Engaged Surrender: African American Women and Islam. By Carolyn Moxley Rouse. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Pp. 271. Cloth $50.00; Paper, $19.95.
In this ethnographic work, Carolyn Rouse offers the most complex, important, and human portrait of African-American Muslim women yet written. Rouse, an anthropologist at Princeton, bases her analysis on fieldwork with two Los Angeles-area mosques to which she assigns pseudonyms. During the course of her research in the 1990s, Rouse attended Friday prayers, taught at a local Muslim school, developed informal social networks among many female Muslims, and at times considered converting to Islam herself.
Rouse began her fieldwork hoping to explain why African American females would convert to a way of life and a religion known to be oppressive to women. She writes that, in retrospect, this question emerged not only out of her own personal assumptions about Muslim women, but also out of the biases present in many early feminist critiques of black nationalist movements, including the Nation of Islam. Citing Barbara Sizemore, Paula Giddings, and Doris Witt, among others, she notes the “overwhelmingly negative expositions on patriarchy in American Muslim movements” (5). Attempting to gain a fuller view of African American women’s religiosity, Rouse quickly changed her agenda, seeking to discover “how Islam empowers some and not others, and in what contexts” (17). She concludes that the experiences of African-American Muslim women cannot be neatly described in terms of false consciousness or liberation (19). Instead, she argues, “African American women who convert have ‘surrendered’ to Islam—but ‘surrendered’ in a way that engages their political consciousness and produces not only a spiritual but a social epiphany” (20). According to many of her informants, the rewards of practicing Islam “include the possibility of a more just community and society, more successful interpersonal relationships including marriage, and, most importantly, the knowledge that one is living according to the will of Allah” (9).
Perhaps the greatest strength of Rouse’s book is her portrait of how women use the discourse of Islamic religion, especially its sacred texts, to negotiate their relationships to other women, male Muslim leaders, husbands, mosques, non-Muslim workplaces, and neighborhoods. Women empower themselves, she argues, “by situating a discourse of liberation within the authorized discourse of Islam” (213). This finding is significant, since it shows the importance of feminist exegesis not only among Muslim elites, but also at the grassroots. In fact, the grassroots hermeneutic uncovered by Rouse mirrors a national trend in the academy, where female African-American Muslim scholars like Amina Wadud and Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons have produced readings of Islamic texts and traditions that support a progressive Islamic politics.1 What Rouse does not mention is that this phenomenon is also a global and transnational trend among Muslim women more generally.2 To cite but one germane example, the groundbreaking Qur’anic exegesis by African-American scholar Amina Wadud, whom Rouse cites, was first published in Malaysia, not the United States.
Rouse also emphasizes the variations in Islamic exegesis and praxis among female believers. Her analysis of the hijab, or headscarf, is particularly satisfying in this regard. Using evidence from her interviews and her observations in the field, Rouse offers portraits of women who, despite being members of the same mosques and networks, approach the issue of covering from a number of different angles. Included are “converts in high-skilled professions who do not wear hijab” outside of the mosque, but express and embody their faith in other ways; women who do wear the hijab at work, and who believe that doing so is both a religious requirement and a form of da`wa, or missionizing; and women who wear a face veil as well as a headscarf, and proudly claim their identity as homemakers and mothers, not careerists (206-208). Rouse also discovers that, no matter how conservative or “extreme” a person’s interpretation of Islamic practice is, “ambivalence is part of faith, and it is within this ambivalent space that followers transform and adapt their religion to meet personal challenges” (178). Instead of depicting her subjects as one-dimensional ideal types, she presents them as dynamic human beings who are not certain about how best to live a Muslim life, and who often change their views over time.
The book also offers an important argument about the history of the Nation of Islam. Rouse asserts that there was both change and continuity in the transition from the leadership of Elijah Muhammad to that of his son, W. D. Mohammed, in the middle 1970s. Criticizing the argument of Robert Dannin that the Nation of Islam was anything but spiritual, Rouse asserts that the Nation’s “dialogic critique of Christianity was tied to a politically informed spiritual reawakening” (87).3 The question for Rouse is: what was the nature of the Nation’s political/religious activity and how did it change during the 1970s? She asserts that as W. D. Mohammed eschewed more and more of his father’s separatist visions of Islamic religion, his followers simultaneously preserved much of the “intent and social impulse behind them” (121). Focusing on the use of food in the movement, she explains that “though the Nation of Islam and Sunni Islam differ in ideology, they share a holistic and ritualized approach to life” (114).4
Both groups offered strategies for black community uplift, she argues. But whereas the Nation of Islam attempted to mount a systemic and utopian counterattack against white racist ideology and economic exploitation, the Sunni community “has no reasoned approach to achieve utopian goals beyond personal salvation through religious practice” (104). Rouse’s Sunni informants often cite Islamic religion as the solution to the social, economic, and political problems of black America. Thus, for Rouse, the “African American Sunni community is not a revolutionary movement in the sense of demanding sweeping economic or political reforms” (80). But, she claims, it is a resistance movement in which believers use the symbols, language, and traditions of Islam to critique and subvert racism, sexism, and classism at a local and individual level.
Rouse has identified an important trend among many contemporary Sunni African Americans, who do indeed emphasize the central role of Islamic purity as an engine of social change. But I also think that Rouse goes too far here and misses those efforts among black Sunnis to effect structural change. For example, in addressing poverty, African-American Muslim leader W. D. Mohammed has called on the poor to take responsibility for their own uplift. But he has also recognized that several social factors, including the high price of basic goods, make it difficult for them to escape poverty. In order to alleviate this problem in the 1980s, W. D. Mohammed formed an economic cooperative called the American Muslim Mission Committee to Purchase 100,000 Commodities Plus, and hoped to reduce the cost of living for the poor.
If there is a weakness in the book, it is that Rouse’s generalizations about African-American Sunni Muslims sometimes apply only to her Los Angelino Sunni informants, who are ostensibly associated with the communities of W. D. Mohammed. For example, in analyzing embodied religious practices among post-Nation of Islam Sunnis, she claims that “the Sunni Muslim position on America is a non-confrontational one” (125). One must conclude that she is really discussing only her informants, and not all black Sunni Muslims. African-American Muslims are a diverse lot who belong to dozens of unaffiliated mosques and (trans)national groups. Most of them would probably argue that they follow the Sunnah, or traditions of the Prophet Muhammad. But they also vehemently disagree about what the Sunna means, as they do about the meaning of America. In the end, I would argue, the term “Sunni” has little meaning and analytical value unless carefully defined in reference to specific communities, ideologies, and historical circumstances. While one appreciates Rouse’s commitment to conceal and protect the identities both of her informants and the mosques in which she conducts fieldwork—especially in these days of domestic espionage—one wishes for a bit more information about the intellectual, religious, and communal genealogies with which they are associated.
But these comments are not so much a criticism of Rouse as a call to test her various arguments through further ethnographic and archival study of African-American Muslim women. Rouse is a generous thinker who offers us important questions and the methodological means to answer them. Building on the pioneering research of Aminah McCloud and others, she has produced a milestone in the study of African-American Islam. Her book deserves to be read widely, and should find a place in both undergraduate and graduate courses in religion, anthropology, and African American studies.
Edward E. Curtis, IV , University of North Carolia at Chapel Hill
1. See further Amina Wadud, Qur’an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) and Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons, “Are We Up to the Challenge? The Need for a Radical Re-Ordering of the Islamic Discourse on Women” in Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender and Pluralism, ed. Omid Safi ( Oxford: Oneworld, 2003), 235-248.
2. See Miriam Cooke, Women Claim Islam: Creating Islamic Feminism Through Literature ( New York: Routledge, 2000).
3. Dannin calls the Nation of Islam “cultlike,” contrasting it with normative and orthodox Islamic “religion.” See Robert Dannin, Black Pilgrimage to Islam ( New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 4.
4. For another study of the body in African-American Islam, see Edward E. Curtis IV, “Islamizing the Black Body: Ritual and Power in Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam,” Religion and American Culture 12, no. 2 (Summer 2002): 167-196.