Carolyn M. Rouse

(From Pages 1 - 4)

In 1991, when I ventured onto the grounds of Masjid Ummah in Southern California, I was not new to African American Sunni Islam. In college, I had attempted to understand the “evolution” of the Muslim movement by examining the Nation of Islam’s journal Muhammad Speaks from the early 1960s through its transformation into the Muslim Journal, a Sunni Muslim weekly.

What began my love of and fascination with the African American Sunni Muslim community is what I now see as an important but naive observation. While riding on a bus in Chester Pennsylvania in ninety-nine degree weather, I observed a woman walking on the sidewalk and wearing dark, brown, polyester hijab, and veil. She had two young children in tow, a boy and a girl, each with the proper, gendered head coverings: a skull cap for the boy and a scarf for the girl. I thought to myself, “Why would a woman in America choose not to be a feminist?” Or “Why would a woman in America choose not to have choices?”

With respect to the first question, in the feminist literature of the 1970s, the psychological, symbolic, and neo-Marxist approaches to the study of gender asked why women are universally oppressed. The assumption of course is that in every society women are considered inferior, an assumption that has been challenged in what is often described as “third wave feminism.” At the time I asked these questions, in the mid- and late 1980s, I was unfamiliar with the works of, for example, Chandra Mohanty, bell hooks, and Moraga & Anzaldua, who around the same time were articulating the importance of race, class, gender, and nation in terms of women's experiences with gender. These authors challenged the idea that to be a feminist means adopting an ideology and political agenda defined mainly by European American women, whose race, class, and education influenced the scope and breadth of their feminist ideals. Indeed, there were numerous reasons poor people of color would choose not to call themselves feminists, but those reasons would only become clear to me well after I asked them on the bus in Chester.

So then, “Why would a woman in America choose not to have choices?” The ideas of choice and rationality are discussed much more frequently within the disciplines of philosophy, psychology, and, because choice and rationality dovetail with ideals of freedom, studies of democracy. While I am poorly equipped to enter into serious dialogue with philosophers and psychologists, I have revisited the anthropological project of cultural relativism and its meaning not simply as a strategy for engaging with our informants, but at the level of unmaking ourselves by challenging our own assumptions. I appreciate the relativist approach, which is not to judge one set of cultural values relative to another; however, it has caused me a great deal of paralysis when trying to address questions about liberation and empowerment. Within a relativist framework, for example, must we agree that a Muslim woman who is physically abused by her husband, but thinks she is liberated, is indeed liberated? In response to my paralysis, I chose to fall back upon the wisdom of a judge who said, "I know illegal pornography when I see it." This approach acknowledges that to make a determination of "decent" or "indecent" is not a science but an art. I adopt this approach when interpreting Muslim women's comments about their own empowerment. Statements like "I'm liberated," or "America is a freedom loving country," can be as exhibitionist as pornography, and the anthropologist must determine the representational values of those personal and political declarations with respect to some referential truth. Freedom always has contraints, and methodologically we must locate the constraints in order to define the freedom, not the other way around.

Since my aborted first attempt in 1986/​87 and subsequent resumption in 1991, I have focused my research on Muslim converts on the deconstruction of the theoretical assumptions and biases that informed my initial two questions. After identifying the problems with my initial response, I shifted my focus and began asking, What is feminism? And what choices do women have in America? I decided the best approach toward understanding choices was to abandon the comfort of my secular “Western” worldview in order to relate to a consciousness that often ignores the social, political, even material environment for intangible rewards. Or are they intangible? They are intangible for people who do not share the same epistemology. For most American women, a Muslim woman’s choice to dress in hijab is as destructive as suttee or foot binding. But if we only acknowledged one worldview as legitimate, 99 percent of the population could be faulted for ignorance, stupidity and/​or irrationality. Relativists defend, on a theoretical level, cultural choices like hammering off the fingers of Dani girls in New Guinea after a male relative dies. Universalists, however, believe the ideology supporting such acts is indeed problematic. I heard an anthropologist describe the tug-of-war between universalists and relativists as analogous to the American struggle between equality and justice. Put another way, American society has competing social ideals of recognizing others as social and political equals while also believing in universal forms of justice. The universalist part of the American psyche believes in political and moral universals like democracy and social justice while the relativist believes that people must be allowed to be different and to respect those differences as equal. The conflict between these two ideals becomes especially interesting in cases where the Ku Klux Klan wants to march on public property, or when a majority of parents want their children to pray in school. I, like my American counterparts, have the same bifurcated utopian ideal. Therefore, I recognize that my research has been driven in part by the desire to reconcile my belief that these women are my equals in their capacity to make “rational” decisions with my belief that Western feminism and Western freedom are in fact good things.

My interest in understanding “rational” behavior comes from my interest in resistance consciousness and strategies for overcoming oppression. Being African American, I am not unique in my desire to try to understand the puzzle of race and oppression, or in my desire for progressive social change. My initial fieldnotes outline questions and codes that at the time, I believed, would help me determine if African American women who convert to Islam are reproducing their oppression. Questions included: Are you wealthier now than before you converted? What material contributions have you made to the Sunni community? I wanted to know whether the Muslim women’s religious practices and ideology produced the intended results. Finally, I realized that I was using a modernist sensibility in trying to understand human intentions and action, and my methods could only lead to a determination that my informants were falsely conscious. To accept my methods and data was to accept a universalist social-science approach that takes for granted the idea that people are objective and act rationally, that cultures evolve in a unilinear fashion, and that economic class organizes intentions, actions, identity, and consciousness - a kind of economic reductionism. Ideas of rational praxis are, after all, firmly grounded in history, and the historical production of knowledge, which means even the theories of praxis, most notably Marx’s, are tied to powerful epistemologies. I wanted to avoid a teleology that begins and ends with the same determination of what ought to be, a common subtext in political economy theory. Instead, I traced consciousness lineages, if you will, in order to determine not whether the Sunni Muslim resistance consciousness is “rational,” in a positivist sense, but how resistance consciousness emanates from and acts upon the American phenomenas of racism, sexism, and poverty.