Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam by Sylvia Chan-Malik (review)

Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam is a masterpiece that provides insightful analysis of the intersections among gender, race, and politics in the lives of American Muslim women. It is the first book-length critical work devoted to gender and Islam in America that addresses how white feminism, Islamophobia, and white supremacy affect the ways in which Muslim women negotiate the cultural landscape of the United States. The study covers early African American converts in the Ahmadi community, the Nation of Islam (NOI), the politics of the veil, and Islamic feminism. Drawing on theories of race, gender, representation, and historical memory, Chan-Malik takes us on a critical journey through the American Muslim experience.

In her introduction, Chan-Malik describes “being Muslim” as part of a process of “producing Muslimness as a way of racial, gendered and religious being” (1). These intersections are centered on the experiences of Black American women, alongside immigrants from South Asian, Arab, and other communities. American Islam is a lived religion that involves an “affective insurgency” (15) modeled upon “againstness” (16). This againstness is foundational to understanding the lived realities of American Muslim women. By their very existence, American Muslim women experience struggle, independence, and self-love. For women in the NOI, this self-love appealed to women like Sonja Sanchez, whose poetry wrote “Black women into the creation myth” (9). The formation of new identities among Muslim women are rooted in lived experience, what Chan-Malik describes as a “story of U.S. Muslim women across time, space, and racial difference that allows for more expansive possibilities of affiliation and exchange among vulnerable populations in the United States and across the world” (38).

The first chapter addresses conversion by Black women in the Ahmadi community in the 1920s. Mindful of the problem of the colonial male gaze, Chan-Malik inverts the common academic approach of placing the subject within the scholar’s narrative. As Chan-Malik writes, “Instead of seeing them as part of an existing narrative (e.g., of Black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, Black men and masculinity, etc.), instead consider what they saw in Islam as Black American women from the South arriving in Chicago in the 1910s and 1920s and how their visions were transformed into insurgent modes of feeling practice through which they made their Muslim-ness” (44, original italics). This gives us “a visual reversal” of Black women’s experiences.

Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the experience of Black American women, in the NOI and on its perimeters. Chan-Malik begins by noting that leaders in the NOI were well aware of the power of the media: “[Elijah] Muhammad would permit only Black journalists, photographers, and writers to cover the NOI, owing to his distrust of having white journalists among his community” (77). An “awareness of the media’s power” (77) shaped the ways in which Black women in the NOI were represented in the Messenger, which projected images of Black womanhood and girlhood that radiated racial pride, beauty, and domesticity. As Chan-Malik writes about a 1959-issue cover photo, “The photo presents an image of Black girlhood that was rarely, if ever, portrayed in the media of popular culture at the time: girls engaged in the act of education, of self-betterment, and of intellectual exchange” (97). Chapter 3 also discusses how Black Muslim women negotiated America’s media landscape through the experiences of Betty Shabazz, Malcolm’s widow, and Dakota Staton, a Black Muslim entertainer who sued the NOI in 1962. The lives of these two women were markedly different—one became an icon of Black Islam for the remainder of her life and the other left the faith of Islam—but they both “understood their marriages and religious lives as fundamentally intertwined” (111). In Islam, the idea of marriage...