Being Muslim, Being Black, Being Woman

In addition to experiencing varying degrees of Islamophobia, Black Muslim women continue to endure marginalization within the American Muslim community.

by Khadijah Akeem-Cox

She was proceeding through a Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) drive-through in Washington, D.C. when she, in her own telling, “lightly honked her horn” at the car ahead of her because it was “holding up the line.” She felt justified in her annoyance; the customer in the car in question appeared to be conversing with the fast-food employee even after receiving their food. As a response to her light honk, the woman extended her head out of her car window and yelled, “Fuck you, bitch. Go back to your own country.”

This happened in the late 1990s. My mother only shared it with me many years later, in a casual teatime chat. This belligerent stranger, who my mother identified as an African woman based on her accent, assumed that my Black mother immigrated to the United States from “the East.” Did this woman intentionally look past my mother’s freckled-faced, light-skinned Blackness due to the sight of her khimar (head covering)? Was her utterance an assertion that Islam could not possibly be organic to America—further separating Black Americans from the orientalist construction of “the Muslim world”?¹

Instances like the one recalled by my mother are not atypical; Black Muslim women encounter discrimination within their workplaces, in social settings, and in public. Many Americans still perceive “the Muslim” as a source of fear and as a brown or fair-skinned person who immigrated to the United States.² But this misconception leads to the exclusion of African, African American or Black, and multigenerational Muslims from the Near and Far East, who were born in the United States.

My exposure to Black Americans practicing Islam has come exclusively from personal experiences.³ Black Muslim women rarely made (or make) appearances on television and film, and if they do, fallacious representations usually follow. Yet the practice of Islam by Black Americans is no longer a nascent phenomenon. Prior to the mid-1960s, Black Americans monopolized people’s perception of Islam in the United States.⁴ Although the focal point of who practices or maintains ownership of Islam in America has shifted in the wake of an influx of Arab and South Asian immigration and the events of 9/11, Black American Muslims, and particularly Black women, are still typically consigned to the periphery of understanding and defining “Muslimness.” Black Muslim women have, in turn, actively resisted being positioned on the outskirts of the American ummah by proudly representing their Blackness and “Muslimness” in unison. While resisting racial discrimination, misogynoir, and Islamophobia, Black American Muslim women also contend with being positioned outside the bounds of the greater Muslim community, an Other within the existing “Muslim Other.”⁵ In the face of erasure both within and without the ummah, Black women find themselves repeatedly affirming that they are as authentically Muslim as those born to Muslim parents or from Muslim-majority countries, regardless of their choice to cover, their knowledge of Arabic, and their Blackness. The condition of Black Muslim women’s existence is the struggle of simultaneously embodying three marginal identities.

The Multidimensional Nature of Otherness

Throughout The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B DuBois refers to a ubiquitous veil. This veil represents a barrier that prevents white Americans from acknowledging black people as Americans and as full humans. DuBois’ veil motif takes a material and ideological shape.⁶ In the case of Black Muslim women, the veil has become rather literal. It is worn by Black Muslim women whose outward appearance directly challenges normative images of Islam and “the Muslim woman.” This intersection of Blackness, Islam, and womanhood complicates conventional ways of conceiving racial and religious identities. The Otherness of Black Muslim women stem from their provocative counter-position to, on the one hand, the United States’ white Christian majority population, and, on the other hand, to the American public’s Islamophobia (i.e., its construction of the Muslim Other). Although academic spaces and scholarly works generally understand the Muslim Other as including Black Muslims in the American context, popular media representations of the Muslim Other often fluctuate between the inclusion and exclusion of Black American Muslims.

In “Message to the Grassroots,” Malcolm X astutely asserts, “You don’t catch hell ’cause you’re a Methodist or Baptist. You don’t catch hell because you’re a Democrat or a Republican…and you sure don’t catch hell because you’re an American; because if you were an American, you wouldn’t catch hell. You catch hell because you’re a Black man.” His words remain relevant.⁷ Although he situates the influence of religion and political affiliation in the periphery of discriminatory praxis and only addresses Black men, he offers insight into how and in which order prejudices potentially materialize. In Malcolm’s framing, Blackness acts as a grand unifier. But when thinking of Black Muslim women as an Other within the existing Muslim Other, Blackness presents as an impediment, an unresolved othering agent. Black Muslim women, whose interlocking identities account for their ostracization from both the non-Muslim racial majority and the American Muslim religious minority, catch hell on several fronts.

Building on W. E. B. DuBois’s theory of double consciousness, a handful of scholars have theorized the existence of a triple consciousness, expanding what DuBois describes as the “two-ness” endured by Black men in America to encapsulate race, nationality, and gender.⁸ Most current theorization of triple consciousness, however, fails to consider religion as an identity or identifier that causes as much of an actual and psychological challenge as, say, sexuality. The triple consciousness of Black Muslim women cannot be understood without reckoning with how they navigate a space “otherized” thrice over by the interlocking factors of race, gender, and religion. Furthermore, even if religion is a chosen practice, rather than an inherited attribute, those committed to their religious practice, in this case Black Muslim women, identify with Islam as if it were unalterable—and certainly the American public often perceives “Muslimness” as an unalterable fact.

How is “Muslimness,” and “Otherness” in general, constructed? How do such constructed identities perpetuate marginalization? Since at least Edward Said’s seminal argument in Orientalism, scholars have understood Otherness as an operation of power. It is materialized by a dominating force or party.⁹ Otherness is manufactured to separate and/or alienate those whose practices deviate from the norm; virtually any practice in the United States that does not coincide with the ideologies of the white Christian majority has the potential to be othered. Certain identities avoid this othering by performing non-normative practices which lack historical significance, or which pose a lower risk of challenging, uprooting, and eliminating the status quo. They are thus spared the fate of the Other. Black Muslim women have not been so fortunate. The legacy of American chattel slavery others Blackness, patriarchal forms of governance other women, and U.S. imperial pursuits before and after 9/11 other “Muslimness.” Arshad Ali argues that “being Muslim in the United States is neither about solely race or religion, but rather functions as racialized epistemological otherness—particular bodies, associated with Islam, are deemed less than human.”¹⁰ Blurring the lines between race, ethnicity, and piety, Ali views the identifier of Muslim as a primary marker of “being less than human,” or a denial of proper citizenship. But what happens when outsiders (the American public) see a person’s Blackness first and learn of their Muslimness second?

This question complicates Ali’s argument and begins to show why Black Muslim women are an Other within the existing construction of the Muslim Other. Even if a non-Muslim perceives her Muslimness by laying eyes on her hijab, jilbab, or light red henna still visible on her hands days after an Eid celebration, her Black identity usually overshadows her religious affiliation. Hence why the word Black comes before Muslim, i.e. Black Muslim woman, not Muslim Black woman. It can be argued that this formula still holds for non-Black Muslims, such as Arab or South Asian Muslims, but under the constructed conditions of the Muslim Other that phrasing becomes redundant. The Muslim Other is a foreigner, hailing from a country outside of the United States, usually the so-called “Muslim world” composed of Muslim-majority countries. Therefore, in the United States, an Arab or South Asian Muslim is just a Muslim without the need for a modifier. Thus, the Muslim Other erases ethnic and cultural differences to create a homogenized Muslim identity. Meanwhile, the deep-seated biases of the American Muslim ummah, forged by both state power and customary dissimilarities, reinstate and weaponize those differences by invalidating how Black American Muslims practice Islam.

The Muslim Other thus contributes to the ongoing “racial, ethnic, class, and gender division[s]”¹¹ of the American ummah by restricting religious authority to Muslims of non-Black origins. The Black community has historical roots in the Nation of Islam (NOI) and many Black American Muslims converted to Islam due to its promises of anti-racist justice. However, the radical nature of the NOI and the organization’s conflation of Islamic practices with Black nationalism called into question the religious authenticity and authority of Black American Muslims, even if they broke away from that school of thought or were never affiliated with it. The legacy of the Nation remains fresh in the memory of Black Islam. So long as Islam is viewed as a “foreign” religion, Black American Muslims’ practice of Islam will be second-guessed or over-criticized. Those who inhabit the Muslim Other themselves perpetuate a form of marginalization already imposed on Black Americans. Even the margin contains margins. This liminal space is occupied by Black Muslim women.

Using Sulayman Nyang’s “indigenous-immigrant” framework to describe the American Muslim ummah divide, anthropologist Su’ad Abdul Khabeer attributes the constant questioning of Black American Muslim’s religious authenticity and authority to ethnoreligious hegemony. She argues,

Immigrant Islam is an ethnoreligious hegemony grounded in this cultural capital, which makes the Muslim immigrant a religious and cultural normative ideal in the United States. This hegemonic norm holds internally within the U.S. American Muslim community as well in certain state policies and popular narratives on Islam in the United States that rely on the Muslims-as-immigrant type. This state and media engagement endows further legitimacy on “immigrant” Muslims as Muslims over “indigenous” sisters and brothers.¹²

Black American Muslims do not have access to the cultural capital that Abdul Khabeer asserts as foundational to ethnoreligious hegemony. The Muslim Other, as a western construction that effaces cultural differences between ethnically diverse Muslims and centers the Muslim immigrant as the ideal standard for Islamic practice in the United States, leaves Black American Muslims with a twofold issue. The state’s construction of an ideal or normative Muslim others Black American Muslims, while the Muslims who fit this ideal perpetuate what they see and hear, further delegitimizing the Black American Muslim experience.¹³ In her discussion of South Asians Muslims and the myth of the model minority, Jamillah Karim cites the pertinent question asked by Vijay Prashad: “Since blackness is reviled in the United States, why would an immigrant, of whatever skin color, want to associate with those who are racially oppressed, particularly when the transit into the United States promises the dream of gold and glory?”¹⁴ Why would immigrant or non-Black Muslims challenge the conceptualization of a “model minority” if it means escaping religious persecution and racial oppression? These questions identify a moral quandary facing Arab and South Asian Muslim, and the actions they take to resolve this dilemma determines if they join the ranks of the oppressed or uphold the principles of the oppressor. The quest for “gold and glory” and the investment in the American dream by non-Black Muslims widen the divide between Black American Muslims and those protected by the capricious nature of cultural capital.

As a last avenue to explore Black Muslim women’s otherness, I turn to the Quran and Sunnah. Neither reinforces the position of women as second-class citizens; however, (many) men and their interpretations of both render women as such. McCloud cites Afzular Rahman who asserts that “the basic and fundamental function of a women is to run the home… it is more important for a woman to continue doing her household duties than to participate in collective worship.”¹⁵ Many other men share this sentiment, but it must be established that it is not to be found in any particular set of ayat in the Quran. Amina Wadud argues that “…the Quran does not propose or support a singular role or single definition of a set of roles, exclusively, for each gender across every culture.”¹⁶ In fact, Islamic feminism, “a discourse and a practice” as Margot Badran frames it, relies heavily on the Quran to facilitate egalitarian discussions. While seemingly outdated, these manufactured notions of how Muslim women should exist continue to haunt Muslim women. Between patriarchal misinterpretations of the Quran, ethnoreligious hegemonies, and systemic racism, Black Muslim women find themselves othered within a group of Muslims already othered by mainstream standards.

“How Do I look?” Affirming Identity Through Their Hijab and Bodies

Although their position as an Other within an existing Muslim Other posits Black Muslim women as powerless and inauthentic, they resist these projections by empowering themselves through dress. The fashion choices Black Muslim women make indicate their commitment to Islam and distinguishes them from others.

In “Blackness as a Blueprint of the Muslim Self,” Abdul Khabeer posits that the hijab or headscarf, when worn in a particular style, aids in a process of self-making that counters “the racial and ethnic hegemonies of the contemporary United States.”¹⁷ As Abdul Khabeer’s narrator explains, a Muslim woman “has to pick what kind of hijabi she’ll be.” She must, because “as personal as her choice might seem, it is also a very public one. Her choice will be her first voice in the world.”¹⁸ Black bodies face continued scrutiny rooted in historically oppressive institutions (scientific racism, slavery, de jure segregation, etc.), and this scrutiny is only compounded by Islam. Therefore, when Black women determine their style of hijab, they must contend with the ramifications associated with that choice. Even under the microscope of the public, Black Muslim women cultivate culture, affirm their identities as righteous Muslimahs, and resist othering by producing trendy hip-hop-influenced modest alternatives to the normative fashion often adapted by Muslim women in the greater Muslim ummah.

Abdul Khabeer also decodes the “hoodjab/hoodjabi” style, a fusion of Black cultural elements, hip hop in particular, with the hijab.¹⁹ She provides an illustrative image: a Muslim woman fashioned in a pair of retro Jordan cement threes, a long black and gold Wu-Tang Clan hoodie, skinny pants, and a headscarf tied around a side bun. Many Muslim women who identify as South Asian also embrace the hoodjabi way of covering. While in certain spaces Blackness is reviled, the stylistic choices made by Black Muslim women and non-Muslim Black women create a recognizable attire that non-Black Muslim women adopt and emulate. Abdul Khabeer describes the term ‘hoodjab’ as having a problematic origin involving a Pakistani Muslim woman and her white supervisor, who opined that her style is “hood.” The suburban Pakistani woman’s recognizably Black fashion choices promoted her elder white boss to associate her style with the “hood” (from neighborhood), a term which historically denotes inner city housing projects and/or residences where the population is majority Black. Abdul Khabeer uses this racially charged label, hoodjab/hoodjabi, to formulate the impact and influence of Black Muslim women’s fashion choices on the American Muslim ummah.

Latifah, one of Abdul Khabeer’s interlocutors and a Black American Muslim, reveals in an exchange with Abdul Khabeer that her Arab American friends think that the hoodjab style will result in her damnation because it does not fit the criteria of “proper” hijab.²⁰ The hoodjab style demonstrates how Black Muslim women and others who embody this style inhabit non-normative ways of being and expressing their Muslimness as women. By using their bodies to perform daily acts of resistance through dress, these women affirm the validity of Black Muslim woman’s practice of Islam. Many of Abdul Khabeer’s interlocutors embody this style precisely for its non-normativity. Black Muslim women redefine the criteria of hijab to include their cultural heritage. The hoodjab style demonstrates Black Muslim women’s ability to exhibit modesty, Black culture, hip hop aesthetics, and a chic coolness (a term Abdul Khabeer uses as a metonym for Blackness).

Black Muslim women’s adaptation of hijab are best described by the words of Carolyn Rouse: “Particularly for African American women, hijab authors a new female aesthetic in an environment of negative representations of the black female body…”²¹ While Black Muslim women encounter othering by racial and religious standards, they “author” an entirely disparate and recognizable aesthetic, as we see from Abdul Khabeer’s ethnographic work, that announces their presence within the ummah. Even in their religious pursuits, Black women pioneer cultural production and resolve their position in the margins through the seemingly simple practices of veiling.

Resistance from Within the Margins

Beyond their fashion choices, Black Muslim women have resisted othering through the site of the mosque. Unlike the often fictitious and overstated perceptions of Muslim women as silent and submissive, Black Muslim women, born into Islam or those who converted to the faith, actively find, forge, and facilitate community amongst themselves and the spaces they occupy. As Aminah McCloud observed in her seminal work, African American Islam, Black Muslim women maintain consistent involvement in their mosques by “organizing educational programs, doing good in community activities, attending classes, and praying.”²² The mosque, therefore, becomes a central site for community. This extensive communal engagement is what sociologist Michelle Byng, drawing on Patricia Hill Collins’s matrix of domination framework, deems an effort “to mediate, or resist the oppression of, discrimination through the self-definition and determination, provided by a humanist vision of themselves and others.”²³ In short, the women in her study understood the discrimination they experienced as multifaceted and sought out sisterhood within a Muslim community that shares their identities and ideologies. Byng’s work reveals that Black Muslim women, connected by their experiences of discrimination, center their chosen Muslim community as a space of solace and comfort. An everyday activity like unveiling around friends becomes an act of resistance because within those spaces of transparency and care, they are free from discrimination, othering, or whispers of inauthenticity. McCloud narrates that “…African American Muslim women live in a closed society that is highly charged with rumor, innuendo, envy, love, nurturing, and spirituality. These women strive to overcome the negative in search of the positive—most times.”²⁴ When navigating the precarity of otherness, Black Muslim women’s commitment to sisterhood amongst those who accept their Blackness and Muslimness in concert with each other begins to reconcile their disposition as an Other within the existing construct of Muslim Other.

In her ethnographic work documenting the relationship between a Black Muslim inner-city community and the mosque, Victoria Lee elaborates on the stereotypes that members of the Black Muslim community contend with. Per Lee,

Stereotypes about black Islam circulate among educated elites as well… Common notions include: black Muslim women are hypocritical and promiscuous; they may wear headscarves, but at the first sign of insult, they are prepared to rip them off and engage in fist fights; black Muslim women may attend mosque covered from head to toe, but engage in promiscuous sex; and black Muslim men may attend mosque and refrain from violence during the Jumaah prayer held on Fridays, but are prepared to confront their enemies with a pistol as soon as they exit the mosque. The labeling of the entire community of black Muslims as violent and hypocritical implies that they are not seriously committed to their religion and spirituality, discounts positive effects that mosques may have on the rehabilitation of inner-city communities and their residents, and thus prevents a true understanding of the role of Islam in the inner city.²⁵

Note how so many of these stereotypes center on Black Muslim women’s supposedly improper rebelliousness, thereby stigmatizing as inherently impious any and all resistance to racialized oppression. The spirit of resistance that lives inside Black Muslim women, whether from the remnants of the Black Power Movement, the Combahee River Collective, or the teachings of self-defense by their parents, refuses to allow someone to disregard their Islamic beliefs or their racial identity. So, while it’s an overstatement to say that Black Muslim women are quick to snatch off their hijabs and engage in fist fights, it isn’t hyperbolic to say that many will defend themselves verbally when discriminated against. This response will often be interpreted as aggressive and angry, but such verbal resistance to unfair judgment empowers and reaffirms the self.²⁶ When my mother found herself under attack at a KFC drive-thru, the confrontation ended not with a peaceful de-escalation but with my mother standing her ground against her oppressor, who in that moment happened to be another Black person. Popular stereotypes about Black women ignore the legitimate reasons a Muslim would ever consider removing her hijab and fighting: relentless discrimination and exacerbated othering.

“Every Black woman in America,” writes Audre Lorde, “lives her life somewhere along a wide curve of ancient and unexpressed angers.”²⁷ Lorde confronts anger directly and implores other women to do the same when they experience hatred in its myriad forms. Regardless of where Black (Muslim) women fall on this curve, we must recognize what they grapple with and empathize with how they choose to respond without reproducing reductive stereotypes. Being positioned as an Other within an existing Muslim Other begins to explain just a fraction of some Black Muslim women’s anger, especially when considering they are “fighting with arms, with their bodies and with their tongues.”²⁸

Dismantling Otherness?

What happens when we add Black in front of miriam cooke’s “Muslimwoman”? cooke frames the “Muslimwoman” as a “new primary identity,” where women who practice Islam are bound by their veiled appearance. cooke posits the veil as an inescapable marker of the Muslimwoman that “functions like race.”²⁹ But what happens when this new essentialized identity is dressed in Blackness? We’re left with an Other within an existing Muslim Other. Thus Othering isn’t just a dialectic between binary geographic regions (East and West) or identities (First world/Third world, Black/white, man/woman, gay/straight). Othering should be conceived through a lens that identifies multiple identities existing in concert with or in opposition to one another. Black Muslim women’s othering stems from the world’s inability to comprehend the multiplicity of their identities existing within one body. Therefore, Blackness adds nuance to cooke’s “Muslimwoman.”

Describing a different conceptualization of the “Muslim woman” twelve years prior to miriam cooke’s, McCloud asserts, “If she does not look like a Muslim woman she is not a Muslim woman, even if she prays five times daily, pays zakat, fast during Ramadan, and saves to make hajj. This conception of Muslim women has determined life for many African-American Muslim women for decades, though not all have accommodated this notion in its entirety.”³⁰ Even the Black Muslim women who look the part cannot escape being othered; her identity continues to be threatened by claims of inauthenticity because of the competition between her the complexion of her skin and her testament of faith. The veil or hijab links many Muslim women in a shared struggle, as cooke discerns, but Others who opt out, modify, or reject covering remain a crucial and often obscured part of the American Muslim ummah. Minimizing someone’s Muslimness based on their physical appearance or inability to fluently speak Arabic, which many Black Muslims cannot do, detracts from what it means to be a Muslim. Steadfast in their worship of Allah, Black Muslim women represent a large body of U.S. Muslims who maintain righteousness within their deen akin to any other practicing Muslims, whose appearance typically shields their practice of Islam from being called into question.

What shall be done about Black Muslim women’s otherness? How can the work of current scholarship permeate the lives of the public, various social media platforms, the local news, and/or international news? As Abu Lughod asks, “Is public ethnography a responsible way to repay the debts we incur to those who have given us the privilege of letting us share their lives and worlds to do our ethnographic work?”³¹ I suggest that we expand on this question by adding, how can we as scholars or scholars in training make our work accessible enough to make lasting impacts for the communities we study? Since Aminah McCloud published African American Islam in 1995, where she used the Quran and sociocultural analysis to situate Black Muslim women relative to Black Muslim men and the wider Muslim community, several scholars (Karim, Abdul Khabeer, Chan-Malik, Rouse) have constructed more nuanced analyses of Black Muslim women by considering their narratives alongside discourses of South Asian and Arab Islam, the politics of knowledge production, and hip hop studies. We can begin to mitigate Black Muslim women’s erasure in scholarship and popular culture by continuing to elevate their voices through meaningful ethnographic work, but also reconstructing existing narratives where their influence is not weighed. We cannot erase being othered from people’s minds and memories, but we can seek the truth and dispel myths that perpetuate othering.

Returning to my mother’s uncomfortable encounter with another Black woman, it becomes clear that the process of othering is ongoing and not racially specific. Putting aside the anger and vulgarity of what the woman uttered, she neglected to consider that this is my mother’s country just as much as it is hers. Her failure to understand Islam as an American religion highlights one of the many pedagogical flaws embedded in the dissemination of American history. But her utterance also demonstrates how Muslims must contend with everyday experiences of Islamophobia. In addition to arbitrary moments of Islamophobia, Black Muslim women wrestle with both external and internal sites of racial and gendered contention. Anti-Muslim discrimination and the devaluation of their authenticity cast Black Muslim women in an idiosyncratic semi-citizenship state of being. Although positioned on the fringe of the many communities they belong to, Black Muslim women often conceive provocative ways of being and use both resistance and refusal as their tools.

---

Notes

1. Khimar means head covering. Within the Black community, khimar and hijab are used interchangeably. For the duration of this paper, I use the term hijab, which is often only referred to as a head covering, but it also refers to a Muslim woman’s demeanor or behavior. I typically use the term to refer to head covering and if I am using it as an all-encompassing term, I will clearly state that.

2. Here, I am using Arshad Ali’s notion of the Muslim and the Muslim Other.

3. It was not until my academic pursuits that I saw Black Muslim women discussed in conversation with other members of the Muslim population in the US.

4. See (Abdul Khabeer 2016; Rana 2007; Chan-Malik 2018; Karim 2009). It is my personal choice to always capitalize Black when referring to Black, or African American populaces. While often scholars, some of which I cite, choose to use a lowercase b in the word Black, I acknowledge Black as a proper noun as Kimberlé Crenshaw does. I choose not to capitalize white. In a Columbia Journalism Review article, Mike Laws writes, “For many people, Black reflects a shared sense of identity and community. White carries a different set of meanings; capitalizing the word in this context risks following the lead of white supremacists.” I use this understanding to justify my choice in refraining from capitalizing white when used throughout this essay. I also intentionally use the term “Black” over African American to posit a more inclusive framing that includes those who identify as African American, those who do not, those who hail from other parts of the African diaspora who look Black or choose to identify themselves as Black.

5. Misogynoir, coined by Moya Bailey in 2008, takes the definition of misogyny a step further to denote the particular discrimination and gendered prejudice that Black women encounter.

6. Jerold J Savory, “The Rending of the Veil in W. E. B. Du Bois’s ‘The Souls of Black Folk’,” CLA Journal 15, no. 3 (1972): 334.

7. Malcolm X, “Message to the Grassroots,” transcript of speech delivered at the Northern Negro Grass Roots Leadership Conference, King Solomon Baptist Church, Detroit, Michigan, November 10, 1963, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/speeches-african-american-history/1963-malcolm-x-message-grassroots/.

8. W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folks, (New York: Bantam Books Edition, 1989), 3.

9. Edward Said, Orientalism, (New York: Vintage Books Edition, 1978), 3.

10. Arshad Imtiaz Ali, “The Impossibility of Muslim Citizenship,” Diaspora, Indigenous, and Minority Education, 2.

11. Jamillah Karim, American Muslim Women: Negotiating Race, Class, and Gender within the Ummah (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 11.

12. Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, Muslim Cool: Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 13.

13. Here, I am arguing that the Muslim Other depreciates difference, not inherently those who fall into its categorization.

14. Karim, American Muslim Women, 5.

15. Aminah McCloud, African American Islam (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), 139.

16. Amina Wadud, Quran and Woman (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 8.

17. Abdul Khabeer, Muslim Cool, 114.

18. Ibid., 109.

19. Ibid., 112-114.

20. Ibid., 113.

21. Carolyn Rouse, Engaged Surrender (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 63.

22. McCloud, African American Islam, 158.

23. Michelle Byng, “Mediating Discriminations: Resisting Oppression among African-American Muslim Women,” Social Problems 45, no. 4 (November 1998), 473.

24. McCloud, African American Islam, 159.

25. Victoria Lee, “The mosque and black Islam: Towards an ethnographic study of Islam in the inner city,” Ethnography vol 11, no.1 (March 2010), 147.

26. Byng writes that “resisting oppression empowers the oppressed through self-definition, self-determination, and self-valuation.” See “Mediating Discriminations,” 474.

27. Audre Lorde, “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger,” Sister Insider (US: Crossing Press, 1984), 145.

28. miriam cooke, “The Muslimwoman,” Contemporary Islam 1, no. 2 (July 2007), 148.

29. cooke, “The Muslimwoman,” 147.

30. McCloud, African American Islam, 147.

31. Lila Abu Lughod, “The cross-publics of ethnography: The case of “the Muslimwoman,” Journal of the American Ethnological Society 43, no. 4 (2016), 595.