African American Muslim Research Articles

The Islamic community in post-9/11 America: Which Muslims are likely to report being called offensive names?

ABSTRACTAmerican Muslims are frequently called offensive names. Yet, despite the pernicious effects of such derogatory language, a paucity of research has examined this phenomenon. This study set out to address this gap in the literature by determining which Muslims are most at risk to report being called disparaging names. Using a community sample of Muslims (N = 275), the logistic regression results revealed that Muslims who were younger, single, and spoke primarily English at home were comparatively more likely to report being called offensive names within the past 12 months. Conversely, both Asian and African American Muslims were less likely to report being called offensive names compared to European American Muslims. The article concludes by offering some tentative explanations for the findings and suggesting some implications for practice with, and on behalf, of Muslim clients.

アーカイヴへの不満 : アフリカ系アメリカ人ムスリムにおけるアイデンティティをめぐる闘争( アイデンティティと帰属をめぐるアポリア-理論・継承・歴史)

アーカイヴへの不満 : アフリカ系アメリカ人ムスリムにおけるアイデンティティをめぐる闘争( アイデンティティと帰属をめぐるアポリア-理論・継承・歴史)

Prayer, Protest, and Police Brutality: Black Muslim Spiritual Resistance in the Ferguson Era

AbstractThis article is a localized ethnographic exploration of African American Muslims within the context of a broad and diverse national movement surrounding police violence and related issues of racial justice: “Black Lives Matter.” Through fieldwork conducted simultaneously in physical spaces in the Northeast and Mid‐Atlantic region of the United States and on social media platforms, this work explores some of the internal diversity of Black Lives Matter through a focus on the lived experiences of Black Muslims as they engage with the movement and their unique positioning in relationship with the issues it aims to address. Through attention to the ways that they are rendered doubly liminal and intersectionally impacted as a result of the prevalence of both anti‐Black racism and Islamophobia, police violence as well as faith‐based profiling and surveillance, I examine the fusion of spirituality and protest that informs the worship and activism of my interlocutors, the crafting of protest repertoires that draw upon the legacies of African American freedom struggles and Islamic mandates to social justice for the purposes of resisting, reimagining, and reshaping the marginalization that they experience.

Africa as Tradition in U.S. African American Muslim Identity

Abstract In this article I take up David Scott's “heuristic of tradition” to examine Africa as tradition in African American Muslim identity. First, I explore the structure and narrative of claims made for and to Africa by U.S. African American Muslims. Second, I ask: When U.S. African American Muslims claim an Islamic African past, to whom are they speaking and to what ends? I contend that U.S. African American Muslims find themselves neither Muslim enough to be authoritative to non-Black Muslims nor Muslim enough to be representative of U.S. American Muslims in the U.S. American popular imagination. In this context, I also trace the genealogical claims to an Africa made through hip-hop to demonstrate how a sonic religious lineage recenters U.S. African American Muslims within the broader U.S. Muslim community. Thus, I argue that as tradition, Africa labors against the erasure of the U.S. African American Muslim as legitimately Muslim.

Black Muslim Girls Navigating Multiple Oppositional Binaries Through Literacy and Letter Writing

Writing alongside 12 African American Muslim girls, we led a summer literacy program in an effort to understand how Black Muslim adolescent girls write about their identities and ideas. The 4-week literacy program was designed to engage and support Black Muslim girls, aged 12–17 years old, in reading, writing, and understanding the multiple contexts that inform their worlds. The girls received writing instruction connected to their experiences and identities in an environment that afforded them time to represent their situated worlds of being Black, Muslim, and girls in the United States. In this qualitative inquiry, we investigated the following research question: How would Black Muslim girls write to encourage a future generation to navigate multiple identities? The participants penned letters to a future generation of African American Muslim girls. Drawing upon methods of thematic analysis, we found that themes of sisterhood and unity, shattering misrepresentations, empowerment, strength through faith, knowledge (education), and speaking up and fighting for rights emerged. These themes indicate the messages Muslim girls write are indicative of the multiple identities they navigate and speaks to how they would encourage youth who share their complex racialized-gender religious identities, as well as the need to open the conversation on Black education to center both Black girls and Black Muslim girls.

Breast and Cervical Cancer Screening among US and non US Born African American Muslim Women in New York City.

PurposeHealth disparities related to breast and cervical cancer among African American and African-born Muslim women in the United States have been identified in previous literature. Our study aimed at exploring the breast and cervical screening rates and factors that influence this population's disposition to adhere to cancer screening exams.MethodsMixed methods were used to collect data with African American and African-born Muslim women in New York City. Data were collected from a total of 140 women; among them, 40 participated in four focus groups.FindingsFocus groups revealed nine themes: healthcare practices; lack of knowledge/misconceptions; negative perceptions and fear; time; modesty; role of religion; role of men; role of community; stigma and shame. Among 130 women who reported their cancer screening status, 72.3% of those age 21 and over were adherent to cervical cancer screening; 20.0% never had a Pap test. Among women age 40 and over, 80.2% reported adherence to recommended mammogram; 12.8% never had one. Among women under age 40, 52.2% had their last clinical breast exam (CBE) less than three years ago. Among women age 40 and over, 75.0% were adherent to yearly CBE.ConclusionsWhile rates of screenings were above the national average and higher than expected, specific barriers and facilitators related to religious and health beliefs and attitudes that influence the decision to adhere to screening were revealed. These factors should be further explored and addressed to inform future research and strategies for promoting regular breast and cervical cancer screenings.

Dehistoricizing Islam in Africa

The Walking Qur'an by Rudolph T. Ware III ambitiously takes on African and Islamic studies in a call to make the study of Islam in Africa more central to the two fields that have left it lying in a double margin. By arguing that a series of root metaphors from the tradition suggest an implicit theory of embodied knowledge that constitute an authentic Islam, however, Ware particularizes West African and Muslim forms of religiosity and dehistoricizes present struggles and points of social contention. The resulting narrative appears to legitimate claims made by the religious establishment within Senegal today while making claims to legitimate authority possible among the African American Muslim community.

W.D. Fard and the Unincorporated Margin of South Asian America

This essay proposes an examination of W.D. Fard, the founder of the U.S.-based Nation of Islam, under the aegis of South Asian American literary criticism. While white American adoptions and adaptations of South Asian religious thought have been culturally and theologically validated, parallel innovations in black religious thought, African American Islam in particular, have been dismissed as pathological, uninformed, or spiritually bankrupt, though they involve no more speculation or imagination than white Indophilic movements. The history and writings of the Nation of Islam form a rich body of text for South Asian diasporic studies. Fard's ideas, via Elijah Muhammad, offer a useful way to understand one of the most creative literary negotiations with race in South Asian diasporic literature. And they deserve to be examined and challenged as a discourse that has privileged a geographical relationship between “Hinduism” and South Asia, while relegating “Islam” to some place west (Persia, Arabia, or Central Asia).

The Oxford handbook of American Islam

This Handbook offers an up-to-the-minute analysis of Islam in America by 30 of the best scholars in the field. It covers the initial growth of Islam in the US from the earliest arrivals through the beginnings of African American Islam, as well as the waves of pre- and post-WWII immigrants when Muslims had little sense of religious identity in relation to their American compatriots. Providing basic information about Sunni, Shi‘ite, sectarian and Sufi movements in America, the volume considers the role of ethnic and racial identity in religious formation. Special attention is given to the role and status of women, marriage, and family. The rise of religious and educational institutions, leadership and youth movements, along with the expansion of Islam through outreach in prisons and through volunteerism, have served to give cohesion and a growing sense of what it means to be part of American Islam. The final section of the book deals with the component pieces of contemporary Islam in America such as politics and government, intellectual life and interfaith endeavors. The process of integration and assimilation that has been intensified as a response to 9/11 has brought about a creative response in which Muslims are eager to be Muslim and American at the same time. The volume concludes with elements of Muslim culture that are part of the current creative response to the reality of American Islam, including Islamic dress and fashion, art and architecture, film and filmmaking, health and medicine, politics, and Muslim-Christian relations. Bracketing these articles on integration and assimilation are thorough investigations of both the effects of the war on terror and the continuing Islamophobia that it has engendered, and of the relationship of American Islam to international Islam.

Social norms, dual identities, and national attachment: how the perceived patriotism of group members influences Muslim Americans

ABSTRACTWhat causes individuals to express patriotism? We argue that Americans’ symbolic patriotism stems in part from social influence, with norms in relevant identity groups influencing individuals’ patriotism levels. Given that Americans identify with multiple groups – national, racial, and religious, among others – many groups are potentially influential in this regard. We focus in this article on Muslim Americans, an especially diverse group, conducting an experiment with approximately 450 Muslim Americans from across the USA. We randomly assigned participants to stimuli that portrayed either Muslim Americans or Americans in general as either highly patriotic or unpatriotic. Perceived patriotic norms among Americans and Muslim Americans strongly – and equally – influenced participants’ expressions of patriotism, although unpatriotic norms did not influence participants’ patriotism. In addition, patriotic and unpatriotic norms among fellow national and subgroup members influenced participants’ evaluations of government. As predicted, these norms did not influence intended participation, suggesting that the normative import of symbolic patriotism may be limited. Finally, African-American Muslims, a minority subgroup of this population, were less responsive to Muslim American patriotic norms than were non-African-American Muslims. The results support the conceptualization of patriotism as a social norm and demonstrate the political relevance of Americans’ multiple identities.

Positioning the Testimony of Job Ben Solomon, An Enslaved African American Muslim

Ayyub Ben Suleiman Diallo, better known as Job ben Solomon was among thousands of African Muslims enslaved in America. Job was a son of a high Priest from Senegal. He was kidnapped by his African enemy and sold as a slave in the New World in 1731. He worked on a tobacco plantation in Maryland. He ran away and was captured and imprisoned. Job’s literacy in Arabic attracted the attention of the philanthropist James Oglethorpe who helped to free him. In 1733, Job sailed to England and later returned to Africa. Upon Job’s request, Thomas Bluett wrote Some Memoirs of the Life of Job the Son of Solomon (1734). Allan Austin claims in his book African Muslims in Antebellum America: Transatlantic Stories and Spiritual Struggles (1997) that Job might be considered as the “father of African American Literature”. Muhammad Al-Ahari (2006) states that this account “is perhaps the earliest biography of any African-Americans”. However, William Andrews (1988) with other scholars consider the year of 1760 the appearance of slave narrative as genre. What is more, African Muslim slave narratives have been excluded from African American anthologies. Florence Marfo (2009) in her article entitled “African Muslims in African American Literature” discusses some possible reasons for this omission which mostly relate to the perceived identity of enslaved African American Muslims and the absence of an anti-slavery goal in their narratives. This paper aims to position Job’s testimony in the light of arguments made by the other scholars.

Discursive Construction of African-American Identities and Spirituality: A Comparison of Muslim Hip Hop and 1960s Jazz Avant-Garde

This article analyzes the discourse of social change and African-American spirituality and how these have become intertwined with music as discursive vehicles for identity construction. We first focus on Muslimhiphop.com, a website which features several African-American Muslim artists. Second, we relate the above to the jazz avant-garde of the early 1960s. Islamic hip hop can be considered an alternative to mainstream hip hop and a medium for negotiating a Muslim identity and embracing social change. Similarly, free jazz expression once supported African-American society in establishing its status, beliefs, and rights.

Iqra

In this study, the researcher explores the role of literacy—specifically writing in the lives of adolescent Muslim girls who used writing as a sociopolitical tool when participating in a literacy collaborative grounded in Islamic principles and writing for social change. Previously, researchers have largely focused on the literacies of immigrant adolescent Muslims, leaving African American girls out of scholarly conversations. Employing methods of intertextual analysis grounded within a qualitative study, the researcher examined two questions: (a) What social issues do African American Muslim girls choose to write within broadside poetry? (b) How do these self-selected social issues relate to their identities? Findings show girls most frequently wrote about issues related to (a) war and violence and (b) the abuse, violence, and mistreatment of women and girls. Writing was a means to make sense of and critically shape their multiple identities, including who they are as Muslims, their community, and ethnic and gendered identities.

Mental Health Conference Advances Care for America’s Muslims

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Community NewsFull AccessMental Health Conference Advances Care for America’s MuslimsAaron LevinAaron LevinSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:27 Apr 2015https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2015.5a4AbstractReceipt of an APA SAMHSA Minority Fellowship inspired one Michigan psychiatrist to expand the discussion of the mental health needs of an underserved religious group.Farha Abbasi, M.D., was puzzled by an anomaly she observed during her psychiatry residency at Michigan State University. Michigan has one of the largest Muslim populations in the United States, but she was seeing disproportionately few Muslim patients.“We need to make sure that mental health services are culturally adapted to each community,” Farha Abbasi, M.D., tells conference attendees.Michigan State University“People certainly needed help,” she said in a recent interview, recounting stories she had heard informally of troubled siblings or parents. “The problems were there, but people were not accessing care.”So when Abbasi was awarded an APA Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) Minority Fellowship in 2009, she used it as a stepping stone to address that particular disparity. Abbasi was born and went to medical school in Pakistan, came to the United States in 2000, and finished her residency in 2010. Today she is a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at Michigan State and staff psychiatrist at the university’s student health center.The fellowship “completely turned my life around,” said Abbasi, who credits former Office of Minority and National Affairs Director Annelle Primm, M.D., M.P.H., as a great mentor.“She was generous with her time and gave us a trajectory and guidance,” recalled Abbasi. “I had a vision but I had no idea how to implement it until I had those discussions with her.” The fellowship helped her organize the Muslim Mental Health Conference, an event that has been repeated every year since, most recently in March in Dearborn, Mich. There had been previous similar efforts but they concentrated more on academic research, and Abbasi wanted to focus more on services and community engagement, she said. Doing so meant addressing some familiar obstacles.“There is stigma surrounding mental illness and mental health care generally in the United States, but that is especially marked in faith-based communities of any kind,” she said. “Too often mental illness is seen as spiritual weakness or a failure to pray hard enough.”Attendees at the 7th Annual Muslim Mental Health Conference in Dearborn, Mich., discuss ways to overcome stigma and increase awareness and acceptance of mental illnesses in the American Muslim community, while also expanding access to treatment.Michigan State UniversityYet contemporary concepts of mental health are not historically absent from Islam. Diagnoses like obsessive-compulsive disorder were described in medical literature in the Muslim world before they appeared in the West, said Abbasi. Constructs expressed within the religion as soul or mind or heart have analogues in modern psychological thinking. “So if someone really needs therapy in that religious terminology, it can be easily translated,” she said. Muslim prayer, for instance, includes both physical components and mindfulness. That combination can be understood as reflecting hygienic reasoning incorporating both personal wellness and communal welfare.Complicating her mission was the fact that the Muslim community in the United States is quite diverse. Besides immigrants from many different countries in South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa and their children, there are African-American Muslims, and converts to the religion—all of whom face their own special circumstances that can influence their mental states. Beyond their various geographic origins, immigrants and refugees may have survived violence and trauma in their home countries and then must deal with adjusting to American society.“There may also be intergenerational trauma, as children of immigrants learn to navigate bicultural identities, especially in the face of stereotypes or discrimination,” said Abbasi. “But even with that diversity, conference participants do feel a connection because of the faith we share.”The conference has grown steadily since the first one in 2009.“There is no topic that we have not discussed at some point over those seven years,” she said. “We create a safe zone where people can connect and tell their stories as well as present research.”Abbasi wants to expand her conversation beyond the conference by increasing cultural sensitivity on the part of clinicians. To that end, she is teaching her colleagues about Islam and the cultures of the people who practice it. And she has seen another change: More Muslim students now come into the student health center at MSU, more open to seeking help. ■More information on the Muslim Mental Health Conference can be accessed here. ISSUES NewArchived

Facing Mecca from Prison: Religious Accommodation of Muslim Prisoners Before Holt v. Hobbs

On January 20, 2015, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the Arkansas Department of Correction’s grooming policy restricting a Muslim inmate from growing a half-inch beard violated the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA). The majority decision in Holt v. Hobbs, delivered by Justice Alito, held that the prison’s restriction substantially burdened Abdul Maalik Muhammad’s right to practice his faith – Islam. For Muslim men like Abdul Maalik Muhammad, donning a beard demonstrates piety, and emulation of Islam’s final and foremost messenger, Mohammed.Holt came before the Supreme Court during a moment of rising scholarly interest in the Muslim prison population. The War on Terror has converted American prisons into battlegrounds, pitting prison officials against “radical Islam.” In addition to fear of prisoner radicalization, the Nation of Islam (NOI), an African-American Muslim movement conceived in Detroit in 1930, is still strongly represented in American prisons. Scholars have not only paid little attention to the experience of NOI Muslim inmates, but also, segregated this narrative from the modern legal discourse about Muslim inmates have in the War on Terror era. The decision in Holt provides the ideal juncture to integrate the modern experience of Muslim prisoners with the pioneering strides brought forth by NOI Muslim inmates. This Article highlights the legal challenges and strategies used by incarcerated followers of the NOI and the victories earned: first, gaining judicial recognition of Islam as a religion prison authorities must accommodate; second, establishing that prisoners had standing to sue in federal court under the Civil Rights Act of 1871; and third, netting a range of fundamental religious accommodations that were not peculiar to the NOI, but amenable to Muslims across sectarian lines. Through an analysis of this litigation, this Article also examines the judicial construction of the NOI’s legal identity, impacted heavily by popular representations and misrepresentations of the movement that spiked in the late 1950’s – decades before the recent Holt decision.

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

Waterpipe Smoking among African American Muslims

Waterpipe Smoking among African American Muslims

Uncovered: Two Generations of African American Muslim Parents Speak Out About Education

This article examines the responses of 14 African American Muslim parents, spanning 2 generations, asked what they are looking for when selecting a school for their children and what they want their children to become. Findings suggest that neoliberal ideologies have in some ways shifted parent's educational ethos from a focus on collective goals to a concentration on individual desires. However, racial and spiritual identities emerge as enduring concerns unfettered by generational context or neoliberal ideologies.

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.

The Buddha Abides in Mississippi

The Buddha Abides in Mississippi Mark M. Miller I am a southern Buddhist. No, I don’t mean Sri Lanka’s Theravada Buddhist tradition. I live in Mississippi, the deepest of the Deep South, and I practice Zen Buddhism with a sizeable “Sangha” (congregation) of fellow practitioners across the state. Among the South’s many fascinations is the extent to which we both exceed but also defy our many stereotypes. Even here within the belly of the Bible Belt, a wide variety of spiritual practices—influenced from traditions around the globe—abide in an atmosphere of relative tolerance and mutual respect. A few years ago, I resolved to attend a teaching by Thích Nhất Hạnh, Vietnamese Zen Master and prolific author. As of this writing, Nhất Hạnh is age 87. I found his travel schedule on the website for Plum Village: the “Engaged Buddhism” center he founded in France after his forced exile from Vietnam. (Nhất Hạnh and his followers were too “engaged” in human rights advocacy for the comfort of his home country; Martin Luther King Jr. nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in Vietnam.) As I expected, Nhất Hạnh’s travels that year took him to the usual intellectual centers of the world: Paris, London, Tokyo, San Francisco, New York City, monasteries his followers had founded in California and New York state . . . and Batesville, Mississippi. Batesville, Mississippi? The small, un-remarkable industrial city on the edge of the Mississippi River Delta? As I learned, Nhất Hạnh’s followers had recently established a new monastery and meditation center, named Magnolia Grove, just outside town. Admirers from the greater Memphis region donated 120 acres of rolling, wooded land, which has since become home for monks and nuns from monasteries in Vietnam and France. The cover photo shows the Magnolia Grove lotus pond, in the heart of the growing campus. Along with hundreds of others in 2011, I helped welcome Thầy (Vietnamese for teacher, as he is commonly addressed) on his first visit to Mississippi: a three-day meditation and teaching retreat. This tradition of Zen is intended to be relatively accessible to a Western practitioner: emphasizing affirmation-like chants and engagement with real-world problems, both personal and social. Thầy returned again two years later for another retreat—again attended by hundreds—and today more than thirty monks and nuns reside and practice at Magnolia Grove, Mississippi. At about the same time, a geography graduate student—a Mississippi native and ex-Marine—organized a Zen practice [End Page 93] group at a local yoga studio. (This is the same Hattiesburg studio where I have also attended workshops on Hindu philosophy). This particular lineage of Soto Zen managed to spatially-diffuse its way from Japan to France to New Orleans to four different cities across Mississippi today. We meet twice a week simply to sit together in silent meditation, followed by a chant of the Heart Sutra in Japanese. That’s about it, but the practice has resonated deeply with me and several of my fellow Mississippians; three of us recently took our precepts with a Zen monk (also a native Mississippian) as “Bodhisattvas,” or committed lay practitioners. About once a month we also meet at a center in Starkville, Mississippi or the New Orleans Zen Temple for weekend retreats called “sesshins.” (I believe there is some other university based in Starkville; we tolerate religious diversity here in the South much more readily than intercollegiate football rivalries.) Meanwhile, Mississippi’s devout Muslims meet in perhaps a dozen mosques in large cities and small towns statewide, together with the New Medina African-American Muslim community near Hattiesburg and Jackson’s International Museum of Muslim Cultures. Add into the mix the Hindu Temple in suburban Jackson, the Krishna New Talavana Community in rural south Mississippi, and the Châu Văn Đức Vietnamese Buddhist Temple in Biloxi. Synagogues in Mississippi date to the early 1800s, with active congregations continuing in Jackson, Hattiesburg, and even some smaller communities. Following my Sunday Zen practice, I attend a low-profile, non-denominational Christian church which prioritizes outreach to Hattiesburg...