they negotiated with, rather than rejected, various aspects of American culture. They found many of the social practices they encountered in public schools abhorrent, but others, such as dressing up, they saw as consistent with their view of children's emotional and social development.
In the best-case scenario, the Parents’ Manual imagined the children of MSA members as rising above the class status of other religious and racial minorities, with their strong Muslim identity facilitating their recognition by other upwardly mobile religious communities. Despite the strong undercurrents of revivalist ideology, the prescriptions of the Parents’ Manual suggest the class aspirations of its primary audience of immigrant families who were very much concerned with cultivating their children's educational and eventual professional successes. The manual presented the two main challenges for Muslim parents in the United States as raising children with “strong Islamic principles and attitudes, implemented by Islamic practices” and “keep[ing] their lives reasonably normal so that they may not suffer from the complexes and emotional and practical problems which often beset members of religious and racial minorities.”Footnote 88 This suggests that, whatever oppositional ideology the Women's Committee embraced, its members also wanted the mission of daʿwa to minimally disrupt their children's daily lives and progress toward material success within American society.
This emphasis on curbing the excesses of democratic capitalism, without challenging its structural foundations, demonstrates, in part, how the MSA positioned itself in the complex racial hierarchies of the Cold War period. During these early years of the Women's Committee, Black Muslim communities were critiquing capitalism as inherently racist and, thus, intrinsically opposed to the cause of human freedom. Communities such as the Nation of Islam called for separate Muslim economic, political, and educational institutions as a means to ensure social equality and to realize the liberation of black people through Islam.Footnote 89 And yet these proposals and practices by fellow American Muslims were nearly absent in Women's Committee publications, even in areas where there was considerable overlap in gendered ideology. For example, as Ula Taylor has shown, many Black Muslim women (like MSA members) saw the nuclear family, predicated on gender complementarianism and patriarchal structures, as essential for building economic success and ensuring rewards in the afterlife.Footnote 90 These omissions are indicative of the MSA's exclusion of Black Muslim theologies and perspectives as largely inauthentic expressions of Islam during this period, even as its publications expressed admiration for the Nation of Islam's ability to unify its members around a political and religious cause.Footnote 91
Building Friendships
As the previous section demonstrates, the MSA's women's publications emphasized that the daily practice of Islam in the United States necessitated selective and sustained engagement with American culture. Such engagement proceeded in large part through the friendships that they wanted to cultivate with certain non-Muslim Americans, especially upwardly mobile Christians and Jews, who were important to the bottom-up approach to daʿwa as well as vital to ensuring MSA members’ success in the very system that they critiqued. These families, and notably not Black Muslim communities, represented potential allies in the MSA's effort to reinvigorate and renew Islam. Rather than preclude participation, revivalist goals sometimes encouraged forms of cultural and interreligious exchange.
Whereas male-authored MSA publications often extolled the “myth of return,” the MSA's female authors proceeded with the assumption that many families were likely to stay in the United States long term. This meant that parents had to get on with the responsibility of raising devout Muslim children who were likely to spend most, if not all, of their childhoods in the United States.Footnote 92 Far from advocating for withdrawal or calling on “utopian” visions in order to preserve their Muslim and diasporic identities, the Parents’ Manual counseled the importance of having both Muslim and non-Muslim friends, telling parents that they should:
encourage the child to associate with non-Muslim children in whose homes religious values and high standards of behavior are respected and maintained. The Muslim child growing up in this society needs friends and companions just as much as anyone else… . The child will as a rule choose his friends from this group as far as possible and his parents should make efforts to build relations with non-Muslim families of this sort.Footnote 93
While other MSA publications, usually authored by men, professed the need to invest religious and political capital in diasporic homelands, the Parents’ Manual was simultaneously foregrounding the importance of building more permanent interfaith social ties in the United States. What is more, these social ties, rather than detracting from the mission of cultivating Muslim identity, would in fact help to sustain daʿwa by improving the image of Islam and enabling American Muslim communities to flourish.
In the long run, the Women's Committee told its readers, a solid network of social relationships cultivated among peers and nuclear families, under the strong direction of the wife and mother, would enable Muslim children to thrive as shining examples of religious piety to others, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. For these authors, cultivating friendships with other religious families offered emotional security for both parents and children. The Parents’ Manual demonstrates how MSA parents saw their religiously pluralistic neighborhoods as spaces of affinity and relative openness for Muslims even as they also represented a certain amount of danger to a Muslim way of life.Footnote 94 The manual was particularly keen to encourage friendships with other religious families, namely Christians and Jews whom the authors felt shared common gender and sexuality norms and centered religious devotion in their family life.Footnote 95 In this way, the Parents’ Manual identified multiple points of affinity with non-Muslim communities whom they saw as preserving complementary gender roles and prioritizing faith over materialism.
The manual intimated that such friendships would be made in public schools and in suburban neighborhoods, where Muslim children would naturally gravitate to kids who hailed from families with similar moral values, such as gender complementarianism. Even if their children made friends with a person of questionable character, such as an atheist, Muslim parents ought not to panic. As with the question of teenage girls and modest dress, with proper instruction in Muslim practice a child would eventually realize the importance of having religious friends who came from families with a similar investment in the nuclear family. Robust social networks would, in turn, provide American Muslims with the security and support to practice Islam correctly and to encourage other Muslims in their own practices. The Parents’ Manual also recommended that children be educated in correcting misconceptions about Islam among non-Muslims.Footnote 96 In short, interfaith friendships would aid in the mission of daʿwa.
This emphasis on the religious and cultural importance of friendships was also evident in the Muslim World Cook Book. The Women's Committee's second major publication affirmed the central role of wives and mothers in the preservation of Muslim identity as preparers of food and caregivers of children.Footnote 97 The Muslim World Cook Book imagined American Muslims as inhabiting emergent multicultural spaces and interacting with Americans of varying identities, all the while observing their particular dietary regulations and celebrating their distinctive diasporic heritage. These aspirations reflect a rather optimistic outlook for American Muslims in the emerging multicultural landscape of the 1970s as they cultivated affinity with religious others while maintaining their cultural differences. The Muslim World Cook Book's aspirational effort to encapsulate all the cuisines of the “Muslim World” into just a single volume shows how the MSA Women's Committee regarded wives and mothers as cultural and religious arbiters. As food preparers, women smoothed the path to eating halal by cooking the foods of their respective homelands while also offering options for times when their family did not want to appear too distinctive or different. A Muslim cook would gain the satisfaction of simultaneously providing her family with pious eating habits, a healthy diet, and access to American cultural norms.
The cookbook's authors imagined that Muslim and non-Muslim white ethnic wives would entertain each other's families, making domestic spaces into multicultural sites for cultural and religious exchange. The Muslim World Cook Book reflects both diasporic culinary practices designed to cultivate Muslim identity through ethnic food practices and a broader acceptance of American consumer practices related to food, such as shopping in grocery stores and buying processed foods.Footnote 98 Of the 160 recipes in the cookbook, about 25 percent were labeled “U.S.A.,” ranging from strawberry punch to Boston brown bread to Pennywise Swiss steak. Every section included at least one recipe with the label “U.S.A.,” and the majority of the recipes in the chapters for drinks and desserts were labeled American. Only dishes labeled as Pakistani and “Levantine” (Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine) were featured more frequently in the rest of the book.
The Muslim World Cook Book celebrated the contributions of wives and mothers to the mission of daʿwa within the home while also affirming women's ability to expand this mission through broader social circles. It did what Kennan Ferguson calls the “intensifying” work of community cookbooks, a genre of culinary writing popular among varying Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities. By celebrating the female labor of cooking and other domestic tasks, they construct a “sensory, performative basis for racialism,” engender diasporic memory, and constitute class-based habits.Footnote 99 The World Cook Book affirmed that a Muslim woman could put revivalist principles to work in the kitchen for the benefit of her husband and children and, in the process, find intellectual, emotional, and, above all, spiritual fulfillment in the labor of cooking and entertaining.
Concurrently, however, the World Cook Book, like the other publications of the Women's Committee, also called for expanding women's activities outside of the home. The authors wanted their cookbook to reach health officials and other professionals in the practice of healthy eating, promoting cross-cultural accommodation of dietary requirements and identifying pathways of pluralistic exchange in schools, restaurants, and medical facilities. Both the Parents’ Manual and the World Cook Book show that the Women's Committee conceived of the home and other domains marked as female as holding significant religious and political potential for their daʿwa mission. These didactic writings were part of a global Muslim revivalist women's literature that promoted the nuclear family and the loving, companionate marriage as the foundation for the revival of Muslim identity and practice. Even as they emphasized women's roles as mothers, mid-twentieth century revivalist female authors claimed public voices through their participation in a transnational print culture.Footnote 100 The MSA Women's Committee, like their revivalist counterparts in places like Egypt, saw their potential influence as extending beyond their local neighborhoods to advancing the global movement of reviving and reforming Muslim practice, starting with the foundational efforts of women.
For the MSA's female authors, the family functioned as the key site for the invigoration of Muslim identity and practice, complementary to the (largely male) MSA mission on university campuses. Within this framework, the Women's Committee emphasized the essential role of everyday practices in the daʿwa mission. Moreover, selective participation in American society, led by women, was actually a key part of that political and religious project.Footnote 101 The domains of education, family, and social programs proved to be the areas in which revivalists had the most success in challenging secular visions of modernity and cultivating alternative constructions of self and society.Footnote 102
Conclusion
By attending to the publications of the MSA Women's Committee, this article has called into question teleological narratives of the MSA as moving from detachment to engagement, from being “foreign” in its first generation to being “American” in the 1980s and beyond. The exclusion of female members’ contributions and activities during the 1970s has obscured the relational practices through which MSA members practiced their faith. In the case of MSA women's literature, critique was a key form of engagement with American culture, but it was one that did not preclude MSA members and their families from hosting their neighbors for “American” meals or participating in holiday celebrations in schools and workplaces. These female-authored sources further suggest the highly localized ways that American Muslims have navigated critique and compromise, efforts that were mediated through personal relationships and social priorities that sometimes overrode ideological conceptions of Islam. MSA female authors denounced some American social norms rooted in a transnational revivalist ethos, yet their rebuke was tempered by the pragmatic and moral value they placed on friendships with other religious families of similar socioeconomic and racial status; on the importance of engaging local institutions, such as public schools; and on the spiritual and cultural meaning they found in some consumer practices. In fact, achieving revivalist aims in the United States to some degree depended on building these social networks outside of the umma. For the MSA's female authors of the 1970s, the ground on which they found affinity with families of other faiths was not theology or Abrahamic lineage but, rather, a shared gendered and classed vision of raising devout children to meet the unique threats posed by modernity.
This article has also demonstrated the need to foreground the role of women in shaping the direction of American Islam, especially in centering the cultivating of Muslim identity in the nuclear family. The authors I have engaged in this essay understood women to play a special, yet circumscribed, role in the home, elevating the nuclear family as the key social unit for daʿwa. In the process, they contributed to the vast literary production of Muslim revivalists in the mid- and late twentieth century as well as to the equally vast parenting literature marketed to American families. The publications of the MSA Women's Committee would come to have a lasting influence, remaining in circulation and widely available throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries following revisions in the late 1990s.
In contrast to ideologies that cast the nuclear family as America's economic engine, the MSA in the 1960s and 1970s promoted the family as a site that mitigated and undermined the deleterious effects of a hegemonic consumerism.Footnote 103 The MSA's female writers articulated a vision of a modern nuclear family that could be a protective force against the moral excesses of late capitalism. In their vision, family and domestic spaces held the promise of bottom-up political transformation and religious revival, with mothers taking a leading role.
By the end of the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries, such ambivalence toward consumerism is less common among affluent American Muslims. The children of first-generation MSA members grew up benefitting from the upward mobility of their parents. The global Muslim fashion market is now a multi-billion-dollar industry, dowry negotiations can involve consideration of the diamond's size relative to a family's social capital, and American Muslim youth are enthusiastic producers and consumers of popular culture.Footnote 104 By contrast, this religious and moral investment in the nuclear family has remained normative. Through its publications and other initiatives, the MSA Women's Committee helped to make the nuclear family an essential site through which American Muslims have navigated a shifting religious and political terrain through the Cold War and beyond.
