All history as reconstruction of the past is of course myth

By Jamillah A. Karim, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs | Vol: 26 | Issue: 2 | Coden: Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Vol. 26, No. 2, August 2006, pp. 225–233 | Year: 2006 | PP: 225-233

[You may view the article as PDF with references To Be Black, Female, And Muslim: A Candid Conversation about Race in the American Ummah]

Abstract

This article analyzes African American Muslims’ experiences of discrimination as they share a common religious community, or ummah, with immigrant Muslims in the United States. Both African Americans and immigrants make up a substantial part of what I refer to as the American ummah. Ideally a symbol of religious unity and solidarity, the ummah in America is marked by ethnic and racial divides. While both African Americans and immigrants contribute to these divides, this article shows how immigrant Muslims enjoy a level of privilege and power over African American Muslims. I demonstrate this through a conversation between three Muslim women: one African American, another Pakistani American, and the third Eritrean American. In this heated discussion, the African American Muslim woman articulates her experiences of racism and discrimination in the American ummah. The way in which the two immigrant women respond only reinforces her sense of exclusion and isolation in contexts in which immigrant Muslims dominate. Her struggles to define and articulate her experiences as black, female, and Muslim position her voice within the broader tradition of black feminist thought and resistance.

Introduction

African Americans constitute a substantial segment of the American ummah (Muslim community). The American cross-section of the global ummah reflects a multiethnic population of African American, Anglo, and Latino converts alongside Arab, Asian, African, and European Muslim immigrants. African Americans represent at least one-third of the American ummah. If numbers do not fully indicate the influence of African American Muslims, names certainly do. The world’s most renowned American Muslim figures have overwhelmingly been African Americans: Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Elijah Muhammad, Louis Farrakhan, and Warith (Wallace) Deen Mohammed. Yet despite the African American contribution to Islam in America, some African American Muslims feel marginalized in the American ummah. Such experiences of exclusion and discrimination contradict the Islamic ideal of ummah, a faith community united across race, ethnicity, class, and gender. In this article, I analyze race relations in the American ummah by highlighting the voices of American Muslim women. I discovered their voices while conducting research on race and class in Muslim communities in urban and suburban Chicago in 2002.

My research focused primarily on relations between African American and South Asian immigrant Muslim communities. As I conducted my research, African American Muslims regularly expressed how immigrants exclude and discriminate against them. On the other hand, South Asian Muslims very rarely referred to negative experiences with African American Muslims. Trends in ethnic mosque attendance shed light on why African American Muslims are more likely to experience exclusion and marginalization. According to an American mosque study conducted in 2000, “sixty-four percent of mosques have one dominant ethnic group. In most cases, this one group is either African American or South Asian”. From this lens, neither African Americans nor South Asian immigrants appear marginalized in the American ummah. Not only do African Americans represent a substantial ethnic Muslim group but also African Americans tend to be the most separate and independent among the three largest American Muslim ethnic groups. Most African American Muslims worship at mosques in which over 90% of the population is African American. When two ethnic groups are equally represented in a mosque, they tend to be a combination of two immigrant groups, Arabs and South Asians, but rarely an African American and immigrant combination.

Based on these trends, it appears that African American Muslims deliberately separate themselves from immigrants. While this is certainly one tendency, limited integration within African American mosques relates to another important trend. Immigrants attend majority African American mosques less than African Americans attend majority immigrant mosques. Many African Americans learn about Islam through immigrant communities and remain linked to those communities whereas South Asian and Arab immigrants, born Muslim, do not have such ties to African American communities. Also, immigrants live in separate neighborhoods and are less likely to go to African American mosques for Islamic resources. Therefore, compared to immigrants, African American Muslims are more likely to attend a mosque in which they represent the minority. As minorities in the mosque, many feel excluded and discriminated against.

Both immigrants and African Americans contribute to divides in the American ummah. Both groups harbor racial and other forms of prejudice towards the other; however, immigrant Muslims have a level of power, authority, and privilege over African American Muslims. This privilege is what distinguishes racism from racial prejudice. Racism is “a system of advantage based on race”. Beverly Tatum uses this definition of racism to highlight the power and privilege that whites enjoy over blacks and other people of color. She boldly asserts that “people of color are not racist because they do not systematically benefit from racism” even though they “can and do have racial prejudices”. As people of color, South Asian and Arab immigrants do not share privilege and power with whites. To gain acceptance among whites, however, many do “participate in antiblack racism”.

As Vijay Prashad explains, “The migrant tunes in to a benign form of racism: an adoption of stereotypes rather than a compassionate look at the enduring forms of racism”. Adopting the dominant culture’s attitudes toward blacks, immigrants resist any association with blacks. South Asian immigrants “came to the United States and denied their ‘blackness’ at least partly out of a desire for class mobility (something, in the main, denied to blacks) and a sense that solidarity with blacks was tantamount to ending one’s dreams of being successful (that is, of being ‘white’)”. Immigrants, therefore, do benefit from race-based power structures by distancing themselves from blacks. They perpetuate racism especially when they fail to “acknowledge its existence”. The way in which immigrant Muslims speak less about racial discrimination compared to African American Muslims, and in certain cases refuse to acknowledge racism, indicates immigrant Muslim privilege.

A Conversation at Nur’s House

In this article, I analyze dynamics of race and privilege in the American ummah through the voices of three Muslim women: one African American, another Pakistani American, and the other Eritrean American. I vividly present their voices to challenge studies that portray Muslim women through the eyes of others, casting them as oppressed, silent, and homogeneous. I use the ethnographic technique of “methods from the margins”, an approach that allows groups underrepresented in scholarship “to create knowledge” through their own words. My identity as an African American Muslim woman facilitated my access into the “margins” or private spaces in which American Muslim women share their voices candidly and genuinely. In the privacy of a woman’s home, I witnessed the most straightforward discussion on race in the American ummah.

The conversation took place at the home of Nur, an Eritrean woman (age 29) whom I met at the Islamic Center of Greater Chicago (ICGC). Every Tuesday women from diverse ethnic backgrounds meet at Nur’s condo on Chicago’s North Side to take Arabic lessons from her—three of them Puerto Rican, one African American (Melanie, age 30), and one Pakistani (Tasneem, age 35), all of whom live nearby Nur. In Nur’s plush living room, I sat with her, Melanie, and Tasneem after an Arabic class. For over an hour, we talked about various topics, discrimination against Muslims post-9/11 dominating the conversation. While the women expressed distinct perspectives, they generally shared common sentiments. But their relative accord changed when I moved the conversation more toward my research interest on race relations in the American ummah. I asked Melanie if she felt comfortable attending ICGC, the majority South Asian mosque where I met Nur. She responded by saying that the women at ICGC “are welcoming, but at the same time, it is always like, ‘Well, but you are black.’” Feeling this expressive yet nonverbal discrimination, she prefers a predominantly African American mosque on the same side of town, and only attends ICGC in Ramadan when, as she stated, “I know more African Americans will be there”.

After hearing Melanie articulate her choice to leave ICGC for a majority African American mosque, both Nur and Tasneem felt that Melanie was wrongfully self-segregating herself, only furthering the divides in the ummah. A heated debate followed in which Melanie defended herself against the others, explaining why she has the right to choose an African American worship space. Their debate, which I analyze below, illustrates how divides in the American ummah not only have to do with race but also differences in income, ethnic history, and cultural practice that characterize multiple ethnic groups. I present these complexities through four key themes: race and class discrimination, African American autonomy, cultural difference, and multiple oppressions.

Race and Class Discrimination

“I hate to say this but even though we are all Muslim sisters, once we leave out this door and we go out into this society, I’m going to be treated differently from you. Not because, ‘Oh, you’re prettier, or you’re wealthier, or you’re kinder,’ but because I strike them as an African American person, plain and simple”, Melanie told Nur and Tasneem. Although all three of the women identify with the struggle to resist white supremacy and color hierarchy, Melanie privileges the race oppression of African Americans. Part of her rationale for doing so is her experience within the ummah. Melanie continues to experience the race oppression that she feels in the larger society, but in the context of the ummah, she feels it from other people of color and other Muslims. “I’m seen as an African American before I’m seen as a Muslim American. I’m seen as an African American, then a woman, then a Muslim, for whatever reasons or prejudices other people have”. Her comments indicate her expectation that other Muslims would embrace her on account of shared Muslim identity in the ummah. But instead she experiences how her color, and her gender, prevent or diminish an ummah connection.

Melanie’s negative encounters with immigrant Muslims mirror relations between African Americans and immigrants in the broader society. Different attitudes about power and success often separate African Americans and immigrants, including black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean. For example, immigrants, non-Muslim and Muslim, tend to emphasize the idea that it only requires hard work to become financially successful in America. Many immigrants recognize that African Americans suffered injustices in the past, but do not see them as affected by racism in the present. Even compared to progressive white Americans, immigrants tend to be less sympathetic to current race–class struggles and disparities reflected in African American communities.

By discounting African American struggle, immigrants downplay the systemic affects of anti-black racism and downplay immigrant privilege. Yet this privilege is evident. The incredible success of South Asian immigrants, for example, reflects immigration policies that favor highly educated immigrants and an American capitalistic ethos that affords high income groups the privilege of whiteness, therefore, acceptance. Indeed, some South Asians “are often treated or classified as white”. The class disparities between African Americans and South Asians reflect in income and residence: African Americans have the lowest median household income ($33,500) compared to Asians ($64,000), Hispanics ($37,600) and whites ($52,000), according to a State University of New York at Albany report, and “Asian Indians are the least residentially-clustered (that is, the least segregated from whites) in several studies”. South Asian immigrant success does not mean that South Asians are not discriminated against. South Asian immigrants, like African Americans, have also suffered the frustrations of trying to fit in a society where “Anglo-English-Protestant” standards dominate. However, at the same time that South Asian immigrants resist racial categories that position them “as ‘not white,’” they sustain “antiblack and Latino racism” as they seek inclusion in the larger society.

The income disparities between African Americans and immigrants even appear in the case of black immigrants. The same study that reported African Americans with a median income of $33,500 reported Afro-Caribbeans with a higher median income of $40,000. Other studies indicate difference and distance between native blacks and immigrant blacks. For example, Caribbean immigrants, while identifying as black, oppose the label “African American”. Many West Indian immigrants do not identify with African American struggle and, like many non-black immigrants, criticize African Americans for overemphasizing race. This gap between native and immigrant blacks became apparent in the dialogue between Nur and Melanie. Nur, for example, did not relate to Melanie’s experiences of racism. In turn, Melanie passionately described, with great disapproval and dismay, their very distinct experiences as blacks in the US:

When people see us [referring to herself and Nur] covered in hijab (hair covering), they see two dark-skinned [Muslim] sisters. But once they ask where we are from, once they speak to us and sit down and share time, they see different ways we prepare our food and other distinctions still. And they treat me differently than they treat you.

Despite their common complexion, Melanie believes that other Muslims respect Nur as a fellow Muslim because of her Eritrean background. On the other hand, she believes that due to her distinctly African American identity, fellow Muslims “look down” upon her, “in this country and around the world”. In other words, Melanie asserts that immigrant identity, African and South Asian, is privileged over African American identity, verified by the exclusion and discrimination that she experiences from South Asian Muslim women at her local mosque.

African American Autonomy

Tasneem (originally from Pakistan) responded to Melanie by defending “the Pakistanis and Indians” at the mosque: “A lot of them don’t speak because they don’t know English, okay. I think your feelings have to do with perception. You perceive that you are going to be discriminated against”. But Melanie refused to let Tasneem dismiss her real experiences as false consciousness. “You can only look at it from the outside”, she responded to Tasneem. “You can never know what it is like to be an African American and walk into a masjid [mosque] and all the sisters there are fair-skinned”. She described the way the other women treat her. “It is in the way people very subtly shun me, or cut me off when I’m speaking, or don’t speak, or speak and move away, or don’t make any further attempts to converse. It is little things like that”. But Nur dismissed Melanie’s feelings as well and exclaimed, “Wal-lahi (by God)! If you don’t go to ICGC [Islamic Center of Greater Chicago] because you don’t think people are going to accept you, that shows me you are weak”.

The fact that the other two women failed to sympathize with Melanie’s experiences indicates a level of privilege that permits them to downplay the psychological damage of anti-black racism. The privilege of not having to see race or racism in the ummah came across most vividly when, after Melanie kept insisting on her negative experiences as an African American, Tasneem asked, “Why do you have to live like that? Why can’t you just live as a Muslim?” Yet Melanie and other African American Muslims argue that it is not their choice to be constantly reminded of their race. Rather, living in a racialized society and a racialized ummah does not permit them to be just Muslim.

Historically African Americans have responded to race oppression in multiple ways. One way is to remove themselves, if possible, from the people and institutions that discriminate against them. Melanie describes why African American autonomy becomes necessary:

If I am in an environment where the people constantly infer that my education level isn’t what it should be, or I don’t live in the right neighborhood and don’t earn enough money, or I’m not doing whatever specific profession, it will have an effect on me. It will make me more conscious of who is around me and that even though we are Muslim sisters, there are still barriers that come in between us.

Melanie does not desire to isolate or segregate herself from South Asian women; rather it is the lack of acceptance among these women that forces her to do so.

African American Muslim autonomy, however, does not always reflect response to immigrant racism and exclusion. It also reflects African American Muslims’ unique history as American converts who embrace Islam because it facilitates spiritual and political aspirations to bring dignity, economic strength, and progress to African American communities. Not only does Islam enhance their lives, but African Americans contribute a new cultural tradition to Islam, further diversifying the global Muslim ummah. They have developed distinctly African American cultural expressions of Islam in their thought, practice, and dress. Many choose to pray in African American mosques, not because they feel excluded from immigrant mosques, but because they prefer a space that radiates distinctly African American Muslim heritage.

Cultural Difference

At one point in the dialogue, as if she had lost all patience with Melanie, Tasneem said, “Melanie, I’m sorry, but I think a lot [of your negative experience] has to do with your personality. If you walk in with a really bad attitude, I don’t care what color your skin is, I don’t care what you look like, you are going to put people off. It’s the loudness. It’s the affirmativeness”. The antagonism penetrated everyone and everything in the room. I had to speak. “I have a question. Would you [Tasneem] recognize that her experience is that Pakistanis discriminate against African Americans?” But Tasneem dodged the point of my question, describing how Pakistanis even discriminate against each other. “I mean, the Karachi people are going to view the Lahore people as being different. They don’t like each other”.

Tasneem emphasizes cultural difference even among South Asians and, as a result, alludes to the way in which different cultural practices of Islam, or ritual, cause tension between Muslims. Like Melanie, African American Muslim women who occasionally worship at immigrant mosques commonly refer to how South Asian women do not speak to them or stand close to them in the prayer line. Tasneem, however, noted that South Asian women do the same thing to her, making the point that interethnic Muslim interaction is not all about race, black and white, as Melanie perceives it to be. Tasneem and many other South Asian women have argued that this behavior has nothing to do with race: South Asian women are not accustomed to praying in tight lines.

Many South Asian women do not know the value of this etiquette because they are not accustomed to congregational prayer in the mosque, usually praying at home in their native Muslim lands. Also, most South Asian women follow the Hanafi madhhab (legal school) which dictates that a group of women not pray in congregation unless following an imam (prayer leader). Therefore, praying individually, these women are not used to praying close to other women even in the privacy of their homes. Therefore, ritual differences emerge from both the diversity of madhhabs and cultural norms imagined to be obligatory yet have no basis in Islamic law.

Multiple Oppressions

The debate finally cooled down, but only because Tasneem had to leave. She apologized to Melanie if she had offended her or misunderstood her. Melanie replied with what appeared to be a departing soliloquy:

People get upset with me because I defend my right to be heard, to be able to speak freely, to be able to be seen as a woman, as pretty and feminine and not slutty and just poor and black and nasty. People are afraid of me because I encapsulate everything that the world overall is unhappy and afraid of. They are afraid of femininity, the power of being a woman. People are afraid of African American people. They are afraid of people of my descent, whether it be Ethiopian, African American, South African, Nigerian, Ghanaian, or whatever. And people are afraid of Muslim people. That’s why I’m treated the way I’m treated wherever I go, whatever masjid, whatever city, whatever grocery store, period.

Her words demonstrate how American Muslim women experience multiple and overlapping layers of discrimination. Though Melanie emphasizes a unique and unrivalled form of racism experienced by African Americans, she also acknowledges other sites of oppression. These multiple sites move Melanie from a discourse of difference as an African American to a discourse of common struggle in which Melanie’s identity intersects with Tasneem’s and Nur’s. With Nur, Melanie shares African heritage. With both Nur and Tasneem, Melanie shares gender and Muslim identity.

Yet, these overlapping sites of injustice can reinforce a sense of difference between African Americans and immigrants when the extent of oppression varies between groups. Earlier in the conversation, when Tasneem had talked about the new post-9/11 policies that violate the civil liberties of immigrants and Muslims, Melanie responded, “My thing is that this has always existed. And now I have a double whammy. I’m African American and I’m Muslim. So now it’s like, ‘We really don’t like you now.’” Melanie meant that African Americans have always had to fear and fight for their civil rights. Again and again, Melanie referred to the multiple identities that make her especially vulnerable to insult and bigotry. “I’m black. I’m in hijab. I’m big”, she said another time. All three women wear hijab, and therefore all three relate to the negative stereotypes associated with visible female Muslim identity. Nonetheless, Melanie makes a concerted effort to remind Nur and Tasneem that her race further complicates her gender struggles.

Conclusion

Melanie’s debate with Tasneem and Nur demonstrates that differences between African American and immigrant Muslims are not as simple as black and white. Class, culture, and ethnic history also explain divides and gaps in the American ummah. Even so, race discrimination stands paramount, certainly for Melanie, but also for many other African Americans in the American ummah. Although racism cannot explain every case of intra-ummah ethnic difference, the salience of race in narratives like Melanie’s indicates the persistence of a race-informed outlook among African Americans. In other words, as important as it is to understand how intra-ummah relations are not restricted to race, it is also important to present the voices of Muslim women affected by race. As Melanie declared, she has the “right to be heard, to be able to speak freely, to be able to be seen as a woman, as pretty and feminine”.

Melanie’s determination to express her voice places her within the tradition of black feminist struggle: a struggle marked by the overlap of race and gender oppression. Because African American women have been systematically defined and distorted through negative images, made sexually visible yet “invisible as … fully human individual[s]”, it becomes imperative that they “find a self-defined voice”. For this reason, Deborah King theorizes that black feminist thought “first and foremost … declares the visibility of black women” and second, “asserts self-determination as essential”. But defining voice also demands a space in which black women can “speak freely”. As Patricia Collins writes, “This realm of relatively safe discourse, however narrow, is a necessary condition for Black women’s resistance”. One of the most powerful safe spaces in which African American women make “efforts to find a voice” has been in the context of “Black women’s relationships with one another … As mothers, daughters, sisters, and friends to one another, African-American women affirm one another”.

Melanie assumed this safe space with women whom she shared Muslim female identity. The women had been developing a sense of connection for the past several weeks. Meeting in Nur’s home, the women cherished the opportunity to learn the language of the Qur’an from a female teacher in a female-centered space. The women’s provocative discussion demonstrates the power of this female-exclusive space. Only in the private spaces of the ummah could women of diverse ethnic backgrounds speak so powerfully about their experiences. Only in private space could women speak of such sensitive matters, not only about race but also about gender, boldly critiquing injustices in the ummah. Only in women’s private space could Melanie have demanded that she not be stereotyped as “slutty” just because she is black and female.

However, when Melanie realized that the other women did not support her, she maintained the struggle to define her voice, a struggle that requires “considerable inner strength”. But Melanie’s strength made this private moment of conversation too powerful. After my visit, Nur refused to answer Melanie’s calls. The safe space of Nur’s home was not sustained. This compelled Melanie to abandon efforts to learn and worship with immigrant women in private ummah spaces as she felt similarly compelled to do so in public ummah spaces, i.e., her choice to leave an immigrant mosque for an African American one.

Melanie’s choice to leave ICGC for an African American mosque allows us “to discover and appreciate the ways in which black women are not victims”, which is a critical objective of black feminist scholarship. Rather “a black feminist ideology presumes an image of black women as powerful, independent subjects”. As such, “Black women are empowered with the right to interpret our reality and define our objectives”. Melanie interprets her reality as one in which racism in the larger society reaches into the American ummah. As in the larger society, Melanie refuses to become the victim of race hierarchies privileging one group over the other. Her resistance and voice represent the enduring legacy of black feminist struggle, except now this struggle extends into the ummah. African American Muslim women’s voices and experiences are vast and diverse. Melanie’s stirring words reflect one important expression of what it means to be black, female, and Muslim.