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Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam is a masterpiece that provides insightful analysis of the intersections among gender, race, and politics in the lives of American Muslim women. It is the first book-length critical work devoted to gender and Islam in America that addresses how white feminism, Islamophobia, and white supremacy affect the ways in which Muslim women negotiate the cultural landscape of the United States. The study covers early African American converts in the Ahmadi community, the Nation of Islam (NOI), the politics of the veil, and Islamic feminism. Drawing on theories of race, gender, representation, and historical memory, Chan-Malik takes us on a critical journey through the American Muslim experience.
In her introduction, Chan-Malik describes “being Muslim” as part of a process of “producing Muslimness as a way of racial, gendered and religious being” (1). These intersections are centered on the experiences of Black American women, alongside immigrants from South Asian, Arab, and other communities. American Islam is a lived religion that involves an “affective insurgency” (15) modeled upon “againstness” (16). This againstness is foundational to understanding the lived realities of American Muslim women. By their very existence, American Muslim women experience struggle, independence, and self-love. For women in the NOI, this self-love appealed to women like Sonja Sanchez, whose poetry wrote “Black women into the creation myth” (9). The formation of new identities among Muslim women are rooted in lived experience, what Chan-Malik describes as a “story of U.S. Muslim women across time, space, and racial difference that allows for more expansive possibilities of affiliation and exchange among vulnerable populations in the...