African American Muslim Women Research Articles

Review: Believing in South Central: Everyday Islam in the City of Angels, by Pamela J. Prickett

In this engaging ethnographic account of an African American masjid in South Central Los Angeles, Pamela J. Prickett explores how Islam is a complete “way of life” that provides guidance on religious practices, community engagement, economic concerns, political activism, and racial justice (2). Prickett expands on Saba Mahmood’s work (2005) by centering on how Islamic practices, not only beliefs, are ways to embody a pious individual self but also to cultivate a more ethical community. In the context of South Central LA, piety “involves the cultivation of virtues that must be achieved through engagement with others” (3). Prickett’s intimate and honest accounting of the conflicts within this community of African American Muslims addresses how working through these struggles is a way for the members to grow closer to God (11).Throughout the book, Pricket astutely presents the specific concerns of this particular Muslim community, such as the racism they face both in United States society and within Muslim American communities, the political and economic struggles, plus the criticism and ignorance they face from Black Christians. This Muslim community is met with a particular challenge to support the significant needs of the South Central LA community. While they seek to help the community with resources, the Muslims are reluctant to let negative forces into the masjid, such as drugs, violence, and sexuality.These conflicts over how to serve the community are the heart of chapter 1, in which Prickett discusses the “symbolic boundary marking” (24) of the members. She explains, “they are pulled by religious obligation to focus on helping the less fortunate in the immediate neighborhood, yet they are pushed by a desire for righteousness to disassociate from people they deem of the hood” (22). She makes an important distinction in this chapter that the members are aware of the institutional barriers to escaping poverty, but they don’t look to religion as a way to magically escape their current conditions. Belief is not about achieving material wealth, as might be preached in Christian prosperity churches, but rather, as Prickett observes, “belief motivating them to move toward something deeper, more existential in character” (28).Chapter 2 uses the death of Imam W. D. Mohammed in 2008 as a jumping off point to examine the transformation of African American Muslims from the Nation of Islam to Sunni Islam. The significant leadership role of Mohammed is shamefully ignored in U.S. religious history. Prickett also discusses the financial collapse of the Nation after Elijah Muhammad’s death in 1975. In chapter 3, she discusses economics: the entrepreneurial projects of the masjid members, the financial struggles of the masjid, and the economic anxieties of the members who live in precarity. Rather than concentrate on poverty and suffering, however, Prickett provides a nuanced analysis of how “money is funny” in this community.Chapter 4 focuses on gender dynamics. While the sermons emphasize that men and women have distinct roles—granting men authority in the mosque and women responsibilities in the domestic space—the African American Muslim women often create their own female networks of support and do not rely on men. Finally, chapter 5 explores class issues, specifically the scrutiny that African American Muslims often face from immigrant Muslims of Arab and South Asian backgrounds. While the ideal is that Islam is a religion without racial hierarchies, immigrant Muslims see the advantages of participating in the American project of anti-Black racism. Through personal stories of institutional racism and micro-aggressions in the mosques, Prickett describes the personal harm of racism and classism, especially when it defines Black Muslims as less pious.Much has been written about the spiritual lives of African Americans, from work on the Black Church, emerging from enslavement, to the Nation of Islam and other Black nationalist religious-political movements. Prickett offers a needed contribution to this literature in her discussion of the religious lives and identities of Black Muslims in the post-NOI era. Another strength of this volume is Prickett’s appealing writing style that is supported by the close connections formed with members of the masjid and her honest reflections of her own positions as a White, non-Muslim researcher. This up-front and at times self-deprecating style allows Prickett to explore the debates and struggles within this masjid. In turn, readers gain an understanding of how Islam is lived out in South Central LA.

Ethics of Conducting Virtual Ethnography on Visual Platforms

For scholars, the internet provides a space to study diverse groups of people across the world and can be a useful way to bypass physical gender segregation and travel constraints. Despite the potential for new insights into people’s everyday life and increased attention from scholars, there is no standard set of ethics for conducting virtual ethnography on visually based platforms, like YouTube and Instagram. While publicly accessible social media posts are often understood to be a part of the public domain and thus do not require a researcher to obtain a user’s consent before publishing data, caution must be taken when studying members of a vulnerable community, especially those who have a history of surveillance, like African-American Muslims. Using a womanist approach, the author provides recommendations for studying vulnerable religious groups online, based on a case study of a YouTube channel, Muslimah2Muslimah, operated by two African-American Muslim women. The article provides an important contribution to the field of media studies because the author discusses a “dead” online community, where users no longer comment on the videos and do not maintain their own profiles, making obtaining consent difficult and the potential risks of revealing information to an unknown community hard to gauge.

A nation can rise no higher than its women: African American Muslim women in the movement for black self determination, 1950-1975

Preface Introduction Chapter 1 Upon the Education of Its People Rests the Fate of a Nation: The Struggle for Self-Determination Chapter 2 African American Muslim Women in the Nation of Islam Movement: Appeals, Benefits, and Outcomes Chapter 3 Raising Her Voice: Writings By, For and About Women in Muhammad Speaks Newspaper Chapter 4 African American Activism: The Muslim Community Contribution, 1960-1975 Chapter 5 Crossing Borders: Toward a Transnational Narrative in the Struggle Notes About the Author Selected Bibliography

Negotiating Gendered Religious Space

Much research on women’s religious participation centers on their abilities to act within constricted institutional spaces. Drawing on five years of ethnographic fieldwork, this study analyzes how African American Muslim women use the mosque as a physical space to enact public performances of religious identity. By occupying, protecting, and appropriating spaces in the mosque for meaningfully gender-specific ways of engaging Islam, the women further a project of religious self-making that bonds African American Muslim women together. In their maneuverings of different forms of physical space as a sisterhood, the women enable themselves to resist gender, economic, and racial oppression. This study reveals that even within men-dominated religious organizations with limited symbolic and material spaces for women, women participants successfully exert agency over their own religious experiences.

African American Women's Experiences Around Conversion to Islam

This article focuses on the experiences of African American women who converted from Christianity to Islam. Examining qualitative data from interviews with 15 Muslim women, we identified common experiences the women had in their paths to Islam. These experiences included predisposing conditions, experiencing challenges, social ties and relationships with Muslims, observing others, and positive experiences during the conversion process. We also found that dissatisfaction with their religious upbringing, life events, close and distant relationships, and feelings of peacefulness entered into the process, which seemed to be gradual. Similarities and differences between these findings and models of conversion and implications for social work practice with African American Muslim women are discussed.

Providing Culturally Conscious Mental Health Treatment for African American Muslim Women Living With Spousal Abuse

African American Muslim women seeking outpatient mental health counseling for spousal abuse face a variety of inter- and intrapersonal barriers that may prevent them from accessing services. Many of these barriers stem from the lack of cultural awareness in the mental health field of the differences between various Muslim populations. This article addresses how racial and religious identities may influence the counseling process for African American Muslim women who are in abusive relationships. To address how counselors can support African American Muslim women averting spousal abuse, we present a revised version of the transtheoretical model incorporating racial and religious identity factors.

Pious Muslim Bodies and Alternative Medicine: Continuities and Discontinuities between the African Diaspora and an Emerging Gendered Diaspora

“Pious Muslim Bodies and Alternative Medicine” explores the emergence of what might be conceptualized as a Muslim gendered diaspora and how it intersects with the African diaspora. Literature on the development of a Muslim public sphere tends to focus on written texts and how those texts are interpreted by Muslim groups within the ummah, or world community. This article explores not only the exegetical borrowings but also the continuities and discontinuities between these two diasporas as articulated in the bodily practices of African American Muslim women. Examining discourses about the body, this article locates different diasporic linkages in consumption and health practices. Of theoretical interest is whether these bodily practices and alternative health care discourses are tied to African American social history (race), conversion (change in dispositions), Islam (exegesis), or the American cultural ethic of individualism. With dramatic increases in women's literacy and media access within the Muslim ummah, Muslim women are beginning to participate in an international dialogue about ethical conduct. Although the religious discourses are often mimetic, the regional inflections of religious practices are often the product of other genealogies. The continuities and discontinuities represented in the health practices of African American Muslim women demonstrate that although diaspora is not tied to any place or essential religious authority, it is materially locatable in modes of practice and relations of power.

Through Sunni Women's Eyes: Black Feminism and the Nation of Islam

This article portrays and analyzes the narratives of two Sunni women who were formerly members of the Nation of Islam. Their Nation stories vividly show how Muslim women accommodated dress codes as well as traditional gender roles that position men as the financial supporters of women and children. The article shows why Sunni African-American Muslim women have advocated male accountability in the past and present, and how doing so situates them within Black feminist tradition.

Race and ethnicity: across time, space and discipline

Introduction Part One Race Across Time 1. Apples are the Color of Blood 2. Confederate Police and the Post-Slavery Racial Order: A New Perspective on the New Orleans Race Riot of 1866 3. State and the Production of Racial Categories 4. End of Race? Rethinking the Meaning of Blackness in Post-Civil Rights America 5. How to Talk Nasty About Blacks Without Sounding Racist: Exposing the Sophisticated Style of Color-Blind Racism 6. A Critical Sociology of African Americans, the U.S. Welfare State, and Neoliberalism in the Era of Corporate Globalization 7. Looking B(l)ackward: 2097-1997 Part Two Race Across Space 8. Transforming Racial Identity Through Affirmative Action 9. Do the right thing - race and ethnic differences in integrity 10. Black Radical Traditions in the South: Confronting Empire 11. Exploring the Racial Discrimination and Competition Processes of Race-Specific Violence in the Urban Context 12. A Black Feminist Critique of the Social Construction of Crack Cocaine along Race, Class, and Gender Lines 13. Dining While Black: Racial Rituals and the Black American Restaurant Experience 14. Ethnography, Demography and Service-Learning: Situating Lynwood Park Part Three Race Across Discipline 15. On Black Athena, Hippocratic Medicine, and Roman Imperial Edicts: Egyptians and the Problem of Race in Classical Antiquity 16. Metaphoric Black Bodies in the Hinterlands of Race Or, Towards Deciphering the Du Boisian Concept of Race and Nation in The Conservation of Races 17. Sexism, Racism and African American Muslim Women: What Does Wearing Hijab Mean to Them? 18. Repression, Racism, and Resistance: New Orleans Black Urban Regime and a Challenge to Racist Neoliberalism 19. Ethnic Pluralism and National Identity in Nigeria 20. I Don't Sing, I Don't Dance, and I Don't Play Basketball! Is Sociology Declining in Significance, or Has It Just Returned To Business As Usual? References Notes on Contributors Index

African American Muslim Women: An Invisible Group

Little is written about Islam and African American women or men from a psychosocial perspective. Most of the literature is on the historical and political development of the Nation of Islam, and the differences among the male leaders. This focus obscures the fact that the majority of African Americans Muslims belong to traditional Islamic groups. Drawing upon a variety of literatures, this paper seeks to explore some background information about Islam and the African American community, and to understand the appeal of Islam to African American women.

African-American Muslim Women and Health Care

ABSTRACT Muslims constitute a growing proportion of the African-American population. This paper explores the health practices, health behaviors, and code of ethics as informed by the Islamic religion within the context of African-American Muslim women's lives. An overview of the history of Islam in the world, and in the U.S., the main Islamic tenets, and the socio-cultural context of African-American Muslim women provides the broad framework for this paper. This information will be helpful in meeting the health needs of African-American Islamic women, within an outreach/community health promotion setting, within a clinical/hospital setting, or within a home care setting.

Mediating Discrimination: Resisting Oppression among African-American Muslim Women

Using qualitative data from interviews with twenty African-American Muslim women, this analysis contrasts the understanding of experiencing discrimination gained from Feagin and Sikes' Living with Racism (1994) with that gained from Patricia Hill Collins' Black Feminist Thought (1991). I demonstrate Collins' theory of a matrix of domination and the both/and conceptual stance through examining these respondents' experiences with the intersection of race, gender, and religious discrimination. Furthermore, I argue that these women are able to mediate, or resist the oppression of, discrimination through the self-definition and determination, provided by a humanist vision of themselves and others. Finally, the respondents' membership in the Muslim community provides them with a safe social space to transform their life and their consciousness. Through these cultural and social structural means, this group of respondents are able to socially construct a reality that allows them to mediate the discrimination they experience.

Mediating Discrimination: Resisting Oppression among African-American Muslim Women

Mediating Discrimination: Resisting Oppression among African-American Muslim Women