Being Muslim offers a rich, meticulous account of how women of color, particularly Black women, have produced distinctive ways of “being Muslim” and have shaped the character of Islam in the United States during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Centering U.S. Muslim women's lives, representations, and voices, Chan-Malik conceptualizes ways of being Muslim as a continual process of affective insurgency that is produced out of the ways in which Islam is lived and practiced in the everyday world, and the ways in which Islam is signified in the United States in racialized and gendered terms. The book proceeds chronologically, detailing the shifting contexts through which women create identities and practices as U.S. Muslims, and demonstrating how the legacies of early twentieth century Black Muslim women, and Islam's presence as a Black protest religion, continue to shape present-day formations.
Being Muslim begins the cultural history of U.S. Muslim women with the first known group photo of visibly identifiable Muslim women in the United States, a portrait taken in 1922 of four African American women who had recently converted to Islam through the South Asia-based Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam (AMI). Rather than assign them to existing narratives of Islam in the United States, Chan-Malik offers the Four American Moslem Ladies as visionaries: “women who came to look at, inhabit, and experience the world as Black American Muslim women during a time when there was no such thing” (44). Chapter One considers what working class Black women from the South living and working in early twentieth century Bronzeville saw in Islam: visions of safety, spirituality, and a world beyond, that Chan-Malik demonstrates were shaped by the multiple, intersecting harms they faced in their everyday lives and in exchanges between Blacks and South Asians in the United States.
As Chan-Malik demonstrates, representations of Muslim women's domesticity and marriages in the late 1950s and 1960s figure prominently in Islam's presence in the United States, and in Muslim women's lives. Through analysis of images and representations of Muslim women in Nation of Islam (NOI) publications, mainstream media, and James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, Chan-Malik explores how the domesticity of NOI women was constructed and performed against and through the racial and gender logics of the Cold War, and rendered as sites of political struggle. Chapter Three examines the significance of marriage for women's engagements with Islam, using the stories of Betty Shabazz and Dakota Staton (Aliyah Rabia), two women who engaged in public marriages to prominent Muslim men. Their stories, reconstructed through biographies, press coverage, and personal writings and statements, demonstrate that both women employed their marriages as conduits for religious practice, and they expanded their identities through those marriages, as Muslim women, against prevailing power structures that otherwise circumscribed their lives.
The racialized and gendered notions of Islam in the United States shifted in the late 1970s, replacing Islam's association with Black nationalism with a U.S.-based “discourse of the veil” that fetishized the Islamic headscarf as a symbol of women's oppression. In Chapter Four, Chan-Malik shows how popular U.S. media and mainstream (i.e., White) feminist press coverage of the Iranian women's movement portrayed Islam as an immediate threat to uniquely American values of feminism and democracy, by casting the protesting women of Iran as “international doggelgangers” of the so-called liberated women in the United States (165). An analysis of Ms. magazine articles from 1979, and critiques of Black and other women of color feminists, further reveal how this discourse reflected White feminists' refusal to address anti-Black racism, white supremacy, or the potential links between feminism and antiracism.
Throughout the volume, Chan-Malik explores ways in which women have engaged Islam and shaped its presence in the United States, in relationship to the discourses of feminism and womanism. She advances the concept of U.S. Muslim feminism in Chapter Five as “a critical strand of gender justice discourses of U.S. women of color, alongside Black feminism, women of color feminism, and womanism in the United States, which encompasses the ways U.S. Muslim women have engaged Islam in various forms in order to secure gendered agency and freedom” (135). Drawing from interviews conducted between 2013–16, Chan-Malik presents the stories of four U.S. Muslim women activists and scholars from diverse racial, ethnic, and generational backgrounds who actively incorporate the principle of social justice into their engagements with Islam, and also articulate a clear relationship to gender justice. Their stories reveal the complex relationships they hold with “feminism” and their varied approaches to gender justice, which Chan-Malik suggests are shaped by their different racial positionalities, cultural affiliations, and generational bonds. Given the heterogeneous positionalities of U.S. Muslim women, and their diverse perceptions and practices of gender justice, a reader may wonder how different configurations of their identities might result in varied and at times competing U.S. Muslim feminist practices. Similarly, readers might wonder whether U.S. Muslim feminism is truly able to comprehend stories of women like Maya Blow in Chapter Six, whose work in the Soul Flower Farm is not articulated in terms of gender justice, but nonetheless actively incorporates the principle of social justice into her engagements with Islam.
Being Muslim is a richly informative book that makes clear methodological and theoretical contributions to the study of race, religion, gender, and American Islam. As a scholar and teacher trained in the discipline of political science who currently teaches introductory ethnic and gender studies courses, I found that the volume's use of cultural interpretation and theoretical orientations offers important insights and lessons for political/social science research on intersectional politics of race, gender, and religion in the United States. I also highly recommend the book for classroom adoption, for interdisciplinary undergraduate and graduate-level courses on race, gender, religion and women of color feminisms.
