In this book, the author, Carolyn Moxley Rouse, a USC Phd and Princeton professor and Anthropologist, tries to make sense of her Sunni Muslim experience - through a peer group of cohorts that she studies. She uses as her research subject, a group of LA Sunni female converts who live and co-exist so to speak "in the belly of the racist, sexist, classist, capitalist and apostate beast" called American society.
Her data consists of interviews, discussions and impressions these subjects made while enduring the contradictions of race, gender, and religion (among many others) as they are practiced in Los Angeles in particular, and U.S. society more generally. Altogether this project proved to be a challenge that forced the author to bypass traditional approaches and to develop her own self-fashioned wider frame of analysis, a frame that in my view is must richer, deeper and much more reliable than that normally used to understand social problems in U.S. society. It gets well beyond America's own "socially adjusted" frame of social analysis and in itself pleasantly overshadows the content of what these women had to say and the analysis of the study itself.
Wading through a dense and complex matrix of racial, gender, class, and religious subjectivities, the author examines women's identity and then characterizes the deepest basis of its agency. Here, using novel and sometimes self-fashioned tool of her trade, she probes deeply into how Muslim women resist the deep structure of internalized racism, sexism, and classism. Her comparative analysis and its processes reveal as much about the American and Christian society that these women co-exist in, as it did about the Islamic faith itself. Her central conclusion is that African American women who surrender to Sunni Islam do so as part of a generalized process of political engagement that is part and parcel to the Muslim faith. As a part of that faith, they have available to them a number of resources unavailable to women in other religions, foremost among them being a political conscience that goes hand-and-hand with their religion.
And even though I am a black male, and a "born again non-theist," her analysis, because it was so general and did not rely solely on the accepted tools of either religious analysis, or just the normal grid of traditional social science research, opened up new spaces even for me, spaces that allowed me too to re-examine in parallel many of the same bad lessons and wrong assumptions that these women experienced and too had been mis-taught, mis-applied, and thus mis-learned in the normal course of being a socially adjusted non-white American, swimming in the "ways of America's racist, sexist, and classist culture."
So, here in a pleasant surprise, is an unexpectedly superior deep, robust analysis of an American cultural and social problem. In it the author adds the most valuable and most indispensable tool of all to her repertoire of tools for social analysis: Anthropology. Since in my own work, I too had often contemplated adding anthropology to my frame for a wider analysis of American racism, it must be said, that at the very minimum, Anthropology, when applied against a backdrop of postmodern critiquing and theorizing as is done here, makes for a sometimes interesting and convincing but always informative read about American society and its cultural problems.
Her purpose was to better understand how African American women who convert to Islam make sense of their new religious experiences - that is, while it is taking place within a more or less hostile and alien society. To do this credibly and successfully, the author fashioned a new vocabulary and opened up a whole new space for understanding problems of women in particular, as well as for a better understanding of American social problems, more generally. And within this wider space, she was able to examine, analyze and critique anew a whole range of built-in assumptions about gender, race, family, community, and relationships extant in American society.
Her analysis, which obviously parallels what she had been taught as a practicing Professor of Anthropology, contextualizes American society in ways uncommon in traditional academic analysis of American culture. As a result, its most important contribution may not have been just in opening up new spaces for understanding and interpreting the problems of recent Sunni converts in LA, both for herself and for the reader, but also in opening up new value-free non-relative avenues of analysis of American social problems more generally. And although the focus was primarily about gender and religion, the subtext unmistakably always was about how to do "clean" "unbiased" "value-free" "non-relative" societal analysis in any culture and in any social situation. This in itself, independent of the content of this study is a worthy contribution to social science research.
According to the author, the religious experience for Muslim women is that of developing a new political consciousness that just happens to grow out of a spiritual epiphany, and not the other way around as is the case in Christianity. It is one intended to deal with -- rather than explain away or rationalize as is typical in Christianity for instance -- existing social conditions. As she points it, this is not unlike the way religion came about among black slaves in America: as a self-made community institution designed to address survival needs and concerns.
However, what followed in the case of American slavery, was that the black religious project was brutally derailed and quickly commandeered and turned into a political container by slave masters to be misused as but another project to further bind the slaves (morally and spiritually) to the master's grand design of continued exploitation and racial subordination. Arguably, because of the single missing element of "political consciousness," not even a vestige of empowerment, personal or communal politicization managed to survive the horrors of slavery - not to mention survival of an intact political consciousness among Americanized blacks.
Here the author underscores the role "resistance consciousness" plays in defining the pivotal concepts in Sunni religion, concepts such as freedom, patrimony, empowerment, family, community and the very act of "engaging one's faith." One conclusion that I drew from this part of the analysis is that even when properly contextualized, it makes little sense to compare these notions across religions, that is to say, to compare Western usage with similar concepts used in Islamic religions. To do so is a non-starter.
The blind religious obedience followed as normal practice in Christianity, without the right to engage religion at the level of political consciousness (the present debate among women within the Catholic church is a perfect case in point), this author would surely conclude, is worse than slavery itself, as it leaves not even a psychological basis for empowerment.
Since the Muslim religion is "process oriented" rather than "outcome oriented," sustained engagement takes priority over discrete outcomes. In Sunni Moslem religions, for the most part, I got the impression that things remain fluid and always on the negotiating table subject to new understandings, new edicts, new rulings and improvements. The Christian notions of freedom, family, patrimony, community, etc., on the other hand, are outcome oriented which is to say they remain tied down once and for all in doctrinal orthodoxy. While being process oriented in the Muslim religion means, at least in principle, they remain forever open-ended. This is such a fundamental difference that to speak of these ideas across religions as if they were they same concepts is almost to be meaningless.
As but one example of how the differences between process oriented and outcome-oriented results get played out in Christianity and Islam, the author uses the example of the biblical story of Ham.
The reader may recall that In Christianity, this story, an allegory actually, is lifted out of its biblical context and put on the political table to do the heavy lifting for the emerging institution of racism. It is used as a "political ram-rod, a generalized justification," hiding under the cloak of profound religious teachings, to justify condemning blacks forever as social and moral inferiors. In the Muslim interpretation of this same story, it is readily seen for what it is: a transparent attempt by Christians to neuter African Americans in an effort to make them passive to their own oppression. And clearly, for the most part, and for at least half a millennium, this Christian ruse apparently has worked to perfection.
The larger point is that in Christianity, political consciousness is reserved exclusively for the ruling hierarchy while spiritual consciousness is reserved exclusively for the lower rungs on the same hierarchy, i.e., for the subordinate classes. The rulers of course, as they do with respect to political doctrines and policies, also make up the religious doctrine and rules that the subordinate classes are bound by religious orthodoxy to follow. In order to square the difference between the dictates from "on high" by the religious hierarchy, and their own beliefs, run-of-the-mill Christians are thus forced to adopt a "false consciousness" to go along with their religious teachings. It is this "false consciousness" that does all of the heavy lifting in the background of Christianity, serving as a shield for those in the upper echelon of the religious hierarchy.
Not so for Muslims. which has a more flat equalitarian structure. Muslims thus are allowed to "engage" the process at the "political consciousness level" from the outset.
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