The Women’s Mosque of America: Authority and Community in U.S. Islam

In recent years, scholarship in the social sciences has made important interventions in the study of Muslim women’s lived experiences in an increasingly globalized world. Following calls to question the universalizing assumptions about desire and subjectivity attached to the study of Muslim women’s lifeworlds (Abu-Lughod 2013; Mahmood 2001), a geographically and topically rich canon of scholarship examines the wide breadth of experiences that constitute Muslim womanhood. Some of the most boundary-pushing work has focused on what it means to be a religiously pious subject in capitalist, secular/secularizing, and increasingly multicultural societies (Fernando 2014; Grewal 2013; Hammer 2012; Mahmood 2005). While many studies have looked at how Muslim women think about piety and morality under increasingly precarious economic and political circumstances, there is little scholarship on how women actively shape and reshape the moral precepts and ethical guidelines of the spaces in which such piety is cultivated and fashioned, and even more so in the U.S. context.

It is here where Tazeen Ali’s book The Women’s Mosque of America: Authority and Community in U.S. Islam makes a valuable contribution. This in-depth qualitative study examines the Los Angeles-based Women’s Mosque of America (WMA) as a space that democratizes who can claim Islamic authority, centers women’s personal experiences, and engages with social injustice. Ali’s study is based on a combination of ethnographic and discursive methods, including participant observation of WMA prayer sessions and community events, and ethnographic interviews with WMA members who come from a range of racial and ethnic backgrounds. This is supplemented with textual analyses of WMA khutbahs (religious sermons) published online. Ali’s analysis is a rich dive into how American Muslim women at the WMA reconfigure conventional notions of authority, inclusivity, Qur’anic exegesis, and what function a mosque should have in an increasingly fractured and economically and racially unequal society. Ali argues that in constructing Islamic authority, WMA congregants navigate marginalization within mainstream patriarchal religious communities and Islamophobia within broader U.S. society.

In Chapter One (“Ritual Authority”), Ali provides a history of the WMA through the debates that emerge around ritual authority, including what counts as Islamically legal forms of woman-led prayer. She deftly shows that WMA members’ concerns about women leading prayer were distinct from those of their critics. Chapter Two (“Interpretive Authority: Reading the Qur’an in English”) examines the motivations behind khateebahs (a person who delivers a religious sermon) promoting English-language translations of the Qur’an in an attempt to expand access to leadership positions and to decenter Arabic as the “sole language of God” (p. 23). Chapter Three (“Embodied Authority: Women’s Experience as Exegesis”) looks at how khateebahs articulate their authority through drawing on their distinct experiences as women, including motherhood, gender-based violence, and other gendered experiences. Ali puts forth the possibility that a distinctly Muslim womanist and Black feminist epistemology informs the construction of khateebah authority.

Chapter Four (“Authority through Activism: Islamophobia, Social Justice, and Black Lives Matter”) is where the book offers some of its most ethnographically illuminating insights. The chapter examines the intersection of anti-Black racism and Islamophobia through the narratives of African American participants of WMA. The chapter also explores debates among South Asian immigrant participants about how to publicly relate Islamic scripture to the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as environmental racism and gender discrimination. Here, fissures between South Asian and Black American communities are explored, including anti-Black racism within more recently arrived immigrant communities. The fifth and final substantive chapter (“The Politics of Community Building: Intrafaith Inclusivity and Interfaith Solidarity”) looks at the possibilities and limitations of WMA creating interfaith alliances with American Jewish and Christian women.

Chapter Four features a range of khutbahs that critique the U.S. state’s role in anti-Muslim racism, and these are followed by a rich history of American Muslims’ hyper-visibilization in the post-9/11 era, which has its historical origins in FBI programs used against Black Muslims in the 1960s (pp. 161–62). Police brutality and mass incarceration appear in supplications that function to resuscitate distinctly Black American histories of oppression and civil rights activism. This chapter shows examples of how women use Islamic scripture to mobilize people to address social injustice. In reading this chapter, I was compelled and curious to learn more about what kinds of political mobilization such khutbahs inspired on the part of participants. For example, did they inspire people to care for their fellow racialized congregants at the level of individual relationships and acts of compassion, or did they inspire more collective forms of political action in their local communities?

I also wondered how the conversations such khutbahs affected the way that Black Muslim women congregants themselves were treated and experienced the WMA? Ali does analyze the reactions of three women to WMA’s BLM discussion series, which were illuminating in terms of the shortcomings of the series and the ignorance they felt community members still exhibited when it came to the Black experience. However, we do not get a sense of what the experiences of Black women were in the mosque itself. While Ali does point out that she did not prompt the women to discuss the BLM series but only prompted those who brought up the series on their own (pp. 178–79), highlighting the happenings within the everyday life of the mosque would have shown where the WMA sits within broader national conversations on racial injustice and served as a supplement to the interview narratives.

Analyzing one delimited space in such an in-depth way is instructive in that it refuses to take for granted that authority, Islamophobia, racism, and patriarchy are universally understood. WMA participants are treated as intersectional subjects who have different lived experiences of such dynamics. However, focusing primarily on the WMA also prompts curiosity about where the WMA sits within the broader local, national, and global landscape. Ali does discuss how participants cite global trends around Islamic authority, scripture, and schools of thought in India, China, and Syria and the history of the Islamic empire. However, a deeper focus not only on how participants interpret scripture and legal rulings, but on how they interact with such global institutions, as well as how these transnational ideas actually circulate institutionally and through various economic and political networks, would have more firmly illustrated how the WMA is part of a global conversation. However, such global circulations are more explicitly articulated in the Conclusion chapter (“American Muslim Women from the Margins to the Center”).

The Women’s Mosque of America is a significant contribution to studies of U.S. Islam and American Muslim women’s gendered, racialized, and classed experiences of religion. This ethnography exemplifies a sound intersectional analysis of women’s engagement with Islamic scripture and of Islam as a dynamic discursive tradition (Asad 1986). In reading this book, one can tell that Ali treats the interviews with deep care and thoughtfulness. The book will no doubt inspire further research on the ethno-racial plurality of Muslim life globally. This study will be of interest to scholars of American Islam, religious authority, Muslim women, and piety in the global North, and the intersection between religion and political activism.