Abstract
Alisa Perkins’ book Muslim American City: Gender and Religion in Metro Detroit (2020) uses critical insights from intimate conversations with Yemeni and Bangladeshi women in Hamtramck, Michigan to resituate debates about Muslim belonging in a multicultural American city. Muslim American City asks, “How have Muslim women engaged civic duties while acting as religious ambassadors and negotiating gender norms across social contexts?” The immigrant women’s narratives responding to this research question reveal that there is no one single story about what it means, or how it feels, to navigate public life as a Muslim American woman. Through a skillful combination of anecdotal and analytical summaries, Perkins draws particular attention to Yemeni and Bangladeshi women’s narratives about embodiment, space and social change to disrupt the dichotomization of democracy, citizenship, and agency into private and public spheres.
Chapters 1 and 2 provide a historical overview of race, gender, and religion in Hamtramck—a city that boasts the largest concentration of Muslim residents in America, and the first municipality to have a majority Muslim city council, despite the large Polish Catholic population. As a growing Muslim metropolitan city, Hamtramck is the perfect landscape from which Perkins’ grounded theory of civic purdah emerges. As social actors whose experiences entangle the interpersonal, municipal, and international meanings of politics, Muslim American City is filled with Muslim women’s stories about making a place for themselves in local high schools, city council meetings, markets, and mosques. Through rigorous ethnographic focus on place, civic purdah, or Perkins’ conceptual framework to describe how Yemeni and Bangladeshi Muslim women symbolically interact with unrelated men in the public sphere, is a feminist approach to gendered inequality and faith-based gender segregation. By emphasizing the various ways Muslim women engage their citizenship rights to space—rather than assuming uncritically that Muslim women are excluded from the public sphere—it centers women’s agency, beyond the binary of its relation to men’s consciousness, control, or perception of them. Elaborated in Chapters 3 and 4, Perkins demonstrates clearly how Yemeni and Bangladeshi civic purdah acknowledges women’s power to actively and intentionally participate in debates about gender segregation as knowers and doers, rather than passive receptacle for religious and cultural oppression. This I think is the most significant original contribution of the book.
The climax of the book in my opinion is Chapter 6, where Perkins’ analysis of the intersection of sound, time, and space is the most seductive. In this chapter, the author’s critical reading of municipal records, newspaper articles, and interviews allows her to elegantly paint a soundscape of the city in 2004, when the al-Islah Islamic Center in Hamtramck, Michigan, set off a contentious controversy by requesting permission to use loudspeakers to broadcast the adhān, or Islamic call to prayer. Using another original concept, this time of ordinance and municipal time, Perkins revisits the hegemonic interpretations of the event, which became internationally notorious as primarily about religious tolerance and Islamophobic sentiment, thereby revealing the residual injury of colonial Christianization woven through Polish Catholic conservative resistance: the Hamtramck council voted unanimously to allow mosques to broadcast the adhān, making it one of the few US cities to officially permit it through specific legislation.
Perhaps without intending to, the strengths and weaknesses of Muslim American City are embedded in the distinct ability of the author to be self-reflexive in her critique of urbanity, modernity, and power. While civic purdah gave Perkins purchase on gendered distance, the author falls short, I would argue, in accounting for racial distance; as a consequence of this shortcoming, ethnic bias and anti-blackness are reproduced throughout the text. In numerous instances throughout the text, for instance, I wondered whether Perkins had or would critique the jokes about class and ethnic distance between women she continuously jotted down as “harmless.” Being in the private spaces of Yemeni girls and women who actively joked and distanced themselves from Bangladeshi women offered ample opportunities for the author to engage in critical reflection on the role of humor in women’s relationships for boundary maintenance. The diverse landscape and soundscape among Hantramck’s immigrant Muslim women are represented with more consensus than conflict, seemingly devoid of aggression whatsoever. This apparent sterilization of women’s interpersonal identities by the author reproduces, I would argue, a single story that masculinizes the performance of aggression carried out to maintain distance. As a result, the public and private divide deconstructed through gender reappears later in Chapter 7, where a brief discussion of queer Muslim women’s experiences ensues. In short then, the intersectional ethnography of race, class, and sexuality invites a critical investigation of voice and violence through the “seemingly harmless” jokes on the one side and also captures Muslim women’s symbolic interaction with unrelated women through civic purdah, albeit through a conflictual framework on the other.
Next, those looking for a critical race or intersectional element will find the text wanting. Through her participation in an ESL course for Muslim immigrants in, Perkins reflects on her intimate interactions with young and old Yemeni and Bangledeshi Muslim women; yet the exclusion of African American Muslim women from such spaces, or Perkins’ lack of desire to include African American Muslim women in a meaningful way, relegates Black Muslim identity to historical background in Chapter 1 and throughout the text. When gendered distance is conflated within a context of linguistic and religious difference, the racialized intersectionality of the Muslim woman in Hamtramck is not adequately analyzed. Is civic purdah incompatible with African American Muslim women’s experiences of public life? This is not fully addressed in the rest of the chapters on LQBTQIA Muslim women’s experiences, creating the impression for this reader the last few chapters were rushed. Understanding how queer and African American Muslim women’s locational and political strategies of citizenship themselves are bound up with not just linguistic, but instead an embodied immigrant experience would be perfect for the author to include in their future projects. The question to pursue would then be: can we understand Muslim identity in Hamtramck as being heterogeneous even if it is not expressed culturally as non-native English fluency?
In summary, Muslim American City explores how, when, and why Muslim women negotiate the meaning of gendered distance from unrelated menfolk through different styles of dress and spatial positioning. For an introductory reader, Perkins’ comparative religion framework provides rich insights into the heterogeneity of the categories of both Muslim (read religion) and woman (read gender) as well as their interaction. Yet this analysis does not fully capture the spectrum of experiences because it does not adequately take into consideration the intersection of religion and gender with race and ethnicity. The main contribution of the text for the reader comes in the rich insights it provides the reader regarding how the agricultural and educational context of Yemeni and Bangladeshi immigrants explodes within urban contexts of racialized segregation and religious secularism.