Through Sunni Women's Eyes: Black Feminism and the Nation of Islam

Abstract

This article portrays and analyzes the narratives of two Sunni women who were formerly members of the Nation of Islam. Their Nation stories vividly show how Muslim women accommodated dress codes as well as traditional gender roles that position men as the financial supporters of women and children. The article shows why Sunni African-American Muslim women have advocated male accountability in the past and present, and how doing so situates them within Black feminist tradition.

Keywords:

• female-headed households
• feminism
• gender roles
• Imam W.D. Mohammed
• male accountability
• Nation of Islam
• slavery
• Sunni Islam
• women's interpretation of the Qur'an
• women's covering

Notes

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Carolyn Moxley Rouse, Engaged Surrender: African American Women and Islam, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), p. 150.

Michael Angelo Gomez, Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 324.

Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005), p. 159.

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, I've Known Rivers: Lives of Loss and Liberation (Reading, Menlo Park, New York, and Don Mills: Addision-Wesley Publishing Company, 1994), p. 11.

Amina Wadud, Qur'an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman's Perspective, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 72, 73.

Rouse, p. 16.

bell hooks, “Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory,” in Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, ed. Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: The New Press, 1995), p. 278.

Rouse, p. 143.

Essien-Udom, p. 86.

Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, “‘Together and in Harness': Women's Traditions in the Sanctified Church,” Signs 10, no. 4 (1985): p. 697.

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 166.

Angela Davis, “Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves,” in Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, ed. Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: New Press, 1985), p. 205.

Tynnetta Deanar, “Muslim Woman Is Model Personality,” Muhammad Speaks, June 1962, p. 15.

Rouse, p. 148.

Stack, p. 53.

Leith Mullings, “Households Headed by Women: The Politics of Race, Class, and Gender,” in Conceiving the New World Order, ed. Faye D. Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 125, 126.

Jesse D. McKinnon and Claudette E. Bennett, We the People: Blacks in the United States, Census 2000 Special Reports, August 2005, available at < http://www.census.gov/prod/2005pubs/censr-25.pdf >, retrieved March 30, 2006.