Abstract
This study uses the case of African American Muslims to examine the intersection of religious inequality with other forms of disadvantage. It draws on more than six years of ethnographic and historical research in an African American Muslim community in a poor neighborhood in Los Angeles, comparing the experiences of community members with existing research on first- and second-generation Muslim immigrants. It addresses the three most prominent axes of difference between African American and immigrant Muslims—race/ethnicity, class, and neighborhood disadvantage—to explicate the ways in which religion may compound existing inequalities, or in some cases create new forms of difference. It also shows how identifying as native-born Americans allows African American Muslims to claim religion as a cultural advantage in certain situations. Religion is complex not only when different forms of inequality intersect but when these intersections create a different way of understanding what religion means for people of faith.
Highlights
In the US, as in parts of Western Europe, Islam has acquired an undesirable public status as a foreign and “antiWestern” faith, with this discursive ‘othering’ becoming more amplified since September 11th (Byng, 2010; Charrad, 2011; Mahmood, 2005)
The ways in which American Muslims experience stigma and inequality varies depending on how their religious identification intersects with other dimensions of social stratification
I show how African American Muslims claim their native-born status as a cultural advantage over other Muslims, framing religious authority as one that can be heightened by nativist interpretations of Americanness
Summary
In the US, as in parts of Western Europe, Islam has acquired an undesirable public status as a foreign and “antiWestern” faith, with this discursive ‘othering’ becoming more amplified since September 11th (Byng, 2010; Charrad, 2011; Mahmood, 2005). Followers of the faith face an increasing threat of being victim to religious discrimination and hate-motivated violence (Considine, 2017) This is true in cases where the outward expression of a Muslim identity makes believers more visible, as with veiling (Perry, 2014). I examine how African American Muslims in this study navigate their stigmatization and discrimination to explain the ways in which religion may compound existing inequalities, or in some cases create new forms of difference. I show how African American Muslims claim their native-born status as a cultural advantage over other Muslims, framing religious authority as one that can be heightened by nativist interpretations of Americanness By changing their conceptions of religion to accommodate an intersection of felt differences, believers in this study demonstrate an ability to reconstruct religion in new ways. This article makes a distinct contribution to the study of ‘complex religion’ (Wilde, 2017; Wilde & Glassman, 2016; Wilde & Tevington, 2017) by highlighting that religious stigma intersecting with other forms of inequality transforms the very nature of religious experience
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