Agency versus Insurgency

Abstract

Recent publications draw on critical race theory and Black studies, with potentially transformative possibilities for thinking through the gendered and racialized politics of “being Muslim” in the context of Euro-American secular modernity (Gibson and Karim 2014; Hammer 2012; Muhammad 2020; Taylor 2017). Rather than take up questions of agency, as Saba Mahmood’s seminal work Politics of Piety did, Sylvia Chan-Malik’s Being Muslim charts an “insurgent genealogy” of Islamic commitments in the face of colonial racisms, as protest or liberation theology. In so doing, her work moves beyond questions of pious Muslim women’s agency and toward what Black studies scholar Dylan Rodríguez (2014: 38–39) calls “a creative, liberation-focused, and generally radical political-intellectual practice” that is also spiritual and affective.In Politics of Piety Saba Mahmood draws largely on theoretical arguments developed by Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Immanuel Kant, and Isaiah Berlin, as well as a rich body of anthropological material on women and gender in Middle East studies (Abu-Lughod 1990; Boddy 1989; Hale 1997). Her principal argument centers on an assertion of Muslim women’s agency in the women’s mosque movement in Egypt. Her project, she writes, is not just an ethnographic study but aims to “speak back to the normative liberal assumptions about human nature against which such a movement is held accountable—such as the belief that all human beings have an innate desire for freedom” (Mahmood 2005: 5). But it was also an argument about the power of piety in animating (Muslim women) subjects toward discursive participation in knowledge systems, reshaping those systems through new kinds of interventions. Mahmood’s argument about Muslim women’s agency in the Islamic movement in Egypt was a radical claim, especially given countervailing claims in the US academy and the public sphere, although it was also somewhat self-evident (with due respect to her important body of scholarship). Through an eloquent mode of argumentation, Mahmood’s thesis ultimately demonstrates that the pious Muslim women she studied were humans with agency, as if the question were in doubt. She made her intervention in the shadow of 9/11 and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, during a time of self-righteous self-congratulation about the liberatory agenda of the conquest, with strange and colorful images of women in burkas to legitimize that claim. It was yet another conquest of territory in the Middle East, legitimized by tropes of saving women from oppression, following a long legacy of earlier colonial endeavors. Mahmood’s work follows distinguished scholars studying women and gender in the Middle East, scholars that have worked to combat age-old Orientalist assumptions about Muslim women’s oppression, many of them associated with this journal (Abu-Lughod 1998; Ahmed 1993; Badran 1996; Baron 1997; Booth 2001; cooke 2000; Guindi 1981, 1999; Hafez 2011; Hatem 2002; Moallem 2005; Najmabadi 2005; Tucker 2002). (Apologies for the many other invaluable contributions not included in this short list.)Mahmood’s work is an important intervention in the field but, perhaps more important, in the Eurocentric American academy, destabilizing its theoretical underpinnings through the very introduction of alternative knowledge systems rooted in the Islamic world. But it also shows how bound scholarship continues to be by the terms and conditions of war, the industrial military complex, colonialism, and imperialism, even when, or especially when, this scholarship pertains to the Middle East and Islam. Elements of Politics of Piety and Lila Abu-Lughod’s (2002) widely circulated and respected “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” were presented at the “Responding to War” conference at Columbia University in the fall of 2001 in the early days of the US invasion of Afghanistan. There Abu-Lughod piloted her argument in “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?”; Catherine Lutz spoke about the military-industrial complex’s perpetuation of gender, class, and race inequities locally and globally, based on fieldwork at an army base in Fayetteville, North Carolina; and Gayatri Spivak talked about the immolation of the twin towers as sacred symbols of a global capitalist order built on oil revenues, ground zero of a new era of global conflict. “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” has enduring scholarly and pedagogical relevance, cleanly cutting through the more ludicrous rhetoric surrounding Muslim women, their sartorial choices, their allegiances, their bodies, and their agency. But the need for teaching and reteaching this piece, and the enlightenment it still engenders, suggests an ongoing, suffocating “racial stasis” when it comes to US policies and attitudes toward Islam, Muslims, and Muslim women (DeSante and Smith 2020).Such attitudes testify to a persistent willful ignorance about the intimate role played by Islam and Muslims in the formation of European concepts of “Western civilization,” but also in building up the United States as a global power beginning from its earliest days. This ignorance is knowingly perpetuated by an inadequate educational system barely emerging out of its racist history but also by a Eurocentric public sphere permeated by both latent and overt elements of white supremacy.Mahmood intervened in the theoretical apparatus of the academy, claiming pious women’s agency in terms set down by the Euro-American theoretical apparatus, making space for saving Muslim women from their omission as nonentities in this discourse. Veiling as resistance against (the coercive visibilities of) liberal secularism and its colonial offshoots has occupied similar space in scholarship, turning veiling into a creative tableau of opposition discourses, pious and otherwise, “insurgent creative activity on the margins of the mainstream” (West 1987: 43).The belief that Muslim women do not have agency suggests a kind of mental slavery, a form of absolute, inhumane oppression through submission to Islam. (This belief is so far from Sufi conceptions of worship, of ibada, as an ecstatic fading of the egoistic, individual self into a sublime universal consciousness of the divine—so far from Sayyid Qutb’s sense of submission as liberation from earthly masters in Social Justice in Islam and Milestones.) Western liberal discourse expertly wields this trope of inhumanity again and again to legitimize its own liberatory claims, even as it dehumanizes the object of its discursive critique, attempting to monopolize and foreclose alternative understandings of humanity. The emphasis on agency stresses, in the terms of liberal citizenship, the individual rather than the community; the self as the measure of action, rather than the collective; rights rather than responsibilities as the definition of human.Mahmood’s work brilliantly draws on Foucault and Butler to argue for the production of subjectivities through submission to disciplines, discursive formations producing citizen-subjects. Even as Mahmood observes and argues for the illiberal nature of the mosque movement as not ascribing to the basic tenets of a liberal society, her overall argument reproduces some of the basic assumptions of liberalism—that submission to discipline constitutes a kind of subjectivity and self-determination that are the very foundation of liberal thought—the chains that set us free (Rousseau 2013). This seeming paradox is what Wendy Brown (1995) calls the constitutive dualisms of liberalism, or what might be better called its hypocrisies and contradictions—that freedom is secured through oppression, equality through inequalities, brotherhood through individualism, and so on.A set of recent books about Muslim women in the United States moves Mahmood’s work to the next level, with theoretical paradigms rooted in Black studies scholarship that go beyond questions of agency and toward concepts of not just resistance but insurgency. In Black studies it would be inconceivable to question the agency of African Americans. This scholarship draws on Foucauldian models that interrogate “power laden discourses: to disrupt and dismantle prevailing Euro-American ‘regimes of truth’ and their repressive effects” (West 1987: 44). Sylvia Chan-Malik’s Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam develops a concept of affective insurgency “as a spiritually embodied practice of social protest.” She contextualizes the Islam of women of color in the United States through “Black liberation, antiracism, and anti-imperialism in the United States . . . through desires for gendered agency and freedom as expressed by women of color” (2). She draws on Sara Ahmed’s (2014) conceptualization of againstness, but Chan-Malik’s argument is also deeply rooted in the early theoretical moments in the formation of Black studies, in Cornel West’s (1987) “Dilemma of the Black Intellectual,” Hortense Spillers’s (1987) “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” and bell hooks and Cornel West’s (2016) Breaking Bread (see also Spillers 1994). She draws on work that calls for intellectual insurgency and creative dissent to open up new worlds not smothered by the suffocating confines of the Euro-American worldview still dominating the academy (see also Kelley 2018; Moten and Harney 2016).Chan-Malik destabilizes Euro-American theoretical paradigms by putting Black studies at the center of her analysis, practicing the transnational solidarities and decolonial movements embraced by Black liberation movements. The reliance on Black studies scholarship unmoors Islamic studies from Orientalist entanglements, staking out cross-disciplinary solidarities that trouble the structure of Eurocentric epistemologies. (Unless one is speaking of Islamic studies beyond the pale of the Western academy, which operates according to different historical textual logics, the field is still haunted by the specter of Euro-American influence in the Muslim world.) Situating her analysis within the field of Black studies but not confined by it, Chan-Malik purposefully, intentionally, and mindfully situates Muslim women of color in the United States not just in a space of opposition but in a space of active revolt against the oppressive racialized gender (and gendered racial) paradigms that continue to roil the landscape of US politics, society, law, and class relations. In so doing, she invokes the long history performed by Black women in the United States confronting, refracting, diffusing, and resisting the vilest impulses of an exploitive capitalist economy that dehumanizes this labor at its core, consuming it with impunity.Black studies has long had Black women at its center. Its origins lie in the history of the emancipatory agenda of abolition; Black colleges and universities; the Black intellectual thought of Carter Woodson, W. E. B. Du Bois, and C. R. L. James; and the campus protests of the late 1960s calling for Black studies. Out of these protests, running alongside and in relation to Black power, Black liberation movements, Black arts, and Black nationalism, came the unruly interventions of the Combahee River Collective; the writings of Toni Cade Bambara, Cheryl Clarke, Patricia Hill Collins, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, and Hortense Spillers (and many others); fierce protests against the willful ignorance of white feminists, their unquestioned assumptions, and their obliviousness to their own subject positions; interrogations of the patriarchy of their comrades in arms even as they lifted them up; and the reclamation of home, family, sexuality, community, beauty, art, music, poetry, and theory on different terms. Chan-Malik takes this fierce theoretical tradition as a center—not as an appendage or a supplement to “traditional disciplines,” not as a final chapter on women or on women of color, not as a reference to a marginalized and oppressed tradition of a marginalized and oppressed group. This is an insurgency against Euro-American theoretical paradigms, as the suffocating sui generis default of the US academy on so many levels, in admissions, tuition, funding, departmental hierarchies, hiring, rank, tenure, administration, citation, publication, research, and other areas.In her concept of affective insurgency, Chan-Malik identifies the heart and soul of this revolt, drawing on the poetry of Sonia Sanchez during her Muslim period in the early 1970s. Being Muslim is not just a “set of proscribed religious practices but a state of insurgent being, in which the embodiment of Muslim womanhood itself is a form of unruly and rebellious expression against social, cultural, and political norms of race, gender, and religion.” Being Muslim, Chan-Malik writes, “is an insurgent ethical, political, and religious framework in which ‘Islam’ facilitates holistic practices of Black women’s liberation and spiritual awakening” (10).For the most part Chan-Malik does not liken her concept of affective insurgency to jihad, maybe because of its radioactivity as a concept in the Euro-American context. For those who know, though, she does not entirely need to, because it is implicitly there, quietly, as intellectual struggle in the form of ijtihad, spiritual struggle as jihad al-nafs, and political struggle as al-jihad al-asghar. This is not just struggle in the self but struggle against nefarious injustices and oppressions that have caused great destruction, bodily harm, and privations inflicted over centuries (Baldwin 1963). As Angela Davis says: Because of the way that this society is organized, because of the violence that exists on the surface everywhere, you have to expect that there are going to be such explosions as reactions. . . . Violence? When someone asks me about violence I just find it incredible. Because what it means is that the person asking the question has no idea what Black people have gone through in this country, from the first days that they were captured from the shores of Africa. (Olsson 2011)Chan-Malik’s concept of affective insurgency has roots in hooks’s, Spillers’s, and West’s notions of insurgency in Black life but also equivalencies in Sayyid Qutb’s idea of al-taharrur al-wijdani, affective emancipation as one of the “pillars” of Social Justice in Islam, along with human equality and social solidarity. Social Justice in Islam itself rests on a liberal, emancipatory paradigm of human rights. But Qutb (1949, 2000) deploys it as revolutionary language articulated against a corrupt, undemocratic monarchy propped up by the British imperial presence in Egypt. Affective insurgency echoes what Hiba Raʾuf calls the soft force or “civil jihad” of Islamic intellectual work and community action, as well as the daily labors of (women’s) struggles in the private sphere—to build community, raise children, educate, and fight injustice (Raouf Ezzat 1995, 2011).By putting Muslim American women of color at the center of her analysis of American Islam, Chan-Malik also works against an earlier tendency in both scholarship and public opinion to see “immigrant Muslims” or an immigrant Islam as the default instantiation of American Islam, denying Black Muslims their integral role in laying the economic foundations of this nation with their blood and labor. This is a point of pride, but it is also connected to the deep shame that is the brutal history of chattel slavery in the US. Christian origin narratives are everywhere plastered over the fact of these Muslim roots, silenced in textbooks and histories, consciousness, and children’s minds, diverting attention from this guilt.By putting Muslim women of color at the center of her analysis, Chan-Malik also challenges the relentless focus on the masculinity of the Black power movement and Black Muslims like Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, and Louis Farrakhan. In so doing, Chan-Malik joins new scholarship insisting on revising histories that gloss over women’s contributions to Black power by focusing only on its chauvinistic masculinity embodied by figures like Eldridge Cleaver (Farmer 2017; Forsgren 2018). Such assumptions about chauvinistic masculinity are similarly attributed to Islam as a religion—assumptions used to mask and disguise the relentless, chauvinistic masculinity of US society. This is another instance of liberal humanism defining itself through processes of dehumanization, as a city on a hill protecting against the barbarians at the gate—yet it is the “barbarians” who were subject to genocide, enslavement, incarceration, detention, and expulsion.Chan-Malik’s book is the fruition of a line of important scholarship building up to it on women and gender in American Islam (Gibson and Karim 2014; Haddad, Smith, and Moore 2006; Hammer 2012; Hammer, Ali, and Silvers 2010; Karim 2008; Rouse 2004; Taylor 2017; Wadud 2006). As Juliane Hammer (2012) argues in American Muslim Women, Religious Authority, and Activism, this body of scholarship and this group of scholars have been integral to rethinking not only US Islam but also the broader field of Islamic studies and Islamic theological concepts. These scholars have been largely committed to broader struggles for social justice in the community and in the field, with contributions that have expanded beyond the bounds of their scholarship. Other important work on Black American Islam has challenged assumptions about Sunni Arab normativity as the most authentic version of Islam, working against the notion of Black American Muslims as a “fringe,” as the Nation called Malcolm X just after his assassination (Ambar 2014: 126). This scholarship has been key to challenging the dichotomization of an orthodox Islamic center against a local periphery, looking carefully at how Islamic practices are embodied, lived, and practiced under different conditions and in different cultural contexts (Abdul Khabeer 2016; Abdullah 2013; Aidi 2014; Curtis 2006; Daulatzai 2012; Grewal 2013; Turner 1997).Being Muslim honors these robust contributions but takes the field a step farther with extensive and meticulous archival work, some of it at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where Chan-Malik was a fellow for a year with Sanchez. She employs a refreshingly interdisciplinary approach that draws on multiple fields of scholarship like ethnic studies, religious studies, cultural studies, the study of women and gender, American studies, and Islamic studies. She also has a keen literary sensibility and a cultural awareness that give her observations and writing richness and depth. The book fleshes out detail with vibrant elements of the Black Muslim American literary cultural tradition: jazz, blues, poetry, art, and music. Chan-Malik chronicles the routes of a cultural tradition embodied in lived faith that has survived through struggle, community building, and creative subcultures. The future, writes West (1987: 52), “resides in a critical negation, wise preservation, and insurgent transformation of this black lineage which protects the earth and projects a better world.” Chan-Malik’s book does Black Muslim women and Muslim women of color justice by paying tribute to their central role in trying to imagine, embody, and live a more just world.