Perspectives from an African American Muslim Woman Feminist

Written by Eisa Nefertari Ulen
From Lee Gutkind’s Creative Nonfiction Living Issue Project, July 2002

I walk with women draped in full-length fabric. We swirl through the delicate smell of incense and oil filling air around the mosque. Even as the mad Manhattan streets overflow with noise, we sisters rustle past the crisp ease of brothers in pressed cotton tunics and loose-fitting pants, past tables of over-garments and woven caps, Arabic books and Islamic tapes. Our scarves flap and wave in bright color or sober earth tones above an Upper East Side sidewalk that is transformed, every Friday, into a bazaar. The sandy souk reborn on asphalt.

Worshippers walk through a stone gate, along a path, and into a room unadorned yet filled with spiritual energy. Women and men lean to remove their shoes where rows of slippers, sandals, heels, and sneakers line the entrance hall. White walls bounce light onto the high ceiling. Men sit in rows along the carpeted floors, shifting in silence as we file past them, up the stairs and to a loft where other women sit and wait. “As salaam u alaikum.” “Wa alaikum as salaam.” “Kaifa halak – how are you, sister?” “Al humdilillah – praise be to God – I am well.”

Soon the Imam’s voice begins to resonate in the hushed rooms. Contemplative quiet focuses communal piety. The cleric speaks in Arabic, then in English, building ideas about a complete way of life. About an hour later, when the Imam concludes, a chanting song, lyrical poetry, calls the Muslims to prayer. We women stand tall, shoulder to shoulder, forming ranks, facing Mecca, kneeling down and then forward in complete submission to Allah, our faces just tapping the prayer rug.

And our ranks are growing. Islam is the second most popular religion in the world, with over one billion Muslims forming a global Ummah that represents about 23% of the world’s population. In virtually every country of Western Europe Islam is now the second religion after Christianity. There are approximately 6 million Muslims in the U.S. today, and about 60% or so are immigrants. About 30% of the remaining American Muslim population are African American, with U.S. born Latinos and Asian Americans making up the 10% difference. There are now more Muslims in the U.S. than Jews, and the numbers of new Shahadas and Muslim immigrants continue to rise. Islam is even changing the way the United States sounds, as the Adhan converges with Church bells, calling Muslims to prayer five times a day. Words of worship are filling the air with Arabic all across America. This country will increasingly need to explore gender, generation, politics, and plurality from an Islamic perspective. The veiled lives of American Muslim women, so often garbled into still passivity, pulsate with social ramifications.

So how will pluralistic America shift and groan under the weight of this new diversity? What happens when uber-girrrl in spiked heels and spiked hair turns the corner on her urban street and peers into the wide eyes of a woman whose face is covered with cloth? What happens when uber-girrrl’s daughter brings home a friend who has two mommies – and one daddy? Under what terms do we launch that dialogue of encounter? Are women who insist on wearing hijab unselfconsciously oppressed; or, are they, particularly in the land that gave birth to wet T-shirt contests, performing daily acts of resistance by covering their hair? In the West, where long blond tresses signify a certain power through sexuality and set the standard for beauty, are veiled women the most daring revolutionaries? In workplaces, where anything less than full assimilation is dismissed, are women who quietly refuse to uncover actually storming the gates for our own liberation? Is liberation possible within the veil? American feminists would do well to engage these and other questions, and, then again, to engage what may seem the easy answers.

I am peering outward, clustered with sisters in scarves. And I am also aligned with women sporting spikes. I am a Muslim woman. I am also a womanist, a feminist rooted in the traditions of Sistah Alice Walker. I run those mad Manhattan streets, contribute my own voice to the cacophony; I also sit in focused silence, shifting space to embrace the presence of my many-hued sisters. I celebrate the sanctity of vari-colored flesh, of difference, that is celebrated in Islam. And I am also an ardent advocate of Black Empowerment, of Uplift, of Pride – I am a Race Woman.

When non-Muslims ask how a progressive womanist sistah like me could convert to Islam, I tell them Muslim women inherited property, participated in public life, divorced their husbands, worked and controlled the money they earned, even fought on the battlefield – 1400 years ago. When Muslims ask how a woman who submits to Allah like me could still be feminist, I tell them the same thing – and add that modern realities too often fall short of the Islamic ideal. The Qur’an was revealed because Arabs were burying their newborn daughters in the sand, because Indians were burning their wives for dowry, because Europeans were keeping closet mistresses in economic servitude, because Africans were mutilating female genitals, and a Chinese word for woman is slave. Obviously, these forms of violence against women continue, very often at the hands of Muslim women and men. The presence of patriarchal, sanctioned assaults against women and girls anywhere in the global Ummah (community) horrifies me, particularly because I recognize these atrocities as anti-Islamic.

Contrary to popular opinion among non-Muslims, The Qur’an rejects the sexist propaganda that Eve is the first sinner who tempted Adam and led him to perdition. Both are held responsible for their exploits in the garden. Muslims believe Islam is the perpetuation –the refinement – of monotheistic religion and admonishes the persecution of people on the basis of gender, race, and class. Non-Muslims often confuse sexist individuals or groups with an entire religious system – and a cross-racial, multicultural swath of the world’s population gets entangled in the inevitable stereotypes.

This political irresponsibility is dangerous especially because Islam is the sustenance more and more women feel they need. Indeed, while American women were publicly calling for more foreplay a few decades ago, Islam sanctioned equal pleasure in spouses’ physical relationship – again, 1400 years ago. Muslim men actually receive Allah’s blessing when they bring their wives to orgasm.

Knowing many Muslim women are cutting their daughters, I celebrate Islam and teach to raise awareness about the culturally manifested, pre-Islamic practice of Female Genital Mutilation, which is falsely considered an Islamic practice worldwide. I feel the same passionate need for widespread truth and empowerment when I read about women across this country knifing their breasts and hips and faces in the name of Western inspired beautification. Fellow feminists too often allow difference to impede a coalition based on these virtual duplications, on this cross-cultural torture. My Muslim sisters too often think feminism is a secular evil that would destroy the very foundations of our faith. This is all a waste. While we allow difference to divide us, women everywhere are steadily slicing into their own flesh – and into the flesh of emergent women around them.

Any concerted efforts to link and liberate on the part of American feminists must proceed from factual knowledge of the veiled “other.” Immigrant Muslim women must begin to align themselves with non-Muslim American women, even as they maintain their deen (religion) and their home culture. Increasing conversion in this country demands U.S. citizens interested in women’s freedom begin to understand why women like myself have chosen Islam.

I became Muslim because The Qur’an made sense, because my mind and spirit connected. Islam is a thinking chick’s religion. Education is more than just a privilege in Islam, it is a demand. Qur’anic exhortations to reflect and understand highlight each Muslim’s duty to increase in knowledge, a key component of this deen, this religion where science, especially, supports a better understanding of spirit. Islam makes no distinction between women and men and access to knowledge, though some men would deny women’s Islamic right to education, just as men in America have historically denied women the opportunity to learn.

The more I think about feminism and Islam, the more compatibility emerges from the dust of difference, and the more potential I see. I want to reconcile the great gulf that all my sisters – American non-Muslims who can’t get past the hijab and American Muslims who can’t get past secularism – see when they peer (usually past) ‘the other.’ I understand my Muslim sisters’ trepidation, because first wave feminism’s relationship with African Americans lacked a cohesion born of acute commitment, and fell victim to white supremacist techniques. Likewise, second wave feminism fell victim to the science of divide and conquer. Daring individuals pushed past division, though. They leaped over the great gulfs system controllers contrived to separate Abolition and Suffrage, Black Power and Women’s Lib, and embraced a decidedly universal freedom. I am still slightly shocked when Muslims and non-Muslims claim I can not be both Muslim and feminist. I am leaping the great abyss dividing submission (to Allah) and resistance (to patriarchy) in this increasingly complex place called America. We must build bridges.

We must build cross-cultural, multi-ethnic bridges. Now, especially now, I ask my African American sistahs to remember our legacy of domestic terrorism, of white sheets streaking by on horseback, of strange fruit, of Black men burned alive, of four little girls. Now, more than ever, we must remember the centuries of domestic terrorism in this country, but we must also remember this: that countless white women were our sisters in fighting the horror and pain their fathers and brothers wrought. We must remember this, too: We must remember the white men appalled by the terrorism of white supremacists, the white men who battled their own souls. We must allow these memories to help form a link connecting non-Muslims with Muslims in the country today. I am asking women to remember today. I am asking you.

I am ready to do this important new work. Islam fuels my momentum. I empower myself when I wash and wrap for prayer. I transform out of a space belonging to big city chaos and into a space conjuring inner peace. I renew. With the ritual Salaat, I generate serenity. I can create and channel strong energy as I pray.

Although I only cover for prayer, I deeply admire women who choose to outwardly manifest their connection to the Divine within. I want more non-Muslims to understand veiled Muslim women and respect them for celebrating Islamic creed, for resisting overwhelming economic forces in this country, for not succumbing to the images captured in high fashion gloss. By living in constant alignment with faith, they challenge the misogynist systems that compel too many Western women and girls to binge, purge, and starve themselves. For these pious sisters, plain cloth is the most meaningful accessory they could ever wear. To me, American Muslim women who choose to cover undeniably act out real life resistance to the hyper-sexualization of girls and women in the West. In the context of consumerist America, women who cover express power of intellect over silhouette, of mind over matter(s of the flesh).

Because I move in non-Muslim circles, I hear too many of my fellow feminists focus on hijab, urging complete unveiling as the key to unleashing an authentic liberation. For them, scarves strangle any movement toward Muslim women’s emancipation. I ask them to just imagine 1400 years – generations – of women moving without bustles, hoops, garters, bustiers, corsets, zippers, pantyhose, buckles, belts, pins, and supertight micro-minis. The way I see it, Western men wear comfortable shoes and slacks while women are pinned, underwired, heeled, and buttoned to psychological death. We American women still strangle ourselves every day we get up and get dressed for work.

Ah, you say – but even in their loose garb, Muslim women are still, so, so… passive. But Muslim women are not silent, not sitting still. We do not require American pity. We take the very best America has to offer. We are moving our bodies. As American women wow the world with unleashed athletic excellence in the WNBA, women’s soccer, bob sledding, and pole vaulting, Muslim American women are running and kicking along that mainstream – in full hijab or not. For Muslim immigrants who hail from nations that denied women access to physical movement, this country has freed them to pilot their own bodies. Many American Muslims are destroying the cultural forces that chained them while remaining true to the essence of Islam.

I remember hearing Sister Ama Shabazz, a bi-racial Muslim educator and lecturer (her mother is Japanese American and her father is African American) urging a large group of Muslim women to take swimming classes and learn CPR to satisfy the Shariah – or Islamic law – not to defy it. (Anecdotes can be so helpful sometimes.) A friend of mine, whose mother immigrated to this country from Columbia, wears long loose clothing to the gym three days a week, then washes to cover and go home. An African American girlfriend of mine rollerblades through her Bedford Stuyvescent neighborhood, full hijab blowing through her own body’s wind.

These women fiercely assert Islam even though they have felt American hands tug at their clothing, especially since 9-11. They are obviously Muslim even though non-Muslims hurl offensive epithets or gestures at them. They do not cower. “It takes a warrior to be a Muslim woman,” says another friend, a New York born and bred Dominican. I agree with her.

Yet there is so much promise in the future: I know two Muslim high school students of mixed Iraqi/Indian heritage who play tennis in traditional whites and have earned black belts in karate. One even coaches the boys’ basketball team. Interestingly, their immigrant mother could not wear blue jeans because her father forbade it. Certainly some men are still using women to assert a political agenda via Islam. I recoil when I see young Muslim girls in full hijab while their brothers skip beside them in shorts and t-shirts. I think about the women I know who cover themselves and their daughters for the wrong reason, and then I remember I know some women who wear push up bras for the same wrong reason: to please men.

We must recognize that the similarities in our oppression as women far outweigh the differences in the ways that oppression manifests. And to do that we must fuse our stories. Like African American women who have fought to wear locks and braids and naturals on the job – or have fought to use relaxers without the ultra-righteous disparaging them as loser sell-outs to the pro-Black cause – Muslim women have had to fight to wear hijab here. For everything from job security to an American passport photo, Muslim women have been asked to uncover. At root, we are all denied our right to represent an authentic self by these predominant cultural and social forces.

The last place we women of all faiths need to suffer the indignity of judgement based solely on outward appearance is in the company of other women. Right now, half of American non-Muslim women encourage other women to be free by being naked, and the other half desperately tries to get women and girls to cover up. Meanwhile, the men simply get dressed in the morning. Likewise, Muslim women who wear hijab are automatically considered unhappy while men who wear turbans and long loose clothing are just considered Muslim.

Non-Muslim women need to stop telling Muslim women their traditional Islamic garb symbolizes oppression. Muslim women need to open themselves to coalitions with women in mini-skirts. Only then will we work successfully toward a world where all women can truly wear what they feel. Ultimately, societies grant men much more freedom in clothing. Perhaps this is the point from which our discussion should launch.

We must begin to think more critically, and honestly, about media representations of all women. While Muslim immigrants need to reconsider the East’s portrayal of American women as loose and wild, feminists need to check their sweeping generalizations about the seemingly inherent violence and suppression the media projects as Islam.

Since the 1970s America has slowly shifted evil empire status from the former Soviet Union to the site of underground power – where black, slick, liquid energy fuels America’s Middle East policy. Americans have been taught to fear the Arab world so that America can easily justify killing Arabs. Images of Middle Eastern men in the state of jihad demonized the people of an entire region. But the only legitimate Islamic war is a war waged in self-defense – the other guy must be the clear aggressor. And the direct translation of jihad is struggle, while the primary focus of that struggle is within. We must remember this as we watch our evening news, as we watch bombs fall from US planes. We must remember this as we vote.

American feminists should not join the Pentagon and media in denigrating veiled women and our faith as archaic, out-of-touch, regressive. This is part of the propaganda of fear America needs to perpetuate in order to maintain world dominance. This country takes the very universal problem of sexism and often presents it as if it were exclusively a Muslim issue, as when non-Muslims degrade Islam for allowing men to marry up to four wives, even as American men practice their own kind of polygamy – via mistresses, madams, and baby’s-mammas. Who are we to judge? After all, while the United States has never had a woman president, Pakistan, Turkey, and Bangladesh – all Muslim countries – have had female heads of state.

Of course, as Jane Smith of the Hartford Seminary says, “I think you’d have to be blind not to see things going on in the Islamic world – and in the name of Islam – that are not Islamic.” Muslim women would do well to remember The Hadith (sayings of Prophet Muhammad) have been interpreted to give men powerful social advantages over women, that there are men, and women complicit in their own oppression, who use Islam as justification for misogyny.

Certainly the 9-11 attacks were not Islamic. Islam means peace. We greet each other with peace. Islam is no more violent than Christianity. Yet there have been American Christian networks formed to throw bombs – at abortion clinics. When have you ever heard the term Christian terrorist? We Americans do not profile white men with crew cuts, but a white man in a crew cut bombed the federal office building in Oklahoma City. Certainly we should not denigrate Christianity – and Christians – because of the few who would use their faith as a justification for violence. Why has it been easy for white Americans to turn on their own darker brothers?

Maybe we simply need to understand each other. Certainly America needs to begin the work necessary to understand Islam. El Hajj Malik El Shabazz said in his letter from Mecca, “America needs to understand Islam, because it is the one religion that erases from its society the race problem.” Back at the Islamic Cultural Center in Manhattan, when the congregational Jummah prayer concludes, chatter fills the once hushed room as women and men prepare to leave. They step off the carpet, slip on their shoes, and the women readjust their hijabs. Vari-colored Indian and Pakistani sisters toss beautifully brilliant cloth sari-style. Olive skinned Arab sisters check the pin securing the cotton scarves underneath their chins. Deep brown African sisters toss oversized lightweight cloth in their handbags, revealing their artfully wrapped gelees. And some women – of all colors and nationalities – take their hijab off completely, now that prayer has ended. This dynamic diversity might just be what the next wave of American feminism needs.

Muslim women and men are active forces in many different struggles, just as Western feminists struggle against misogynist forces. As a Muslim brother of mine once reminded me, race is just a smokescreen. Gender is just a smokescreen. Religion is just a smokescreen. These are tools of the oppressor used to separate and slay as he takes.

We have so much work to do. I chose Islam for the wonder of the word, because I believe in the five pillars of the faith, because I love Allah and justice. I have been blessed to bear witness to women’s realities in what people think of as two different worlds, and I have seen that those realities are essentially the same.

I bear witness to the woman beaten by her lover in the street outside my Brooklyn apartment – and to the woman tied to a Nigerian whipping post. I bear witness to the woman forced to strip to survive in Atlanta – and the woman forced to cover to survive in Afghanistan. I bear witness to the ever-increasing legions of women caught in this country’s prison industrial complex, often because of their associations with husbands and male lovers – and I bear witness to the women struggling against inequity in interpretations of the Shariah in Islamic courtrooms. How do we measure a veiled woman’s pain? Does it weigh more or less than the trauma in a woman’s American eyes? Should we compare, contrast, horror, brutality, the hard smack against a woman’s cheek?

I simply ask that we warrior women, Muslim and non-Muslim, stand shoulder to shoulder, forming ranks, bending forward to carry all our sisters, Muslim and non-Muslim, tapping our collective strength.

1. Statistics on Islam: Jane Smith, Hartford Seminary
2. Muslim female heads-of-state:
Pakistan, 1988, Benazir Bhutto, Prime Minister
Bangladesh, 1991, Begum Khaleda Zia, Prime Minister
Turkey, 1993, Economics Minister Tansu Ciller voted President