[Engaging Books is a returning series that features books by various publishers on a given theme, along with an excerpt from each volume. This installment involves a selection from Saqi Books on the theme of art and liturature in Palestine. Other publishers' books will follow on a monthly basis.]
Table of Contents
Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam
By Sylvia Chan-Malik
About the Book
About the Author
Scholarly Praise
In the Media
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
Islamophobia and Racism in America
By Erik Love
About the Book
About the Author
Scholarly Praise
In the Media
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
The Practice of Islam in America: An Introduction
Edited by Edward Curtis IV
About the Book
About the Editor
Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
Muslim Cool: Race, Religion, and Hip-Hop in the United States
By Su’ad Abdul Khabeer
About the Book
About the Editor
Scholarly Praise
In the Media
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam
By Sylvia Chan-Malik
About the Book
For Sylvia Chan-Malik, Muslim womanhood is constructed through everyday and embodied acts of resistance, what she calls affective insurgency. In negotiating the histories of anti-Blackness, U.S. imperialism, and women’s rights of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Being Muslim explores how U.S. Muslim women’s identities are expressions of Islam as both Black protest religion and universal faith tradition. Through archival images, cultural texts, popular media, and interviews, the author maps how communities of American Islam became sites of safety, support, spirituality, and social activism, and how women of color were central to their formation. By accounting for American Islam’s rich histories of mobilization and community, Being Muslim brings insight to the resistance that all Muslim women must engage in the post-9/11 United States.
From the stories that she gathers, Chan-Malik demonstrates the diversity and similarities of Black, Arab, South Asian, Latina, and multiracial Muslim women, and how American understandings of Islam have shifted against the evolution of U.S. white nationalism over the past century. In borrowing from the lineages of Black and women-of-color feminism, Chan-Malik offers us a new vocabulary for U.S. Muslim feminism, one that is as conscious of race, gender, sexuality, and nation, as it is region and religion.
About the Author
Sylvia Chan-Malik is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Women and Gender Studies at Rutgers University. https://womens-studies.rutgers.edu/faculty/core-faculty/571-chan-malik-sylvia
Praise for Being Muslim
“This is a compelling, comprehensive, well-researched yet intimate exploration of intersectionality in the lives of African American Muslim women. … It is clear that Chan-Malik consulted every form of literature available on women engaging Islam. She challenges pervasive notions about who is Muslim and who is not and the wearing of a veil; she also gives readers a glimpse into how black life disrupts prevailing notions of race, ethnicity, gender, and class. Chan-Malik has interrupted the stream of community biographies told through a male lens. An important book.”
—Choice, a publication of the Association of College and Research Libraries
“Rarely does a work of scholarship so seamless and skillfully interweave methods of theory, history, ethnography, and cultural interpretation to elucidate a topic of overarching importance. With rich insight and pristine originality, Sylvia Chan-Malik establishes a new, lasting standard that will redirect future scholarship on race, gender, and transnational Islam. Readers will learn immensely from the rich fruits of such careful and judicious intellectual labor.”
—Sylvester Johnson, Virginia Tech
"This fascinating cultural history of Islam in the United States will surprise readers with its insights and subtleties of argument. By centering the lives, labor, and perspectives of US American Muslim women, and black Muslim women in particular, Chan-Malik makes a powerful case for conceptualizing Islam in the US in terms of its foundational blackness and the religious opposition to racism and sexism."
—Zareena Grewal, author of Islam is a Foreign Country
In the Media
Interview with New Books Network https://newbooksnetwork.com/sylvia-chan-malik-being-muslim-a-cultural-history-of-women-of-color-and-american-islam-nyu-press-2018/
Interview with Black Agenda Report https://www.blackagendareport.com/bar-book-forum-sylvia-chan-maliks-being-muslim
Interview with Classical Ideas podcast http://classicalideaspodcast.libsyn.com/website/ep-86-dr-sylvia-chan-malik-on-being-muslim-a-cultural-history-of-women-of-color-in-american-islam
Additional Information
June 2018
288 Pages
$29 (list price)
Cloth ISBN: 9781479850600
Paper ISBN: 9781479823420
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
(from the Introduction, pp. 1-3)
This is a book about being Muslim. More precisely, this is a book about how women of color, primarily within, but not limited to, the United States, have crafted modes of Muslim being and practice that constitute critical histories of Islamic life and culture in the twentieth-and
twenty-first-century United States. At the same time, this is a book about how women of color have continually shaped Islam’s presence in the nation’s racial and gendered imaginaries during this time and how women and issues of race and gender are essential to understanding Islam’s cultural meanings in the United States. Stated another way, Being Muslim is an exploration of women—primarily Black, but also Asian, Arab, Latino, African diasporic, white, and multiracial—producing Muslim-ness as a way of racial, gendered, and religious being—for example, as both “American” and “global” subjects, as U.S. Muslims, and as part of the ummah, the global community of believers. This book is also an investigation of Islam’s significant historical-cultural presence in the twentieth-and twenty-first-century United States as a religion, political ideology, and racial marker, with a focus on how this has been produced and signified by women.
A series of questions drives its inquiry: How do we tell a story of Islam in the United States that foregrounds the lives, labors, presence, and perspectives of women of color throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? How does a focus on women of color produce alternative narratives of Muslim life and Islam’s historical presence in the United States? How have Black women shaped histories of American Islam, and what are the legacies of their labors? What is the role of race in the formation of U.S. Muslim women’s religious practices and cultural expression, and how have desires for agency and discourses of feminism influenced U.S. Muslim women’s lives? How have Muslim women in the United States engaged questions of social justice and struggles for freedom through Islam? How do race and gender shape modes of religious practice and identity construction? Finally, is it possible—or for that matter, necessary—to articulate a collective experience of being Muslim women in America across time, space, and racial difference? If so, what does this experience tell us? And what is at stake in its telling?
In its response to these queries, Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam presents a series of previously untold or underexplored narratives that explore U.S. Muslim women’s lives, subjectivities, representations, and voices during the last century. In the existing literature on American Islam, men’s voices and perspectives dominate. Further, in the handful of texts addressing U.S. Muslim women’s issues, there is generally a separation between the stories of Black American and non-Black American Muslim women, who are primarily Arab and South Asian American, although not at all exclusively. As a result of such divisions, a number of texts on U.S. Muslim women, perhaps inadvertently, privilege the stories of non-Black Muslim women of Arab and South Asian backgrounds and relay U.S. Muslim subject formation as a process of immigrant Muslims “becoming American.” Such language enacts an erasure of the lives and representations of Black Muslim women (who are already American) and generally relegates their experiences to a separate chapter or section, as opposed to situating them as a central component of Islam’s historical narrative in the United States. In addition, “becoming American” also marginalizes the experiences of many Latina and white female converts, who are also already American.
In Being Muslim, I instead place these varied narratives on a historical continuum and argue that a desire for gender justice as expressed and conceived of by women of color has continually impelled and informed the construction of U.S. Muslim women’s lives. While a number of scholars have noted Islam’s affiliations with movements of Black liberation, antiracism, and anti-imperialism in the United States, few have contextualized Islam in relation to women’s participation in these movements or through desires for gendered agency and freedom as expressed by women of color. Indeed, if as Kimberlé Crenshaw has written, “the experiences of women of color are frequently the product of intersecting patterns of racism and sexism,” and “these experiences tend not to be represented within the discourses of either feminism or antiracism,” this book suggests that Muslim women in the United States have historically mobilized their engagements with Islam and articulated ways of being Muslim as simultaneous correctives to patterns of racism and sexism specifically directed at women of color. Being Muslim seeks to demonstrate how women’s ways of being Muslim and practicing Islam have continually functioned as a rejoinder and critique of the intersecting politics of race, gender, sexuality, class, and religion. By doing so, it reveals how “Black feminism,” “womanism,” and “woman of color feminism”—terms I explore more fully toward the close of this introduction—constitute integral components not only in approaching U.S. Muslim women’s narratives and representations but also in fully narrating the twentieth-and twenty-first-
Century story of Islam in the United States.
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com
Islamophobia and Racism in America
By Erik Love
About the Book
Islamophobia has long been a part of the problem of racism in the United States, and it has only gotten worse in the wake of shocking terror attacks, the ongoing refugee crisis, and calls from public figures like Donald Trump for drastic action. As a result, the number of hate crimes committed against Middle Eastern Americans of all origins and religions have increased, and civil rights advocates struggle to confront this striking reality.
In Islamophobia and Racism in America, Erik Love draws on in-depth interviews with Middle Eastern American advocates. He shows that, rather than using a well-worn civil rights strategy to advance reforms to protect a community affected by racism, many advocates are choosing to bolster universal civil liberties in the United States more generally, believing that these universal protections are reliable and strong enough to deal with social prejudice. In reality, Love reveals, civil rights protections are surprisingly weak, and do not offer enough avenues for justice, change, and community reassurance in the wake of hate crimes, discrimination, and social exclusion.
A unique and timely study, Islamophobia and Racism in America wrestles with the disturbing implications of these findings for the persistence of racism—including Islamophobia—in the twenty-first century. As America becomes a “majority-minority” nation, this strategic shift in American civil rights advocacy signifies challenges in the decades ahead, making Love’s findings essential for anyone interested in the future of universal civil rights in the United States.
About the Author
Erik Love is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania.
https://www.dickinson.edu/site/custom_scripts/dc_faculty_profile_index.php?fac=lovee
Praise for Islamophobia and Racism in America
"As scholars and students grapple with how to understand the role of race in the situation of Muslim Americans, the book provides a dynamic historical account and a forceful argument about race and advocacy that will nourish productive and thoughtful debate among scholars and in the classroom."
—Mobilization
"Islamophobia and Racism offers a necessarily startling and chilling view of the pervasiveness ofIslamophobia and the effectiveness of the state in co-opting and fettering the language of advocacy in the United States...Love's work is effective, insightful, and pulsing with urgency and compassion."
—Mashriq Mahjar Journal
"Poses crucial questions about the future of race and activism in America . . . Through extensive historical and sociological research, Love sets out to map the ecosystem of organizations claiming to speak for Middle Eastern Americans, and interrogates their use (or lack thereof) of race based language, organizing, and advocacy strategies."
—Muftah
"Invaluable for its detailed chronicle of Muslim-American activism and its careful attention to the fascinating complexities, dilemmas, and paradoxes of racial identity."
—Pacific Standard
“Wedding institutional analysis with rigorous empirical research, Love shows how Middle Eastern American political identity was born at the intersection of state policy and societal hostility. Original, timely, and chillingly lucid, this work falls within the best traditions of sociology, critical race theory, and institutional history.”
—Hisham Aidi, author of Rebel Music: Race, Empire and the New Muslim Youth Culture
“In Islamophobia and Racism in America, Erik Love traces the roots and practices of discriminatory images and policies against South Asian, Muslim, Middle Eastern and Sikh communities. Especially in today’s political climate, his book is a necessary reminder that Americans must understand the context in which Islamophobia developed and the role it plays today.”
—Deepa Iyer, author of We Too Sing America
“An important look at the rise of Islamophobia in the United States and the activists who work to fight it.”
—Mehdi Bozorgmehr, author of Backlash 9/11: Middle Eastern and Muslim Americans Respond
In the Media
Pacific Standard https://psmag.com/magazine/blueprint-for-resisting-islamophobic-prejudice
Interview with New Books Network https://newbooksnetwork.com/erik-love-islamophobia-and-racism-in-america-nyu-press-2017/
Interview with “Think” on KERA-FM http://think.kera.org/2017/05/23/islamophobia-in-america/
Additional Information
May 2017
272 Pages
$28 (list price)
Cloth ISBN: 9781479804924
Paper ISBN: 9781479838073
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
(from Chapter 1, pp. 1-5)
Cameron Mohammed was shot in the face because he “looked Muslim.”
On January 3, 2013, Mohammed and his girlfriend were walking to their car in a Wal-Mart parking lot near Tampa, Florida. A man suddenly approached, shouting, “Are you Middle Eastern?” Mohammed, who was raised in Florida and born in Trinidad, simply said no. “Are you Muslim?” Mohammed is Catholic, so again, he said no. The stranger scowled, “Nigger with a white girl.” Suddenly, he pulled out a gas-powered pellet gun and fired at Mohammed’s head, at point-blank range. A hailstorm of pellets lacerated Mohammed’s face and neck. The shooter, a White man named Daniel Quinnell, fled the scene be- fore police arrived. Fortunately, Mohammed recovered, but he needed surgery to remove some of the pellets. A few days after the shooting, Quinnell was captured by police. When an officer informed him that Mohammed was not Muslim, he did not seem to care. “They’re all the same,” he reportedly said.
This hate crime is an example of “Islamophobia,” even though Cameron Mohammed is not Muslim, because the attack was motivated by a desire to harm a Muslim or someone from the Middle East. This shooting bears disturbing similarities to the brutal murder of Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh American who was shot and killed on September 15, 2001. The shooter in that case, also a White man, intended to avenge the 9/11 attacks by, in his words, “shooting some towel-heads.” Dozens of violent attacks like these have been reported in recent years. Sikh Americans have been frequently targeted. Like Cameron Mohammed and Balbir Singh Sodhi, everyone hurt or killed in these attacks were vulnerable to Islamophobia because they “look Muslim”—because of race.
It should go without saying that the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims span the full range of human appearance. There is no way to actually “look Muslim.” Nevertheless, race operates at the very core of Islamophobia. The racial lens through which Americans see the world distorts and conceals the obvious truth that it is basically impossible to accurately determine someone’s religion based solely on their physical appearance. That racial lens is why it is possible to “look Muslim” in America. In other words, there are a set of physical traits and characteristics that can mark someone as “Muslim,” regardless of their actual religion, ethnicity, or nationality. Race is the only way to explain how this is so.
The process by which Islamophobia came to affect anyone who “looks Muslim” is an all-too-familiar process, one that has constantly roiled American life: the social construction of racial categories. Race is what links aspects of physical appearance (facial features, skin tone, attire, hair texture, etc.) to an ascribed social identity such as White, Black, or Asian. In America, as a fact of life, everyone gets ascribed with a racial identity. In today’s America, “Muslim” or “Middle Eastern” is one of the most commonly ascribed racial categories. Most of the time, getting racially ascribed with this identity is quick and easy. But the violence in some Islamophobic hate crimes serves as a reminder that racial identification is not benign.
Quinnell, the shooter in the Wal-Mart parking lot in Florida, saw Cameron Mohammed’s physical features and then placed a racial identity upon him: “Muslim.” At that point, Quinnell had done nothing out of the ordinary; looking at someone and assigning a racial identity based on physical appearance is unavoidable, nearly automatic in America. Racial identity is always there, in every social interaction. Usually it remains in the background—silently understood by everyone. Sometimes, however, race enters the foreground, like when someone makes race the topic of conversation. Sadly, on that January evening, Quinnell’s brazen questioning—“Are you Middle Eastern?”—and the shocking violence that followed it made the usually invisible and automatic process of racial identification all too visible. Race made Cameron Mohammed vulnerable to Islamophobia, as it has so many others.
In the United States, anyone who racially “looks Muslim” is similarly vulnerable to Islamophobia. Many South Asian Americans are Muslim, but many others are Hindu, Sikh, Christian, Buddhist, or have no religion at all. Whatever their ethnic, religious, and cultural heritage, South Asian Americans often get caught up in Islamophobia because of race. Similarly, many Arab Americans are Christian, Jewish, or agnostic, but race exposes them to Islamophobia all the same. Because of race, these communities and many others have been pulled into the swath of Islamophobic discrimination, social exclusion, and violence that has marred American life for decades.
Even as non-Muslims have been directly affected by Islamophobia, there is, of course, no doubt that Muslim Americans and American Islamic institutions have been severely affected by Islamophobia. Slanderous rhetoric about Islamic faith has dramatically increased in intensity in recent years, as politicians and pundits frequently proffer uninformed opinions about Islam and Muslims. Along with the renewed trend in anti-Muslim rhetoric, denial of fundamental civil liberties such as basic religious freedom has been a growing problem across the United States. Mosques have been vandalized and faced protests against their very existence. Moreover, Muslim Americans have suffered the second-largest number of reported hate crimes over the past few years, second only to Jewish Americans, according to official Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) hate crimes statistics.
Somehow, Islamophobia remained largely under the radar until the 2000s. Despite decades of widespread, extremely damaging effects, Islamophobia did not attract a great deal of attention in America until recently. No doubt the new attention is mainly due to the unprecedented scale of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (or, 9/11), which led to an extraordinary surge in Islamophobic hate crimes and discrimination. This led many analysts and scholars to conclude that a “new” wave of specifically anti-Muslim sentiment had appeared in the United States. A great many books and articles have described the challenges facing Muslim American communities and the specifically anti-Muslim components of “post-9/11” Islamophobia. But limiting the discussion of Islamophobia to the “post-9/11” era obscures the long history of ra- cial discrimination affecting Arabs, Muslims, Sikhs, South Asians, and others in the United States. In fact, discrimination that would today be called “post-9/11” Islamophobia has thrived in one form or another in the United States since at least the seventeenth century. Understanding the problems posed by Islamophobia requires not only looking farther back in time than just 2001, but it also means expanding the under- standing of Islamophobia beyond religious and ethnic frameworks. Race must be part of the analysis.
This is because American Islamophobia developed in very much the same ways as all American social structures that involve race. As a form of racism, Islamophobia is built into American institutions. White supremacy and Islamophobia stem from the same root, and they are both burrowed into the foundations of American institutions. Therefore, any effective understanding of Islamophobia must take into account the full scope of American race and racism.
This presents a tremendous challenge, to contextualize Islamophobia as part of a newly salient manifestation of a centuries-long process that classifies people from North Africa and Southwest Asia (i.e., the Middle East) as racially distinct. Explicating this process requires elaborating the co-constituted nature of Islamophobia and the very concept of race itself. Each of these dynamic, overdetermined concepts—race and Islamophobia—is too complex to encapsulate fully in any one study. Despite the challenges and necessary shortcomings of any attempt like this one, there are significant analytic advantages that can only be brought by the endeavor to understand the co-constituted nature of American racism and Islamophobia. Placing Islamophobia into the well-worn context of American racism makes it less anomalous and less mysterious. Racism has always been present in the United States, so it should not surprise us that Islamophobia has roots that extend far deeper in history than 2001. This approach also seeks to apply the tools developed for understanding racial discrimination to the analysis of Islamophobia. Drawing the connections between race and Islamophobia provides, among other insights, the only plausible explanation for why Christians, Sikhs, Hindus, and people of all faiths are vulnerable to Islamophobia. Moreover, shining a light on the intrinsically dehumanizing elements of racism enables an understanding of connections between hate crimes and discriminatory “counterterrorism” policies, both domestically in the United States and globally on the so-called battlefields of the “War on Terror.” All of these flow directly from the same source: Islamophobic racism. Seeing the links between them requires an understanding of how racism is embedded into American social institutions.
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com
The Practice of Islam in America: An Introduction
Edited by Edward Curtis IV
About the Book
Muslims have always been part of the United States, but very little is known about how Muslim Americans practice their religion. How do they pray? What’s it like to go on pilgrimage to Mecca? What rituals accompany the birth of a child, a wedding, or the death of a loved one? What holidays do Muslims celebrate and what charities do they support? How do they learn about the Qur’an?
The Practice of Islam in America introduces readers to the way Islam is lived in the United States, offering vivid portraits of Muslim American life passages, ethical actions, religious holidays, prayer, pilgrimage, and other religious activities. It takes readers into homes, religious congregations, schools, workplaces, cemeteries, restaurants—and all the way to Mecca—to understand the diverse religious practices of Muslim Americans.
Going beyond a theoretical discussion of what Muslims are supposed to do, this volume focuses on what they actually do. As the volume reveals, their religious practices are shaped by their racial and ethnic identity, their gender and sexual orientation, and their sectarian identity, among other social factors. Readers gain practical information about Islamic religion while also coming to understand how the day-to-day realities of American life shape Muslim American practice.
About the Editors
Edward E. Curtis IV is Millennium Chair of the Liberal Arts and Professor of Religious Studies at the IU School of Liberal Arts in Indianapolis. A recipient of Mellon, NEH, Fulbright, and Carnegie fellowships, Curtis is author of Muslims in America: A Short History and editor of the Encyclopedia of Muslim-American History.
https://liberalarts.iupui.edu/about/directory/curtis-iv-edward-e.html
Scholarly Praise for The Practice of Islam in America
“Edward E. Curtis’ The Practice of Islam in America is a must read for anyone who wants to encounter Islam as a living and lived faith. This outstanding collection enables readers to encounter (through description and exemplification) the practice and meaning of daily prayer, fasting, and rituals (including birth, marriage, and death/funeral rituals; and much more.”
—John L. Esposito, University Professor and Professor of Islamic Studies, Georgetown University
“Is every practice inspired by a good-faith commitment to Islam Islamic? From both a thirty thousand foot view, as well as the panoply of Muslim practices on the ground, this book sheds much light on this critical question and will certainly enhance the discussion thereon, both within and without the academy.”
—Sherman A. Jackson, King Faisal Chair of Islamic Thought and Culture, University of Southern California
"Edward E. Curtis’s new book is a groundbreaking collection of innovative essays that provide rich information about the diversity and complexity of Muslim American religious practices in the United States. Fascinating stories about the contemporary religious lives of South Asian American, Arab American, African American, Latino American, and European American Muslims are analyzed in this beautiful volume edited by Curtis, a brilliant historian of Islam in America. Highly recommended for courses and research on religion in America."
—Richard Brent Turner, author of Islam in the African American Experience, Second Edition
“Edward Curtis has established himself as the premier historian of American Islam. In this volume, he brings together twelve scholars who shift the discussion of Islam in America from the question of ‘Americanization,’ identity, and xenophobia to an in-depth examination of religious practice. We are treated to twelve essays from scholars covering topics ranging from prayer and pilgrimage to charity, food consumption, weddings, birth rituals, and funerals. We are treated to an insider’s look at the everyday experiences of Muslim Americans. Highly recommended for students of Islamic Studies, American religion, anthropology, and history.”
—Omid Safi, Duke University
"The practice of Islam in America is often conscious of and sometimes shaped by Islamophobia...For this reason, we are in need of counter-narratives, and the publication of this detailed and diverse description of Muslim life in the United States is especially timely."
—Reading Religion
Additional Information
December 2017
296 pages
$28 (list price)
Cloth ISBN: 9781479882670
Paper ISBN: 9781479804887
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
(from the Introduction, pp. 1-3)
Muslims were practicing Islam on American soil long before the United States declared its independence in 1776. Perhaps the most famous Muslim to set foot in the British North American colonies was Ayuba Suleiman Diallo (1701–1773), better known in U.S. history as Job ben Solomon. “Very constant in his devotions,” according to his biographer Thomas Bluett, Diallo was a highly educated religious leader who was a member of the ruling family of Futa Toro in Senegambia, West Africa. Enslaved in 1730 and brought to Annapolis, Maryland, he was sold to a settler who lived on Kent Island in Chesapeake Bay, where he lived until 1733. At first made to work as a hand in the tobacco fields, Ayuba, or Job, eventually became a cattle herder. “Job would often leave the cattle,” according to Bluett, “and withdraw into the woods to pray.” As a trained imam, or prayer leader, Ayuba would likely try his best to point his body toward Mecca, Arabia, just as other Muslims do when they prostrate their bodies in the direction of Islam’s most important shrine. “But a white boy frequently watched him,” recounted Bluett, “and whilst he was at his devotion would mock him, and throw dirt in his face.”
Bluett said this harassment “very much disturbed Job,” but it did not prevent him from continuing his religious practice. Bluett first discovered that Ayuba was a Muslim when Ayuba “pronounced the words Allah and Mahommed; by which, and his refusing a glass of wine we offered him, we perceived he was a Mahometan [Muslim].” Even though he could not speak English, Ayuba believed, correctly, that invoking the names of Allah, the Arabic word for God, and the Prophet Muhammad, whom Muslims revere as the Messenger of God, would success- fully communicate his identity as a Muslim. Bluett was impressed by the sincere reverence that seemed to accompany Ayuba’s every mention of God’s name: “he showed upon all occasions a singular veneration for the name of God, and never pronounced the word Allah without a peculiar accent and a remarkable pause.” In addition, Ayuba’s refusal to accept the hospitable offer of a glass of wine was a sign of Ayuba’s ethical commit- ment to abstinence from alcoholic beverages. During a 1733 sea voyage to England, Bluett wrote, “we often permitted him to kill our fresh stock that he might eat of it himself; for he eats no flesh, unless he has killed the animal with his own hands, or knows that it has been killed by some Mussulman [Muslim]. He has no scruple about fish; but won’t touch a bit of pork, it being expressly forbidden by their Law.” Bluett was observing Ayuba’s ethical commitments to eating halal, or permissible, meat. Based on Bluett’s description, it seems that Ayuba insisted on following the dietary guidelines of Shari‘a, which Bluett called Islamic “law” but could also be translated as an Islamic “way of life” or “path to salvation.” Once Ayuba had learned English, he and Bluett discussed the Christian belief in the Trinity, the idea that the one God is also three persons: the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. After he “perused it with a great deal of care,” Ayuba declared that his Arabic New Testament contained no men- tion of three gods. For him, God was One, not Three in One.
Ayuba Suleiman Diallo was one of tens of thousands of Muslim Americans who were performing Islamic rituals and following ethical norms outlined in the Shari‘a before the United States became an independent nation in 1776. Today approximately 1 to 2 percent of the U.S. population is Muslim, meaning that there are perhaps 3 to 6 million Muslims in the United States. Their religious traditions have been part of the American experience since the moment that Europeans and Afri- cans arrived in the Western hemisphere, but Muslims have always been religious minorities, and the general public’s knowledge about basic Is- lamic beliefs and practices remains limited. Islam is sometimes seen mainly as a political rather than a religious concern, and it is often associated with controversy rather than curiosity.
This book is driven by the desire to provide clear answers to essential, but basic, questions about how observant Muslim Americans practice Islam: How do they pray? What religious holidays do they celebrate? How do Muslim Americans welcome a child into the world, get married, and bury their dead? What dietary rules do they follow? What kinds of charitable activities do they do? What is it like for American Muslims to go on hajj, the annual religious pilgrimage to Mecca? What role does the Qur’an play in Muslim Americans’ daily lives? Is there anything like religious music or sacred dance in Muslim America?
The book’s contributors, all experts on some aspect of Islam in the United States, take us to homes, religious congregations, schools, work- places, cemeteries, restaurants, the Internet, and all the way to Mecca to see how Muslim American individuals discuss, debate, and implement answers to such questions in their daily lives. Their engaging narratives illuminate what Islam looks like as a lived religion in the United States. Muslim Americans have fashioned a set of religious institutions, ethics, and rituals that would be both familiar and strange to Ayuba Suleiman Diallo. This volume brings that vibrant world of religious practice to life. Points of commonality among Muslim Americans often include a shared love of the Prophet Muhammad and the Qur’an, the seventh-century scripture that he recited. And for many, but certainly not all Muslim Americans, the Shari‘a provides specific guidelines on how to pray, what to eat and wear, how to bury the dead, when to fast, and how to perform the hajj. But even as the majority of Muslim Americans identify with a shared history, sacred texts, and authoritative religious interpretations, Muslim Americans themselves often point out that diversity is built into the religious DNA of Islam. As readers will learn, this diversity applies to questions as basic as “where should Muslims place their hands as they perform their daily prayers?”
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com
Muslim Cool: Race, Religion, and Hip-Hop in the United States
By Su’ad Abdul Khabeer
About the Book
This groundbreaking study of race, religion and popular culture in the 21st century United States focuses on a new concept, “Muslim Cool.” Muslim Cool is a way of being an American Muslim—displayed in ideas, dress, social activism in the ’hood, and in complex relationships to state power. Constructed through hip hop and the performance of Blackness, Muslim Cool is a way of engaging with the Black American experience by both Black and non-Black young Muslims that challenges racist norms in the U.S. as well as dominant ethnic and religious structures within American Muslim communities.
Drawing on over two years of ethnographic research, Su'ad Abdul Khabeer illuminates the ways in which young and multiethnic U.S. Muslims draw on Blackness to construct their identities as Muslims. This is a form of critical Muslim self-making that builds on interconnections and intersections, rather than divisions between “Black” and “Muslim.” Thus, by countering the notion that Blackness and the Muslim experience are fundamentally different, Muslim Cool poses a critical challenge to dominant ideas that Muslims are “foreign” to the United States and puts Blackness at the center of the study of American Islam. Yet Muslim Cool also demonstrates that connections to Blackness made through hip hop are critical and contested—critical because they push back against the pervasive phenomenon of anti-Blackness and contested because questions of race, class, gender, and nationality continue to complicate self-making in the United States.
About the Author
Su’ad Abdul Khabeer is Associate Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies at University of Michigan.
https://lsa.umich.edu/ac/people/faculty/drsuad.html
Praise for Muslim Cool
“The book in sum is an admirable approach to the circulation of Blackness, which few have taken up in the context of Muslims in the United States."
—Sociology of Religion
"Muslim Cool discusses much-neglected topics in the field of Islam in America; Khabeer's discussion of Muslim masculinity in the United States, for instance, is a contribution to a shockingly small bibliography on the topic."
—Mashriq Mahjar Journal
"A skilled ethnographer, [Su'ad Abdul Khabeer] combines her poet's ear and thorough research in prose that flips the script on the anti-Black, anti-Muslim sentiment."
—Ebony
"Where Chance injects spirituality into hip-hop, Muslim Cool injects hip-hop into spirituality. And in doing so, as Abdul-Khabeer’s Muslim Cool-hunting presents, it’s expanding the ways in which black history, culture, and politics get expressed, re-defined, and redeployed into new contexts."
—Popmatters
"Muslim Cool celebrates the spiritual grounding of hip hop and tries to tease apart its complex relationships with race and religion."
—The Atlantic
"Abdul Khabeer explores the rich relationship of hip-hop to Islam in her fascinating new work, Muslim Cool."
—Foreword Reviews
“Because the text stays so close to her teachers’ words and theorizations while working through complex questions regarding power and religious and racial identity, it is accessible to both everyday readers and scholarly circles alike.”
—Religious Studies Review
"A must read for any student of anthropology, religion, migration, or urban studies."
—Choice
"Muslim Cool brilliantly spotlights how Black Muslim youth construct and perform identities that embody indigenous forms of Black cultural production. Equally important, the text shows how these constructions are used to reimagine, reshape, and resist hegemonic and often anti-Black conceptions of Muslim identity. With masterful ethnographic detail, Abdul Khabeer offers a subtle and rich analysis of the complex relationships between race, religion, and state power. This book is a desperately needed intervention within Anthropology, Africana Studies, and Islamic Studies."
—Marc Lamont Hill, author of Beats, Rhymes, and Classroom Life: Hip-Hop Pedagogy and the Politics of Identity
"In times when both Islam and Hip Hop have been constructed as “threats to American civilization” by some, Muslim Cool presents a much-needed, rigorous analysis backed by rich, ethnographic detail to present a far more nuanced and intriguing story—a story that is central to understanding current U.S. racial, religious, and political landscapes. Through Khabeer’s groundbreaking research and carefully crafted narrative and argumentation, we discover the journeys of young Muslims who find, through Hip Hop, a way of being Muslim that helps them challenge anti-Black racism in their everyday lives and interactions with systemic inequalities. Muslim Cool is, as dead prez once rapped, bigger than Hip Hop—it is a must-read for anyone interested in race, religion and culture in contemporary America."
—H. Samy Alim, author of Roc the Mic Right: The Language of Hip Hop Culture
"Offers an account of how Muslims in Chicago feel, think, and act. Fashionistas, hip-hop heads, and activists will recognize this scholarly work as chronicling the edginess of a possible future. Imagine Black Power meets twenty-first century faith-based social justice and cultural organizing. A must read for all those who didn’t know, and even those who do!"
—Junaid Rana, author of Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora
"An intense and novel anthropological approach to the development of the relationship between African American Muslims—the original American face of Islam—and immigrant Muslims and their children. An absolute must-read."
—Aminah Beverly McCloud, DePaul University
In the Media
The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/12/muslim-cool-interview/509234/
Interview with “Word of Mouth” on NHPR https://www.nhpr.org/post/31617-muslim-cool-sweeney-todd-10-minute-writers-workshop#stream/0
Marginalia/LA Review of Books https://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/first-impressions-98-suad-abdul-khabeer-race-religion-muslim-cool/
Additional Information
December 2016
288 pages
$30 (list price)
Cloth ISBN: 9781479872152
Paper ISBN: 9781479894505
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
(from the Introduction, pp. 5-8)
I developed the concept of Muslim Cool through my long-term ethnographic research with young multiethnic Muslims primarily in Chicago, Illinois. I argue that by establishing connections to specific notions of Blackness, my teachers configure a sense of U.S. American Muslim identity that stands as a counterpoint to the hegemonic norms of Whiteness as well as to Arab and South Asian U.S. American com- munities. These connections are critical and contested interventions: critical because they push back against the pervasive phenomenon of anti-Blackness, and contested because questions of race, class, gender, and nationality complicate and trouble Muslim Cool’s relationship to Black identities and cultures.
I make three central arguments in this book. First, I argue that Black- ness is central to the histories, engagements, entanglements, and experi- ences of U.S. American Islam. The term “Blackness” in my work refers both to the histories, traditions, and customs of Black peoples and to the circulating ideas and beliefs about people of African descent. My rendering of Blackness is Diasporic (Hall 1990) and polycultural (Kelley 1999) and as such conceptualizes Blackness as culture and discourse, which relies on and exceeds the body, Black and otherwise.5 I contend that Blackness shapes the individual Muslim experience in the United States and interethnic Muslim relationships as well as the terms of U.S. Muslim engagement with the state. Second, I make a case for the con- tinuing significance of race and Blackness in the contemporary United States. The book focuses on interminority relationships to articulate a narrative of race and racism in the United States that transcends the Black-White binary but also the fallacy of postracialism, which holds that racism, particularly anti-Black racism, is over and that any talk of race is actually counterproductive to the work of antiracism. I identify the ways in which race, and specifically Blackness, is marshaled in the work of antiracism. For Muslim Cool Blackness is a point of opposition to white supremacy that creates solidarities among differently racial- ized and marginalized groups in order to dismantle overarching racial hierarchies. Yet as the stories in this book illustrate, these solidarities are necessarily entangled in the contradictions inherent in Blackness as something that is both desired and devalued. The engagement with Blackness by young U.S. Muslims, Black and non-Black, is informed by long-standing discourses of anti-Blackness as well as the more current cooptation of Blackness in the narratives of U.S. multiculturalism and American exceptionalism. Accordingly, my third central argument is that any analysis of contemporary Blackness must contend both with the ways in which it is used to resist the logics of white supremacy and with its complicity in that supremacy.
A light-skinned Latina, Esperanza hesitated to consider herself Black. She explained by example, “I didn’t grow up eating those foods, I had to learn how to make macaroni and cheese as an adult.” Nevertheless, Progress Theater’s performance was still deeply meaningful to her. This was because Black expressive cultures, both U.S.-based and in the broader African diaspora, shaped her own experiences as a Latina who did not know how to make macaroni and cheese but who grew up on ecstatic evangelical church culture as well as house music and hip hop. Esperanza’s macaroni and cheese learning curve is reflective of the Chi- cago context in which Black is defined as having roots in the U.S. South. However, Blackness, in the discourse and practice of Muslim Cool, and as I use the term in this book, is not limited to Black traditions originat- ing in the continental United States.
For example, as I describe in chapter 2, my teachers contest claims that “music is haram” (forbidden) by placing hip hop in an Afrodia- sporic Islamic genealogy. This genealogy is constructed through historic Africa and its transatlantic diaspora to assert the religious permissibility of Black music. Likewise, the style of head wrapping that I describe in chapter 3 is a practice found outside the United States. Yet Muslim Cool’s relationship to place, specifically the United States, is not inconsequen- tial. When multiethnic U.S. American Muslim women take up the Af- rodiasporic head wrap tradition, this practice must also be interpreted with attention to the specificities of Blackness in the United States. Similarly, when U.S. Muslim hip hop artists travel abroad on the state- sponsored cultural diplomacy trips described in chapter 5, Blackness is entangled in its relationship to U.S. empire. Accordingly, the Blackness engaged in Muslim Cool is Diasporic—linked to the particulars of the Black experience in the United States as well as to questions of Black culture and politics that are in conversation with those of other Blacks elsewhere, particularly in other parts of the Americas.
Muslim Cool is a way of thinking and a way of being Muslim that resists and reconstitutes U.S. racial hierarchies. This push and pull at the core of Muslim Cool is grounded in its relationship to hip hop. Hip hop, as an artistic form—expressed in DJing, emceeing, dance, and graffiti— and as a form of knowledge and cultural production—from ideas and language to fashion and style—is a site of critical contradiction and con- testation. Perceptions of hip hop music and culture range wildly: hip hop is seen variously as deeply mass mediated and commodified and as a quintessential example of an expressive culture of resistance. The “hip hop wars” (Rose 2008) in the mainstream media and within the hip hop community reflect this kind of binary framework, with each side claiming to know what hip hop really is. However, hip hop is a traded commodity and an oppositional culture at the same time. Hip hop epito- mizes what Stuart Hall described as the contradictory nature of Black popular culture: it is simultaneously rooted in the lived experience of the African diaspora and appropriated in ways that are unrecognizable to that lived experience (1998). Importantly, my claim for hip hop’s rooted- ness in the African Diaspora is not a move to mark hip hop as “Black” in an essentializing way that erases, most specifically, the Latin@s, Black and non-Black, who were central to hip hop’s development (Flores 2000; Rivera 2003). Rather it acknowledges hip hop’s grounding in a Diasporic and polycultural Blackness (in which Latinidad is always an interlocu- tor, if not a participant) forged by involuntary and subsequent migra- tions and manifest in the aesthetics privileged in the music and culture (Rose 1994). Moreover, the contestation identified by Hall is not unique to Black popular culture, but it is a defining characteristic of the mass production of Blackness: the proliferation of Black expressive forms de- values Black life as often as it celebrates it.
The contradictions and contestations of hip hop are often depicted through the homonyms “roots” and “routes”: hip hop is rooted in Af- rodiasporic expressive cultures and has traveled on routes far beyond its origins (Gilroy 1993; Peterson 2014).7 To the pair of roots and routes, I add the loop. I take “loop” from the hip hop sampling technique in which a selected piece of music is looped to play over and over as part of the creation of a new piece of music. Whereas roots and routes extend and splinter into multiple pathways, the loop extends and returns, not in a closure but in a cypher, the communal and competitive space in which hip hop culture regenerates and develops.8 The loop is a metaphor for the linkages between Islam, hip hop, and Blackness in the twenty- first century that create Muslim Cool: Islam, as practiced in U.S. Black American communities, shaped hip hop, which in turn shapes young twenty-first-century Black and non-Black U.S. Muslims who return to Blackness and Islam as a way of thinking and a way of being Muslim—as Muslim Cool. Like a looped musical sample defined by sonic repetition and variation, Muslim Cool is a site of critical continuity and change.
Call for Reviews
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