Abstract
Much research on women’s religious participation centers on their abilities to act within constricted institutional spaces. Drawing on five years of ethnographic fieldwork, this study analyzes how African American Muslim women use the mosque as a physical space to enact public performances of religious identity. By occupying, protecting, and appropriating spaces in the mosque for meaningfully gender-specific ways of engaging Islam, the women further a project of religious self-making that bonds African American Muslim women together. In their maneuverings of different forms of physical space as a sisterhood, the women enable themselves to resist gender, economic, and racial oppression. This study reveals that even within men-dominated religious organizations with limited symbolic and material spaces for women, women participants successfully exert agency over their own religious experiences.
African American women’s participation in men-dominated religious organizations seems to represent a classic paradox of contemporary religious life. Within the popular institution of the Black church, women fill the pews but rarely stand at the pulpits; they serve as “footsoldiers” for clergymen whose concerns often privilege the interests of men over women (Harris 1999), and they appear hesitant to accept women as religious authorities (Putnam and Campbell 2010). The passionate commitment of African American women to the Black church has undoubtedly benefited the African American community at large (Carpenter 2003; Gilkes 2001; Higginbotham 1993), but this participation may come at the expense of Black women’s gendered interests (Collins 2000, 2004; Grant 1982; Williams 1993). Even the most sensitive portrayals of church involvement among African American women recognize that the presence and commitment of women to the church reflects some “acceptance of male-centered theologies of female subordination” (Frederick 2003, 4).
For African American Muslim women who participate in the mosque, the obstacles may be more cumbersome. They face institutionalized forms of patriarchy as well as find themselves fewer in number than their men counterparts (Bartkowski and Read 2003; Harris 1999; Lincoln and Mamiya 1990). Along with Orthodox Judaism, Islam is one of the only global religious traditions in which men regularly attend worship services in far greater numbers than women (Sullins 2006). For this reason, Sullins argues, Muslim men are more religious than Muslim women, despite Muslim women worldwide reporting higher measures of religiosity (Sullins 2006, 845). Institutionalized gender segregation as well as the exclusion of women from leadership roles contributes to public perceptions of Islam as an innately patriarchal religion that suppresses women’s interests (Haddad, Smith, and Moore 2006; Inglehart and Norris 2003; Korteweg 2008; Ong 1995). As Mahmood so eloquently explains, any study of “Muslim women” must at some point engage with “all the assumptions this dubious signifier triggers in the Western imagination concerning Islam’s patriarchal and misogynist qualities” (Mahmood 2005, 189; see also Abu-Lughod 2002). Yet, Muslim women demonstrate they are capable of constructing modes of religious being that further their own desired interests (e.g., Read and Bartkowski 2000).
Feminist studies of Islam contribute to a growing body of work on women’s engagement of conservative religions that has uncovered an array of surprising and creative ways women benefit from their participation in men-dominated religious traditions (Chong 2008, 133; also Avishai 2008; Bartkowski and Read 2003; Mahmood 2005; Read and Bartkowski 2000; Rinaldo 2013). Avishai argues that the “paradox” approach assumes a false dichotomy “[pitting] agency against compliance,” when instead women construct their religious selves through observance and conduct (Avishai 2008, 429). This process, which Avishai terms “doing religion,” occurs as women simultaneously negotiate multiple identities (see also Bulanda 2011). In the U.S. context, where Islam is not only a minority religion but one often marginalized in public spheres as misogynistic (Rinaldo 2013, 192), African American Muslim women face the possibility that their religious identity may compound intersecting racial, class, and gender oppressions (Byng 1998). But they also “surrender” to Islam, in part, as a means of resistance to racism and economic exploitation (Rouse 2004, 216), suggesting their negotiation of an Islamic identity may demonstrate a “capacity for action” not captured in conventional framings of Islam and gender (Mahmood 2005, 18).
This study builds on recent insights into religion and women’s agency by incorporating feminist theories of space into a “doing religion” framework. I take advantage of data collected over five years in an African American Muslim community to provide an interactionist account of how African American women negotiate spaces in the mosque as a way to perform certain religious and social identities. Religious space matters because to determine its meanings and appropriate uses is to have power over it, along with the symbolic and material resources encoded in such space (Morin and Guelke 2007, xxv).
I review the literature on religion and space to explain how women may exert agency by inhabiting and appropriating the physical spaces of religious institutions. In the case of African American Muslim women, it helps to consider space as a set of religious, racial, class, and gender relations (Byng 1998; Massey 1994). I compare the work of African American women in the mosque to that of churchgoing Black women, who attend in order to engage a network of other believers for mutual support and individual validation of religious identity (Frederick 2003).
I analyze the ways in which African American Muslim women’s mosque participation constitutes a form of socially engaged religious conduct. In their negotiations of different spaces, at times in direct conflict with men trying to occupy the same spaces, the women reinforced shared gender and racial identities. However, their efforts were not boundless, and the women found themselves with less access to institutional resources than certain men. I discuss how the women leaned further on their network of African American Muslim sisters for support in these struggles, thereby enabling themselves and each other to resist racial, economic, and gender oppressions (Bartkowski and Read 2003; Collins 2000).
Feminist Theories of Religion and Space
Religious traditions, however “global” in their ideological identifications, are lived in the local (Knott 2005). Veiling, for example, takes on different meanings for women depending on their exact location at the moment of performance—wearing a veil in Egypt helps a woman “fit in” while in the United States it “differentiates” her (Read and Bartkowski 2000, 403-4). African American women converts to Islam find in the Qur’an a blueprint to navigate their daily lives, yet struggle to transcend the material and social realities of the poor urban landscape around them (Rouse 2004). Even the absence of space plays an important role in how women construct their religious selves. Finding no physical place inside a mosque to pray, because men occupy every available inch, forces some women to leave (Karim 2009, 178). All of these examples reveal that women’s abilities to engage religion at the local level are further contextualized within and across different spaces.
Understanding the role of space in religion helps us better situate religious action in everyday life in two primary ways. First, it directs scholars toward the varied ways people construct religiosity through local patterns of social interaction, as opposed to top-down approaches that theorize religion as a set of beliefs and practices imposed on believers. Second, attention to how religion is spatially structured provides a framework to assess women’s agency. Control of space accords the ability to regulate, “discursively and materially,” those within it (Morin and Guelke 2007, xix). An analysis of religious spaces emphasizes how gender relations are constructed differently across settings as well as how such constructions enable and constrain women’s movements (Massey 1994). It also avoids essentialized notions of religion as innately patriarchal or misogynistic by reconnecting agency to subjectivity (Korteweg 2008).
Feminist geographers typically conceptualize space more as categories than actual physical localities (Morin and Guelke 2007), but as the earlier examples about veiling demonstrate, physical space roots religious conduct in specific places at particular moments. The structure of a space, both architecturally and socially, suggests what actors expect appropriate behaviors by men and women to be (McDowell 1999), and it can maintain or challenge existing hierarchies (Kahera 2002; Spain 1992). On a practical level, physical spaces are also observable, permitting researchers to document how gender relations are created, maintained, or transformed in religious institutions (Moore 1995). For example, Sullins (2006) has suggested that physical segregation of the genders during religious practice and ritual, along with the systematic exclusion of women from leadership roles, privileges men’s participation in orthodox Muslim and Jewish communities.
Given that most American mosques segregate worshippers by gender and that the areas women occupy are often smaller and less desirable spaces, such as basements or balconies (Baghby, Pearl, and Froehle 2001; Karim 2009), Sullins may be right in expecting women’s activities in the mosque to be less empowering. However, existing research suggests African American Muslim communities differ. Their mosques generally do not have partitions, enabling women to move more freely within them (Karim 2009). African American Muslim women also attend the mosque more often than other ethnic Muslim women, suggesting they may have more opportunities to expand the meaning of the mosque in their daily lives as a result of their fluid movements (Bhimji 2012).
Religious communities have long provided African American women safe social spaces away from the physically and symbolically unsafe spaces to which they have been subjugated throughout U.S. history (Byng 1998, 484). Higginbotham (1993) documents how women in the Black church empowered all African Americans against racial subordination by serving as models of respectable behavior during and after Reconstruction. During that time, African American women broadened the church’s reach to become “the most powerful institution of racial self-help” in the larger Black community (Higginbotham 1993, 1). Frederick (2003, 4) argues that even though the organization of the church is “far from ideal,” it remains a spiritual structure that supports, nurtures, and validates them. Both scholars argue that African American women exert agency through their efforts within religious communities to improve their lives and those around them. Critically, this occurs not through dramatic protest but everyday forms of resistance, such as raising funds to provide social services to other members.
The work of African American women in the church serves as a useful reminder that the enactment of religious identity is an intersectional process requiring women to negotiate multiple, competing identities. In the following section, I consider how gender, race, and class affect the ways African American Muslim women engage Islam.
“Doing Religion” against Multiple, Everyday Oppressions
African American Muslim women bring to their religious communities a diverse range of racial, class, and gender experiences, as well as those of being a religious minority in a social landscape sometimes hostile toward Islam (Byng 1998). At the same time, African American Muslim women believe their religious identities enable them to maintain a humanist vision in the face of discrimination, providing a framework to resist multiple oppressions (Byng 1998). Rouse explains that the performance of an Islamic identity pushes African American Muslims “into the contentious arena of religious identity politics . . . but then again one must remember that African Americans are already deeply engaged in racial identity politics” (Rouse 2004, 177).
Persistent racial and class inequalities in both the American ummah (community of believers) and larger U.S. society serve as daily reminders to African American Muslims of their marginalization. This shared history binds African American Muslim women and men together and encourages them to incorporate strategies for racial and economic liberation into their constructions of religious community (Byng 1998; Rouse 2004). This helps explain why most African American Muslim women choose to worship in majority African American mosques, despite gender inequalities in leadership consistent with other ethnic mosques (Karim 2009). What remains less clear is how African American Muslim women reconcile their competing identities as they struggle against patriarchy in the mosque while also seeking to activate the mosque as a tool to combat other oppressions.
Forming a religious self occurs through individual acts of observance and performance (Avishai 2008), as well as by working with other women to fight social injustices (Rinaldo 2013). Such a constructivist approach to religion extends conceptions of women’s agency beyond compliance or resistance to include the multiple processes through which women actively construct religiosity (Avishai 2008). These processes vary by institutional and structural context. From her interviews with orthodox Jewish women in Israel who observed niddah (Jewish laws of menstrual purity), Avishai found some women reacting to the “threat” of secular Israeli culture by deepening their religious engagement, specifically through embodied practices that excluded them from certain social interactions. However, in the already secularized environment of Brooklyn, New York, Fader (2009) found Hasidic women striving to increase their interactions with secular institutions in order to free men to focus on religious studies. Fader’s study provides evidence that the gendering of space accords different expectations for how women and men will enact piety.
In this study, the local context of the mosque, structural locations of the actors, and racialized understandings of Islam they invoke in their social practices are critical to understanding how African American Muslim women “do religion.” Like Avishai, I argue that religiosity is a social construction grounded in observance and achieved through performance. I focus on how women negotiated religious spaces at the mosque as a means of socially engaged religious conduct and in so doing helped each other resist multiple oppressions. The structure of a religious community may look patriarchal and exclusionary but, as I will show, women’s agency is reflected in how they navigate together the daily contours of community life.
Methods
This study is part of a larger project on the role of organized religion among the urban poor. Using a Sunni mosque in an inner city neighborhood in Los Angeles as my site of entry into the networks of low- and middle-income African American Muslims that worship there, the project examines how religious social support plays out in everyday community life and the unintended consequences of these systems of support along axes of class, gender, and neighborhood residence. 1
From the street, the mosque—or masjid, as members referred to it—was unrecognizable as a place of worship. Surrounded by a wire fence, the lot included a masalah (prayer hall), small house, dirt yard, and narrow gravel parking lot. The masalah was composed of a simple stucco structure with two sliding glass entrances (one for men, or “brothers,” one for women, or “sisters”). Brothers performed wudu (ritual cleansing before prayer) at an outdoor sink near a second men’s side entrance. For the first three years of the study, sisters used a small powder room inside the house for wudu, but they later helped finance the installation of a portable shed next to the house that contained a sink and foot washing station. The small house contained staff offices, kitchen, brothers’ bathroom, sisters’ powder room, and a bedroom for an elderly brother who lived there.
In spite of its simple appearances, the masjid was a place of “maximum collectivity” for community members (Kahera 2002). They gathered there before, during, and long after worship services, often staying late into the night. Brothers played dominoes under a portable tent many weekday afternoons, and sisters used the masjid as a meeting point for social get-togethers as well as a place to bring their children and grandchildren after school. The landscape provided a safe refuge from the problems of the neighborhood, considered one of the poorest and most violent in the city.
From May 2008 to August 2013, I gathered data on believers’ interactions by participating in and observing a variety of religious and social activities at the masjid. I attended jumah (Friday community prayer), Islamic classes, fundraising banquets, religious conferences, festivals, and funerals. I volunteered on several planning committees and logged hundreds of hours cooking and cleaning alongside women believers. For thirteen months of the study, I lived four blocks from the masjid to better immerse myself in the daily realities of life in a poor urban neighborhood. During this time, I spent two to five nights per week at the masjid “hanging out” with a group of longstanding women community members, increasing my visits to nearly every night during the holy month of Ramadan. Over the years, I attended more than 120 community iftar dinners, which permitted the most opportunities to study women and men interact outside Friday services.
Through khutbahs (sermons), everyday group talk, and hundreds of one-on-one conversations, I learned about the rich life histories of core members. Many came through the Nation of Islam, transitioning to al-Islam in the 1970s under the leadership of late Imam W. D. Muhammad, with whom the masjid continues to identify. The children of these older members are now grown, and some bring their own children to the masjid when school schedules permit. Others “found Islam” through potential mates, friends, family, and sometimes while in prison, reflecting a diversity of life experiences that informed their religious interpretations and practices.
One of the unique—and inspiring—characteristics about gender relations at this particular site was the openness with which men and women interacted in public. As a woman researcher, I was able to observe patterns of cross-gender interaction in their “naturalistic unfolding” (Timmermans and Tavory 2007, 497) in ways that may not have been possible in a religious community with more rigid gender segregation. During these interactions, certain “group styles” of interaction came into play that reveal shared assumptions about what constituted Islamically appropriate modes of gender behavior (Eliasoph and Lichterman 2003). Women talked openly with men on the sidewalks surrounding the prayer hall, inside the kitchen and offices of the mosque complex, and in the parking lot. After jumah, believers trickled onto the grounds and participated in a weekly marketplace where men and women vendors from the community sold food, beverages, and other goods. Both men and women shopped at the same booths, standing in line together and chatting while they waited. Men and women frequently hugged and even kissed the other’s cheek as friendly gestures, especially if they had not seen each other for an extended time.
The closeness of members made my status as a “white girl” and “non-believer” more tangible. I spent the first several months of the study focused on building rapport with believers by simply being present and answering their repeated questions about my intentions. During this time, I jotted field notes or dictated my observations into an audio recorder in my car immediately after I left the site. I then transcribed and expanded these observations into complete field notes upon return to my office or home. As believers eased to my presence and referred to me as “Sister Pamela,” I began to take observational notes in public view. While observational data comprise the bulk of my data, I also draw on many informal interviews I conducted in situ over the years, asking follow-up questions or for points of clarification when I wanted to better understand the motivations of individual members.
As I eased into community life, I learned to see my participation as a heuristic device to understand the many ways believers understood and engaged Islam. For example, after being teased for wearing dark, heavy clothing, I began to wear lighter-colored scarves draped more loosely over my head. I felt comfortable wearing three-quarter-length sleeves and slim-fitting pants. Believers—women and men—took pride in pointing out to me that women in the community dressed in ways that reflected a shared ethos of “balance” between Qur’anic exegesis and American cultural patterns. As an imam once said in a community meeting, “We have our own food, our own clothing. We don’t want to give ourselves in to what they want.” Then he added, “We like how we look. . . . You can’t escape you and how you look. You can have on—What’s that thing? A burqa?—but that’s not Islam!” On the rare occasions a woman came to the masjid in a niqab (face veil), I saw sisters look at each other and roll their eyes, later echoing the words of the imam: “That’s not the religion. That’s their culture.” Most of the women mosque participants wore head scarves in the West African tradition (Karim 2009), covering their hair and the tops of the ears but leaving their necks exposed. And in social gatherings outside the mosque, I regularly saw women from the mosque without head coverings, instead proudly displaying coiffed hairstyles or fashionable wigs. I came to see these practices as “everyday acts of resistance” to the percieved hegemonic ideologies of Muslim traditionalists (Bartkowski and Read 2003).
All data were analyzed and coded using the principles of modified grounded theory (Timmermans and Tavory 2007). I began my analysis with open coding to identify concepts and categories, followed by axial coding to find links between categories. My methodological commitment to grounded theory led directly to the creation of this article. Early on I was determined to avoid a study of “Muslim women,” feeling that too much scholarship on Islam focused on gender at the expense of other pressing issues in the community, such as class polarization and racial discord. However, on reflecting on the opus of notes for the project, I found myself repeatedly coding phrases such as “sisters only” or “brothers only” when I described spaces in the masjid. Analysis revealed that group styles of interaction varied within and between these spaces, suggesting I delve further into my data to better understand the relation between space and gender at the masjid. I also looked closely at when and where conflicts between men and women occurred, noting that space was a frequently contested terrain. As I engaged a diverse range of literatures on Islam, gender, race, and urban poverty, I began to ask what these contestations over space reveal about broader systems of power within the community.
Negotiating Gendered Spaces
Believers engaged physical spaces at the masjid in order to worship, socialize, and acquire support. In analyzing the ways believers constructed and used different spaces at the mosque as well as how these uses varied by gender, we see how control of and access to different spaces accorded women and men different institutional benefits. The sisters had less or often restricted access to certain spaces in the masjid but within their maneuverings of individual spaces were able to cultivate strong bonds of sisterhood that aided them outside the mosque. Their actions constitute creative forms of “doing religion” through social interaction, in gender-specific ways.
A Space for Meaningful Worship
Like any religious organization, the masjid existed first and foremost as a place of worship (Sullivan 2011), and in this capacity men dominated. Only men served as imams, giving khutbahs and leading congregational prayer. Only men performed the adhan (call to prayer), a sacred duty of additional symbolic importance in this setting because the first muezzin in Islamic history was a former African slave. 2 And, only men taught official religious classes. While at different times over the five years of the study I observed women form informal religious education classes, coming together to discuss the Qur’an and to give each other lessons about important women in Prophet Muhammad’s life, the groups typically waned after a few weeks or months. The groups also failed to gain the authority of being noted in the monthly community bulletin.
This patriarchal division of religious labor was reflected in the spatial layout of the prayer hall. The masalah was divided into two sections: the “sisters’ side,” which measured approximately 400 square feet, and the “brothers’ side,” roughly 520 square feet (see Figure 1). Though I have designated them as separate boxes, in reality this was one open space, with only a half wall where the bold line is indicated.
Inside of Masjid (sisters’ area in white; brothers’ area in gray)
The division was reinforced by two parallel lines of black gaffing tape on the floor at the front of the sisters’ area placed to help guide women believers on where to face during prayer. While there may have been some implicit negotiation over the exact boundary before the tape was placed, after its arrival men did not sit past the line. If one did—generally a non–African American participant—he was urged to move forward, oftentimes by fellow brothers.
While the sisters’ side was technically smaller, it was surprisingly large given women’s lower attendance. On a typical Friday afternoon, between 15 and 20 women sat in the sisters’ area, while three or four times that many men clustered in the brothers’ portion. Unlike many mosques where women worshippers find themselves praying in basements or hallways (Karim 2009), it was men who sometimes had to make salat (prayer) outside on the sidewalk or lawn. With the exception of densely crowded prayers, say on a large holiday like Eid al-Fitr, I rarely had to squeeze into the women’s space, more often than not getting plenty of room to relax on the floor against a wall. Brothers sat through the khutbah with folded legs, their knees or shoulders centimeters from a neighbor.
However, the sisters’ disproportionately large spatial representation in the masalah did not always improve their ability to participate in elements of the worship experience. Because they worshipped behind the men, facing northwest toward Mecca, they had to look at the backsides of the brothers during khutbahs and salat. If asked about this, sisters agreed that their positioning should be insignificant, because believers were supposed to focus on their eeman (faith) instead of what was happening around them, but I also heard them sometimes complain to each other about having to see men’s “cracks” when the latter bent for prostration (see also Karim 2009). The arrangement of women behind men also impeded the sisters’ abilities to hear key components of worship services. Poor acoustics inside the masjid coupled with the competing sounds of the inner city, such as sirens, helicopters, buses, and booming steroes, frequently drowned out the voice of the speaking imam.
Sisters came to the masjid despite these obstacles to worship and, once there, worked to make the prayer hall a sacred space that facilitated women’s engagement in processes of religious self-making. The following excerpt illustrates this well:
The masalah is quiet, save for Imam Khalid’s soft voice speaking about the importance of taqwa (God-consciousness). Although the service started at 1:00, and it is now 1:28 p.m., believers are still trickling into the masjid, including one younger non-African American male. As many believers do before they sit for the khubtah, he starts to move into salat position, bringing his feet together and correcting his posture. Before the man can begin his prayer, a sister sitting in a chair about six feet behind him clears her throat loudly and says, without moving her body an inch, “As-salaam alaikum, Brother.” The young man turns round, looks at the sister humbly as he lowers his head, and then moves far to the left out of the sister’s way. The sister says nothing else, just continues to look forward towards Imam Khalid.
To accommodate the sister, the brother had to wedge himself against a crowded group of men on the north side of the masjid. On that day only 15 sisters were in attendance (13 who prayed), while the men’s area had at least 60 brothers. 3 The sister’s heightened position in a chair would have enabled her to see over the man once he sat down, but she did not wait. 4 She publicly enforced her right to be able to see the imam, an act that demonstrated to anyone watching she was neither subordinate to nor intimidated by the men worshipping ahead of her.
Sisters also exhibited a sense of right to engaged worship when they asked for the microphone to be turned louder or approached an imam after services to question his interpretations. They even policed the space’s sacredness with each other, as happened on one memorable occasion when a sister asked another sister to stop talking on her cellphone. The latter, a light-skinned woman in a long black dress and matching jilbab, went outside and continued to talk loudly in Arabic.
Attendance and engaged worship were two of the ways sisters in this study ideologically distanced themselves from other ethnic Muslim women and, in so doing, sought to highlight the piety of African American Muslim women as active mosque participants. Sisters noted that most of the men who arrived late were Arab or South Asian and suggested the men went there only because it was close to their workplaces. This was in contrast to sacrifices sisters made to be able to attend the Friday midday service, taking time off from work, shuffling family obligations, and sometimes traveling long distances to worship at this particular masjid, though they could have attended one of another dozen mosques in greater Los Angeles. They chose this mosque because they identified with the quiet sanctity of the sisters’ space, as was evident in a conversation I observed between two sisters one evening. Both complained that at “immigrant” mosques women talk in the masalah and “let their kids run all over the place.” Added one of the sisters, “I hate that when trying to make prayer.” Then she joked, “The women are just so glad to get out of the house,” echoing stereotypes about Muslim women as oppressed while rejecting this version of Islam for herself or her masjid. Double resistance to patriarchy in the masjid and to what sisters perceived were misguided cultural interpretations of the religion by immigrant Muslims solidified racial bonds between the sisters and encouraged them to push back against the possibility that their identification with Islam constituted an oppressive force. 5
Women’s active participation during worship services demonstrates that the masjid was “an important performative space” (Chong 2008, 121) where women negotiated multiple social identities. Even though their designated space was smaller, the sisters made it a meaningful place for religious conduct. Individual efforts to enforce the sacredness of the sisters’ space benefited the women as a whole, because it furthered every woman’s capacity to engage Islam.
A (Safe) Space All Their Own
One evening while I helped a sister clean up the kitchen following a community event, a brother walked in and politely asked us if he could use the sisters’ bathroom because the men’s was occupied. When he came out, he was drying his hands on an American flag handkerchief and joked, “You don’t have any paper towels in there. I have to wipe my hands with the American flag. Blasphemy!” The sister and I laughed, but the joke served as a subtle reminder that for women to have resources—even those as simple as paper towels for their bathroom—they had to fight for them.
Money was a constant source of tension at the masjid because there was never enough to cover even basic expenses. These shortages reflected the larger financial insecurity of the community. The ability to spend masjid funds rested in the hands of Resident Imam Khalid and his right-hand man, Brother Fareed. These two men decided if, when, and where money would go, often with a lack of transparency that frustrated believers of both genders. Women learned to work within this power system, using informal channels with the men to lobby for money for certain events or activities. They also counted on Imam Khalid’s wife to serve as a champion for sisters’ causes, a role she relished when heading the annual women’s conference or helping her husband decide how to remodel portions of the masjid. Women generally did not concern themselves with the quality of men-only spaces, focusing instead on parts of the masjid women used, thus reinforcing gender divisions.
When I started my fieldwork, a small group of sisters spearheaded an effort to remodel the bathroom, worn and in need of repair, by getting the masjid to install a new sink and toilet. Sisters took turns cleaning it and buying replacement bottles of hand soap that were nicer than the discount-brand the office bought. Not long after the remodel, sisters started “catching” brothers sneaking out of the women’s bathroom. Two women, including the imam’s wife, put a new lock on the bathroom, keeping the keys away from male staff and taking turns to unlock the door every morning. Although the lock lasted only a few weeks, it sent a message to the brothers that this space belonged to the sisters and indicated to all members that the women were united in their efforts to stop men’s appropriation of women’s resources.
Women also mobilized to create new gender-specific spaces for intimate religious practices. Like salat, wudu (ritual washing before prayer) involves moving and bending the body. Not wanting to do these physical movements in front of men, women relied on the sisters’ bathroom as a private space to “make wudu.” But the bathroom was small and had only one sink. After discussions among the sisters, a concerted effort emerged to install a proper wudu station. The women collected money to purchase a storage shed and oversaw its installation. Plumbing for the special sinks for washing feet came later, and although there remains no cooling or heating system, once complete the women were proud of their accomplishment to create a space exclusively designed so sisters could engage more deeply in Islamic practice.
Sisters’ efforts to police men’s movements in gender-specific spaces grew more extreme after installation of the wudu station, which sat next to a popular fig tree. This created tensions between men and women believers, captured in this excerpt from one Ramadan:
Several sisters are standing outside and talking while taraweeh prayer is going on inside. Together we’ve been watching a brother who the sisters often complain is creepy and crazy because of his physical appearance and odd ramblings. The brother starts to walk towards the sisters’ wudu station and Lisa says, “What’s he doing? No! No! That’s not right. He can’t be over there!” She decides she’s going to rush over there and stop him, with Aisha running after her and shouting that she’s coming too! The sisters go up to the man and have some kind of back-and-forth. The brother eventually walks off, away from the wudu area. Lisa and Aisha come back to where we’re standing, and (imitating a deep male voice and arching her back) Lisa chants, “I want a fig. I want a fig.” Then returning to her normal voice and relaxed posture, she says that sisters need to be part of security too, to which another sister mumbles, “We are security.”
Even though no sisters were using the shed at the time, the man’s trespassing violated a sacred sisters-only space. The irony is that I rarely observed women use the shed, or what one sister mockingly termed “the outhouse.” Despite this, the wudu station is important because it represented women’s abilities to come together to create new, safe spaces for religious ends within the existing institutional structure.
Women’s efforts to protect the space exhibited a claim of authority over men, if only for a short time. Following the incident, I pressed Lisa on who she thought has final authority to determine access to the masjid. She replied, “No one. The community does.” She rejected the idea that only men leaders or security could make those decisions, but her assertion suggests an exaggerated sense of agency in the case of access. Sisters complained repeatedly to Imam Khalid about the brother in the previous excerpt and asked that he be “kicked off the lot,” in part because the man failed to observe an appropriate physical distance when he talked to women. Time and time again the sisters complained that they had to be security even though it was the responsibility of the men to protect women.
The Limits of Appropriating Space
Informal power has its limits (Harris 1999), and the concentration of religious authority in the hands of a few men leaders (especially Imam Khalid) accorded certain men tangible benefits not extended to women. Sisters had less overall access to the masjid at night, when a key was needed to enter the grounds and buildings. As a result, women were less able to appropriate the masjid as a domestic space, while certain men lived there for little or no rent. This gendered division of access matters to our understanding the ways material resources may become encoded in religious space as well as the role religion plays in systems of social support in general.
The sisters who put the lock on the bathroom did not seem to mind when respectable brothers asked permission to use it. Rather, the lock was intended to keep out a specific group of men who lived at the mosque and who the sisters saw as appropriating too much of the masjid for personal use. Brother Bill lived in an old RV on the street in front of the masjid, running electricity off the prayer hall in exchange for guarding the property at night. “Old Man” Taleem had a bedroom in the small house, and both men used the masjid kitchen and brothers’ bathroom as their own. Brother Taleem had been there so long that no one I asked remembered exactly when the special living arrangement started for the 93-year-old. Sisters, on the other hand, did not have official permission to live or sleep at the masjid, resulting in a less equitable distribution of this specific social service provided by the mosque to its struggling community. 6 It also meant that patriarchy, oddly, permitted men more opportunities to domesticate the masjid.
This is not to say women never appropriated the masjid for personal use. Some of the sisters I came to know well over the years retreated there to escape “drama” at home. Between 2009 and 2010, I regularly met Sisters Ava and Hafsa at the masjid to hang out. We ate, talked, and watched movies, often until 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. If we got there after isha we had to call one of the brothers with a set of keys to open the masjid. Imam Khalid caught wind of our activities and had several “talks” with Ava, who each time ignored his instructions and said we would do what we wanted. I believe the get-togethers stopped mainly because I became pregnant and my friends worried for my safety in the neighborhood at night, not because Ava or Hafsa feared Imam Khalid. Our actions constituted “small acts” of resistance (Frederick 2003) to what the sisters saw as Imam Khalid’s attempts to control access to the community’s masjid.
Critically, Ava would not have been able to use the masjid after hours without the assistance of Bill or Darius, another brother with a set of keys. As fellow residents of the neighborhood, they understood each other’s struggles in ways that crossed gender lines. When Ava was “at war” with her adult sisters and brothers, who all lived together to save money, she often retreated to the masjid to find peace or to sleep. She relied on one of the brothers staying there to guard her, sometimes all night, in exchange for food or rides. However, as hectic as Ava’s family life was, she never had to live there like some of the brothers in the community. When sisters lost their housing they could stay with another sister or married couple, but a brother staying at the home of a single sister or even a married couple was less common because it violated sexual norms.
By granting brothers greater access to the mosque, leaders may have unintentionally undermined the men’s incentives to develop wider networks of social support that could have helped them in meaningful ways. Brother Wali lost his job in 2012 and began living out of his car on the masjid lot. Later that year his car broke down and he watched patiently by the open hood as several brothers leaned in to assess the repairs. I asked Wali if any had offered to help him fix the car. He said, “No [but] that would be a beautiful thing, wouldn’t it?” It did not seem in his worldview to consider using his Muslim brotherhood as an extended network of “fictive kin” (Stack 1974).
Sisters, on the other hand, had constructed a tight sisterhood of fellow Muslim women, or Muslimahs, to which they were able to turn for social support outside the masjid. When Ava’s car was giving her trouble, Hafsa helped her buy a new one. When Hafsa’s husband took ill, she asked Ava to cook meals for her children and invalid mother-in-law. As lifelong residents of the neighborhood, the women first sought the safe social space of the Muslim community to construct a stronger moral self alongside others experiencing similar struggles. Through 30 years of friendship and collective struggle, Ava and Hafsa, like other women in the community, have learned to manage their experiences as minority women in a minority religion by working within the organization’s existing power structure. This sisterhood constitutes a way of engaging Islam that helps them resist gender and economic oppressions in and out of the organization.
Conclusion
The African American Muslim women in this study asserted their rights to be engaged pious actors in spite of their smaller numbers and spaces in the masjid. Admittedly, the most sacred space in the masjid was the most segregated, but the arrangement afforded women a designated space they actively protected. Sisters also exerted power in the community by creating new sisters-only spaces, as establishment of the wudu station demonstrated. Even when their access was restricted after hours, women found ways inside by relying on their class solidarity with select men. For these reasons, I hesitate to say Islam is a “patriarchal religion” (cf. Bartkowski and Read 2003). Instead, my analyses suggest there are particular instances in which patriarchy manifests in observable ways.
I also cannot comfortably claim that the mosque is “unquestionably men-dominated” as some scholars have written about men-led organizations in other conservative religious traditions (cf. Chong 2008). Where I found sisters fighting men’s domination was in their attempts to appropriate the masjid as a personal space. I do not know of another study about American Islam that documents the mosque as a place of residence for the down and out, but in this case the intersecting forces of race and poverty led some believers to rely on the masjid as a living space. Men leaders attempted to condition access by gender, but in so doing mobilized women to cultivate a strong support system outside the mosque that, over time, has proven more meaningful than the limited opportunities for support brothers had inside the masjid.
The particularities of patriarchy in this setting may constrain sisters’ abilities to negotiate spaces in certain ways, but they do not stop the women in their goals to engage Islam. Their creative responses to men’s maneuverings are further proof that women can “do religion” in institutions led by men. In many ways the actions of African American women in the mosque mirror those of African American women in the church, whose aims are not to feminize leadership but instead work within existing organizations to create stronger communities (Frederick 2003; Higginbotham 1993).
An intersectional frame like the one used here recognizes that religious identity exists alongside other social identities. In negotiating these multiple, competing identities in contested spaces like the mosque, women work to overcome different forms of oppression. In the worship area, the women distinguished their patterns of worship from those of “immigrant” Muslims as one form of resistance, whereas at night class inequalities mattered more for how women chose to exercise their agentic potential. These negotiations are further proof that piety is grounded in everyday observance and conduct (Avishai 2008; Mahmood 2005), to which I add piety is as much a social process intended to engage religion through interaction as it is an achievement of personal conduct (Rinaldo 2013, 92).
By considering how pious women position themselves with respect to others occupying similar spaces, we see that gender is not just a project of understanding the social meanings attached to sexual difference (George 2005, 22). Gender also involves the articulation of racial and class differences that shape one’s capacity to act. African American Muslim women may be better able to resist patriarchy, and therefore set their own terms and limits within community life, by performing a distinctly African American Muslim identity positioned against that of “immigrant” Muslims. Such everyday acts of resistance may undermine efforts to create an ummah (wider Muslim community) by promoting racial exclusion over gender inclusion (Karim 2009), but my evidence suggests African American Muslims rely on their local communities in distinct ways because they face different oppressions. Research that acknowledges the contours of religious social difference avoids homogenizing religions and the people who identify with them (Korteweg 2008).
Previous research suggests that the majority of U.S. mosques use the most conservative worship arrangement of complete gender segregation during worship (Karim 2009), so the experiences of women in this study may be more the exception than the rule. However, through their micro-level maneuverings of space we see how the dominant “paradox” approach in the sociology of religion, which sees women’s participation as a form of submission to patriarchal religious systems, belies a more nuanced and important social phenomenon at play. Religion does not inherently “do” anything to people that practice it—rather, in this case, African American Muslim women and men “do religion” in a context shaped by multiple oppressions.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Stefan Timmermans, Mignon Moore, Karen Leonard, Marie Berry, Joya Misra, Orit Avishai, Afshan Jafar, and Rachel Rinaldo, as well as five anonymous Gender & Society reviewers, for their insightful comments.
Notes
Pamela J. Prickett is a graduate student in sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is an ethnographer whose research interests include urban sociology, organized religion, culture, and education. Her dissertation critically examines the changing role of religious social support among the urban poor from the perspective of a longstanding African American Muslim community in Los Angeles.