Engaged Surrender: African American Women and Islam (George Gund Foundation Imprint in African American Studies) (Paperback)

~ (Author) "In 1991, when I ventured onto the grounds of Masjid Ummah, a mosque in Southern California, I was not new to African American Sunni Islam..." (more)
Key Phrases: feminist exegesis, female converts, ideological domains, African American, Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammad (more...)

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Commonly portrayed in the media as holding women in strict subordination and deference to men, Islam is nonetheless attracting numerous converts among African American women. Are these women "reproducing their oppression," as it might seem? Or does their adherence to the religion suggest unsuspected subtleties and complexities in the relation of women, especially black women, to Islam? Carolyn Rouse sought answers to these questions among the women of Sunni Muslim mosques in Los Angeles. Her richly textured study provides rare insight into the meaning of Islam for African American women; in particular, Rouse shows how the teachings of Islam give these women a sense of power and control over interpretations of gender, family, authority, and obligations.
In Engaged Surrender, Islam becomes a unique prism for clarifying the role of faith in contemporary black women's experience. Through these women's stories, Rouse reveals how commitment to Islam refracts complex processes--urbanization, political and social radicalization, and deindustrialization--that shape black lives generally, and black women's lives in particular. Rather than focusing on traditional (and deeply male) ideas of autonomy and supremacy, the book--and the community of women it depicts--emphasizes more holistic notions of collective obligation, personal humility, and commitment to overarching codes of conduct and belief. A much-needed corrective to media portraits of Islam and the misconceptions they engender, this engaged and engaging work offers an intimate, in-depth look into the vexed and interlocking issues of Islam, gender, and race.

From the Inside Flap

"This sharp and timely book is a pioneering contribution. Systematically mapping African American women's lives within Islam for the first time, Rouse establishes that engagement is as meaningful an ethic as liberation for black women, and black folk generally. A provocative, deeply conscientious work that will engender overdue debate in anthropology, feminist studies, black studies, and Islamic studies."--Adam Green, Assistant Professor of History and American Studies, New York University

"Rouse's study charts a neglected and much misunderstood path for Black women's empowerment. What we learn rocks many assumptions of liberalism, Western feminism, women's activism, and prevailing notions of freedom. In a climate where the status of women within Islam is uncritically used as proof of women's oppression, Engaged Surrender reads like a breath of fresh air."--Patricia Hill Collins, author of Black Feminist Thought

"Engaged Surrender is an insightful ethnographic analysis of two dozen women who are members of two masjids in southern California. We learn about their conversions, the ways their lives have changed, and how they negotiate a desire for agency and a traditional gender hierarchy--from childrearing, to hijab-wearing, to work, to marriage, to Qur'anic exegesis. Rouse's vivid portrayal of her subjects and fluent familiarity with feminist debates and anthropological theory make this book a compelling new study, particularly in the wake of 9/11."--Faye Ginsburg, author of Contested Lives

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (February 20, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520237951
• ISBN-13: 978-0520237957
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #579,245 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent scholarly work!, April 14, 2005

By	Layali (FL, USA) - See all my reviews

In this ethnographic study of African American women converts to the mainstream Sunni Islam in two communities in Los Angeles, California, Carolyn Moxley Rouse tries to understand what inspired these converts to make the switch and under what circumstances, as well as how they accept, interpret, and live Islamic teachings that are generally viewed as oppressive to women particularly when viewed from the Western feminist lens. Carolyn Moxley Rouse, currently an assistant professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, conducted this study as her Ph.D. thesis over the span of 10 years. The question she attempted to answer was: are those African American women reproducing their oppression? Her answer to this question is: "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). In Gender Negotiations chapter she gives evidence to how conversion to Islam has been an asset to some "to undo self-hatred" prevalent in African American communities.

The thesis of the book is: "The Muslima (Muslim sisters) accept the religiously prescribed gender roles and codes of conduct, believing that liberation emerges out of these disciplinary practices. Ultimately, the social history of black women in the United States contributes substantially to the reason why Muslima view Islam as a faith with the potential to liberate women from racism, sexism, and classism.... This book explores the lives of several women who through overt displays of their faith use their bodies as sites of resistance. These sisters challenge hegemonic discourse about race, gender, community, and faith at the level of the everyday." One of her main conclusions is that African American women's conversion to Sunni Islam cannot be described as simply "false consciousness" or full "liberation."

Rouse argues that her informants find their empowerment through the religious exegesis and authorizing discourse of Islam. Those who wear the hijab, in Rouse's study, are not only fulfilling a religious duty, but are also making statements of disagreement with the American mainstream culture, resisting Western middle-class hegemonic expectations of how a liberated American woman should look like and what she should wear. "For African Americans to socially acknowledge their Islamic faith through certain types of dress is like carrying a United States exit visa; it is a sign marking the closure of access to certain social and material rewards....[It] could be considered a form of social suicide" (8-9). This is true for everyone who publicly displays their religious, particularly Islamic, identity in the US, not just for African Americans. This is also true, and even to a greater extent, in other parts of the world where, for example, girls are expelled from public schools in France for choosing to wear the hijab.

In Chapter One, Rouse argues that African American Muslims in the communities she studied believe that "performing an Islamic identity in the United States, so to speak, may in the long run change social relations" where they can have "a more just community and society, [and] more successful interpersonal relationships" (9). I feel Rouse did not go through with this argument and did not give strong evidence to strengthen it. In fact, it seems to me that the personal lives of some of the women she interviewed are far away from having "successful interpersonal relationships" and it looks like the second generation of those converts is being co-opted/reclaimed by the American mainstream secular culture and driven back into poverty, illiteracy, and drugs.

Perhaps the strongest argument of this book is that some or most of Rouse's interviewees consider the Qur'an a feminist text and use religious exegesis (religious interpretation) to define their roles and empower themselves at a personal level, family level, and within the community. Male-centered readings of the Qur'an and Hadith, and not Islam itself, are the barriers to liberation (173). Rouse determines ambivalence, "which women attempt to reconcile through a holistic sense-making that combines exegesis, common sense, and pragmatism" as a path to empowerment. "[T]here is a layered process of identity reformulation that involves dimensions of both ambivalence and empowerment."

I believe Rouse has done Muslim women justice by letting the Muslim women themselves be heard instead of being represented by feminists, scholars, or extremists. Among the strong views that those Muslim women voiced was their belief that within the domestic sphere, gender roles are separate/different but equal and that wife's obedience to husband is conditional on husband's fulfillment of his financial responsibility. African American women converts believe that Western feminism led by white middle-class women has failed to liberate all women because social problems such as teenage pregnancies and decay of family structure have only increased. Additionally, Muslim feminists challenge Western feminist ideology of work as an empowerment for women. "[I]t is impossible to try to derive an objective universal truth about the ways in which people can or must be empowered."

Rouse's account of the four professional women who choose to perform faith, marriage, and career at the same time (in Chapter Seven) is an excellent, enlightening one that serves to balance some of the negativity surrounding women's status in Islam in the US. For example, in Zipporah's case, she is an example of an assertive Muslim woman who "believes the men are simply not ready for what she sees as Islam's radical empowerment of women" (168). In the case of Maimouna who owns a very successful law firm and who uses Islamic history to refer to "the four perfect women in Islam," Rouse says: "Far from the ideal of a wife secluded at home, Islam reaffirms for Maimouna that being a mother, wife, and professional are indeed compatible" (170).

This book displays the intersections of race, class, and gender in forming women's identities and characterizing their agency. Here, added to this mix of multiple subjectivities is the element of religion, where Islam makes those African American Muslim women a minority within a minority with a minority. Rouse says: "These women are resisting the deep structure, the internalized racism, sexism, and classism, a process I believe that is fundamental for lasting sociopolitical change" (218). In conclusion, African American Muslim women converts' surrender to Allah is accompanied by "engagement with the sources of faith, the texts, and the community."