Unique Voices: Black Muslim Women

Sumaiya DeLane
Feminist Theory

In the current political climate, concerns over terrorism dominate foreign policy and law
enforcement reform has been pushed to the center stage of domestic policy. In turn, major news
outlets have perpetuated and somewhat validated anti-Islamic and anti-BlackLives matter
rhetoric. Given the recent rise of Islamophobia post 9/11 and the strengthening traction of the

Black Lives Matter movement, mainstream feminist discourse has attempted to integrate other
identities, and thus intersectionality has become key in modern day feminism. However, feminist
discourse mainly only explores the identity of the monolithic Muslim woman in a global sense.
Although Islam has a long standing role in African American history, Muslim women are rarely
discussed within an American context and therefore never associated with African American
identity. How then, if at all does the media represent African American Muslim women?
Furthermore, how does media representation result in or reflect marginalization within each
minority?
After the 9/11 terror strikes on the Twin Towers in New York city and the Pentagon, the
presence of Muslims in the United states has raised concerns about the threat of terrorism. The
term Islamophobia, meaning a dislike or prejudice against Muslims or Islam especially as a
political force, has gained prominence since hate crimes against Muslim Americans have
increased. Most often women who wear hijab, the Islamic head covering for women, are targeted
victims of prejudice and hostility. The media has effectively presented Islam as an inherently
violent religion and, pulling on a history of western superiority, persuaded many Americans that
Muslim women are oppressed by Muslim men. Nearly ten years after 9/11, the recent terrorist
threats of the Islamic State (ISIS) in western countries have reignited anti-Islamic rhetoric. In the
current race for Republican candidate, every single runner has needed to take a stance about
Islamic extremism. Dr. Ben Carson has said ISIS has the same goal as they did when
Mohammed was around. They want to dominate. And they want everyone else to submit to
them. Like many followers of the Republican party, candidates have succumbed to the idea that

extremist groups such as ISIS practice Islam in its true, fundamental form. However, the vast
majority of practicing Muslims and Islamic scholars have condemned extremists violent
behavior as un Islamic. Even though political groups like ISIS have manipulated a perverted
version of Islam to justify their inhumanity, Dr. Ben Carson and many others still vehemently
believe that advocates of Shariah law [Islamic law] are growing rapidly, along with their zeal to
eradicate or convert all infidels.
A western obsession with the threat of Shariah law pervades every level of American
government. Senator Ted Cruzs Tennessee chair headed the Anti-Sharia bill in Tennessee, which
basically would have prohibited any public practice of everyday Islam. Likewise, Governor Mike
Huckabee buys into the supposed violent nature of Islam saying, why it is that we tiptoe around
a religion that promotes the most murderous mayhem on the planet in their so-called holiest
days. And so, the only logical reaction to such an imminent threat to American safety is to issue
total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States, according to Donald
Trump. He suggested that American mosques be surveillanced and Muslims wear identification
badges in order to solve the Muslim problem, in the words of Bill Oreilly. In a more local
context, such staunch opposition to anything related to Islam has reached even Vanderbilt
Universitys campus. Professor Carol Swain, in her opinion piece to the Tennessean, says Islam
poses an absolute danger to us and our children [it is] is positively dangerous to our society.
Arguing that Islam does not deserve the respect accorded to other world religions, Swain says
Islam is a dangerous set of beliefs totally incompatible with Western beliefs concerning freedom
of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of association. Ending with, Islam will never

understand the freedoms that we live and die to preserve. If America is to be safe, it must remove
the foxes from the henhouses and institute serious monitoring of Islamic organizations, Carol
Swain speaks for those who have played into the us vs. them dichotomy. Islam, according to
her and many others, opposes every aspect of American identity and democracy.
In a recent interview, Swain was asked, How do you conceptualize the existence of a
large black Muslim population- at least 25% of Muslims in America are African American.
Therefore, many of the black people who fought/continue to fight for their "American freedoms"
are in fact Muslim. How does this fit into your framework? She replied, race has nothing to
do with it. Islam is a religion. Somalian immigrants come here from overseas, and proceeded to
explain her opinions about the refugee crisis. For one, she did not answer the question at all, but
most importantly, she proved that black identity and Muslim identity seem to be mutually
exclusive. To her, Islam could only be conceptualized in a foreign, global context, when in fact
Islam has been in America decades before 9/11. The Black and Muslim identity do converge. In
fact, close to 30% of American Muslims are black, according to Pew Research Centers 2015
Religious Landscape Study (Simon 2015). However, current media coverage does not at all
depict black American Muslims, though they do use similar rhetoric around the two identities.
Like Islam has been labeled a threat, so has the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement.
New media outlets have referred to the social justice activists as members of a Nazi Party,
extreme group, and hate group. As protesters involved in the Murder Movement, they
promote an anti-cop...thug mentality...in black communities. So while both Islam and the BLM

movement are presented as dangerous, they are dangerous in their own separate spheres- Islam to
the west and BLM to white-supremacy.
Before the repeal of the 1965 Immigration Quota System, in which President Johnson
overturned a bill that heavily favored European immigration and thus allowed for waves of
immigrants from Eastern countries to enter America, Islam was a Black religion (Jackson 2005).
Nation of Islam, the most well known black Muslim organization, founded by Wallace Dean
Fard, arose in the 1930s as both a religious and a black nationalist movement (Turner 1996 p.
149 as cited by Abduqarrib 174, 2010). Under the leadership of Elijah Muhammed, the Nation of
Islam became prominent in the black community as an alternative to Christianity. According to
Lincolns the Black Muslims in America, the main attraction of the Black Muslim Movement
was its passion for group solidarity and black pride. Nation of Islam leaders and followers
believe that all black men are Muslim by nature and saw Christianity as a tool of oppression
meant to distance African Americans from their roots. (Lincoln 1961 as cited by Abdurraqib
2010). Thus, renouncement of Christianity by black people symbolized emancipation from white
slavery and ideologies (Abdurraqib 2010 p.175). Nation of Islam promoted black unity through
Islam and was dedicated to self-sufficiency and success independent from whites, whom Nation
referred to as blue-eyed devils. The majority of black people whom identified or whose family
previously identified with the Nation of Islam have left the religion as of today; its 250,00
members from 1975 have decreased to an estimated 50,000 as reported in 2007 (MacFarquhar
2007). Most members left the Nation of Islam and converted to traditional Sunni Islam in the late
1980s; however, many black Sunni Muslims still link Islam to anti-white supremacist,

patriarchal ideologies. Aisha Al-Adawiya, a black American convert to traditional Islam says,
We saw in Islam the opportunity to re-create ourselves as women.We were not seeking to
assimilate into the society. So, before the waves of immigrant Muslims into America, Islam
was a vehicle for black pride to counter white-supremacy. However, once immigrant Muslims
arrived in America, they dominated the definition of Islamic life in America. For them, white
supremacy and race was not issue but instead, the clash of eastern and western culture was
problematic. Opposition to the west and opposition to white supremacy are not synonymous; for
one to be anti-western, one must also be anti-black, at some level (Jackson 2005).
Being that now more than 60% of Muslims in America come from immigrant families,
the post-9/11 rhetoric that depicts Islam as a foreign has erased the connection between black
identity and Islam. Specifically, the rhetoric is necessary to justify the war on terror, creating an
idea of the Muslim enemy as foreign-born and un-American. Anti-Islamic rhetoric evolves into
remarks such as go back home and you dont belong here (Gotanda 2011). Black Muslims,
especially black Muslim women, still suffer the consequences of islamophobia and the foreign
terrorist stereotype. However, islamophobia directly attacks the immigrant Muslim community
through the assertion that Islam is a foreign threat. Thus, the immigrant Muslims attempt to
reverse the stereotypes by assimilating into American culture and emulating the model minority
role. In the process of integrating into American culture immigrant Muslims have actively
otherized the black Muslim community. Becoming a true American is strongly linked to
whiteness (Akhtar 2011). Immigrant Muslims attempt to fit into American society by fulfilling
the role of the model minority, which is essentially a racial group somewhere between white and

black. This racial group exemplifies racial success in efforts to discipline African Americans
while simultaneously reaffirming white superiority by emphasizing the minority aspect
(Gotanda 2011). Jamillah Karim in her book American Muslim Women: Negotiating Race,
Class, and Gender Within the Ummah, addresses the issue that immigrant assimilation posits for
black Muslims:
In an era radically altered by the influx of non-European immigrants, new forms of
American racism have developed that extend beyond the black-white color line while
simultaneously reinforcing it. This new racism refers to both discrimination directed at
non-white immigrants and the ways in which immigration assimilation has led to new
structures of anti-black racism. The myth of the model minority represents a form of
disguised racism that achieves new ways to racialize African Americans. South Asian
immigrants subscribe to privileged status of model minority to set themselves apart from
African Americans (2009:5).
Essentially, given the racist, economic hierarchy embedded within American culture,
immigrant Muslims operate within the social binaries in hopes of working their way up and thus
perpetuate racism and isolation even in their own Muslim community. The resulting effect is
segregation within the ummah, or Muslim community. Karim examines the demographics of
Chicago and Atlanta, two cities with large South Asian and Black Muslim populations. Given the
racial segregation of Chicago for example, in which South Asians tend to live in predominantly
white, affluent neighborhoods, black and South Asian Muslims exist in separate mosques and
community spaces. Without much interaction, there lacks an opportunity to break pervasive

stereotypes about each respective racial group. Therefore, black Muslims are subjected to racism
within their own Muslim community.
However the active exclusion of black Muslims has not gone unnoticed in the American
Muslim community, at least in the younger generations. As the conversations surrounding race
have escalated as a result of the Black Lives Matter movement, so has the awareness of racism in
the Muslim community. Recently, there have been several social media campaigns to expose the
experiences of black Muslims. These campaigns include the hashtags #BlackinMSA
#DroptheAWord. The #DroptheAWord campaign addresses Arabs use of the racial slur abeed
when referring to black Muslims, and black people in general. The Arabic term abeed
translates to slave in English, and it is used in a derogatory manner towards black people. As
immigrant Muslims try to assimilate into an inherently anti-black white society, they increasingly
use this word to refer to black Muslims as a means of asserting their superiority and otherizing
blackness, just as
American society otherizes and demonizes the inferior black race. #BlackinMSA, on the other
hand, aims to highlight the exclusion and negative treatment of black Muslims within Muslim
Student Associations, whose majority members are often immigrant Muslims. The following are
a few tweets from the campaign: Forgetting Islam didnt come to this country on a student visa.
It came in the belly of a cargo ship, in the heart of a slave. #BlackinMSA, When your MSA
wont participate in BLM movements but would work an entire semester raising funds for Arab
nations #BlackinMSA, and Seeing Desi & Arab MSA members fall over each other to organize
for Syrian Refugees but there were two sides to the story for Freddie Gray #BlackInMSA

(AlJazeera 2013). Many tweets touched on one common theme: the valuing of immigrant
Muslim lives over black Muslim lives and the refusal of Muslim associations to view black
struggles as their own.
As the only black Muslim in the Muslim Student Association here at Vanderbilt, I have
had to speak on my experience countless times. I feel the exclusion from both of my identities.
Although I identify more with being Muslim, my family and I have struggled to navigate our
Muslim identity within black culture. My father grew up in Nation of Islam and converted to
Sunni Islam, and my mother converted from Christianity. My mother faced pushback from her
family for becoming Muslim, and has since not recovered the same relationship she once had
with her them. Even I experience some difficulty in connecting with my mothers side of the
family since most of their activities and reunions are often bound in Christianity. My Muslim
identity separates me more than our shared black identity brings them together. Sometimes, I
have to prove my black identity in the presence of other black people, especially because I
wear hijab and am light skinned. Otherwise, black people simply write me off as just Muslim
and, thus, inherently different and not legitimately black. For example, I am a part of NAACP,
and often need to explicitly claim blackness so I will say we, as black people, in order to
clarify my blackness to others who may not see past my Muslim identity. Many people fail to see
the intersectionality of my Muslim identity and my black identity. Within the Muslim
community, people ask me where I am from and when I say black they ask, where are you
really from, as if it is impossible to be black and Muslim. The biggest issue for me will come up
in marriage. Even though my potential husband who might be of a different race will fully accept

my blackness, I just know that his parents will not jump at the idea of their son marrying a black
woman.

While addressing issues of racism and inclusion in the Muslim ummah, Islamic feminism
and intersectionality have become recurring topics in discussion as well. Although some cities
like Chicago experience physical racial division, experiences of gender inequality inspire some
women to move across spaces in the Chicago ummah in search of gender justice. Gender
asymmetries, therefore, become the condition for resistance and movement (Karim 2009: 92).
Islamic feminism, especially amongst the younger generation, transcends racial
boundaries and establishes religion as a uniting experience. As opposed to mainstream feminism
suggesting that Muslim women are helpless and cannot act as feminists, religious Muslim
woman often believe faith commands they remedy injustice. Miriam Cooke labels this
oppositional stance a multiple critique since Muslim woman not only criticize gender within
their own faith communities, but also Western feminism which attacks and stereotypes Islam as
inherently oppressive (Karim 2005: 93). Similar to African American women's multiple
oppressions, in which they must address racism and classism, Muslim women embody
intersectionality as their struggle includes religious discrimination, race, class, and gender.
Briding racial, religious, ethnic and socio-economic lines to bring about equality, equity and
harmony is integral to feminist discourse. The historical experiences of African Americans,
combined with those of Muslim women, demonstrate the value of collective effort for peace and

social justice; therefore, the voices of Black Muslim women are rare and unique. They need to be
heard.

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