Believing in South Central by Pamela J. Prickett

Author:Pamela J. Prickett [Prickett, Pamela J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL000000 Religion / General, REL037000 Religion / Islam / General, SOC026030 Social Science / Sociology / Urban, SOC001000 Social Science / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2021-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

* CHAPTER FOUR *

“Why Not Just Use a Cucumber!”

“I need a shirt that says on the front, I Am Not Here to Look for a Man.” Sisters Roxanne and Aisha were sitting together on the floor inside the masjid. When I joined the women with my plate, Roxanne was telling Aisha that the brothers’ mouths started watering when they saw her get out of the car with her catering pans.

“Hey, you never know,” I teased. “Nailah also said there wasn’t a man down here for her, and look now.”

Almost in unison the sisters replied, “But he’s not from here!”

“No, but she met him here.” I was referring to Aisha’s daughter, Sister Nailah, who met a man at Masjid al-Quran whom she would later date and marry. The man lived in New York and had been visiting as part of an event.

Sitting up straighter, Roxanne said, “Okay, I concede your point.” Almost immediately, though, she relaxed back into a more casual way of talking, saying how the “men down here” were “no good.” She added, “Brothers down here say, ‘Get on welfare, sister, stay at home, sister.’” Roxanne’s comment referred to the idea that men and women could have an Islamic marriage that was religiously binding but not legal by US laws—and therefore not a marriage that would nullify government benefits to single mothers.

Men at MAQ portrayed themselves as protectors and providers, and they tended to proclaim that women are the keepers of the home. As one of the imams instructed in his khutbah, “Be kind to womenfolk. It’s their duty to be chaste and good, and ours to be good to them.” This kind of essentializing gender discourse, combined with institutionalized gender segregation and the exclusion of women from religious leadership in most mosques around the world, contributes to public perceptions of Islam as an innately patriarchal religion that suppresses women’s interests.1 As anthropologist Saba Mahmood so eloquently explained, any study of Muslim women must at some point engage with “all the assumptions this dubious signifier triggers in the Western imagination concerning Islam’s patriarchal and misogynist qualities.”2

To a certain extent, women at MAQ accepted and even promoted traditional gender roles, but idealized notions of men as providers clashed with the lived reality that many of these women experienced. More often, the sisters worked and supported their families, while brothers struggled to find and keep employment. Many men suffered the stigma and material mark of a criminal record, or they lacked the education and experience to compete for well-paying jobs.3 I knew only a handful who worked in the kind of job that could support a family in an expensive city like Los Angeles. Men’s failure to provide for their wives and the tensions this produced were both a recurrent source of marital tension and legitimate grounds for divorce in women’s eyes.

This chapter examines how the MAQ community tried to valorize traditional gender roles in order to strengthen African American Muslim families. It also examines how the women, in response to

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