African-American Muslim Women

Abstract

Abstract Most scholars writing about Islam in the African-American Muslim community have focused their efforts on the examination of the teachings of the Nation of Islam.1 In particular, their interest seems to have centered on a critique of the Nation’s philosophy concerning the origin of the Caucasian race, a preoccupation of non-Muslim as well as Muslim writers.2 This obsession with the teachings about race has led to two major lacunae in our understanding of the dynamics of Islam in society. First, we have relatively little informed data about the growth and development of an equally large Islamic population outside the Nation of Islam, that of the Sunni African Americans who have been active in the major urban areas of the United States since the first quarter of this century. Second, there is no analytical writing about the role of women in the African-American Muslim community, including the Nation of Islam.