Abstract
This article responds to recent research calling for more nuanced discussions of Muslim political and social activist subjectivities (Ahmed 2011; Maira 2016; Mansouri et al. 2016; Nagel and Staeheli 2011). We analyze community and social justice activism among Muslims in Milwaukee through the lens of the American prophetic tradition. We argue that Muslim leaders in Milwaukee represent their activism as part of this tradition, and that they draw upon a complex of religious, social and political discourses and social practices. These include American civil rights activism, Islamically inspired social action, and a desire to engage in placemaking that responds to the specific conditions of Milwaukee, a city that features intense racial segregation, dense pockets of poverty, and increased immigration from the Arabo-Islamic world. Thus, we see a pluralization of Muslim social activist subjectivity: social justice activism which is religiously based, related to the civil rights tradition, and which is also highly attuned to the specific ways in which Muslims may practice a politics of belonging in this Midwestern city.
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Notes
She argues doing da’wa may be a response to Islamophobia as it refutes negative stereotypes about Islam. The Islamic directive to give to the community comes from religious concepts such as zakat (almsgiving) and ijtihad (reinterpreting the sacred message).
Notably, research in Britain also points to growth of coalition work among Muslims. Richard Phillips has shown how the Muslim Association of Britain has worked in coalition with a leading British anti-war group in the early 2000s as a way of both gaining more traction in the argument against war but also in opposing Orientalist discourse that limits western understandings of Muslim identity and behavior (Phillips 2009).
While it is not within the scope of the article to explore the transnational roots of Muslim movements and activism in the US, we refer the reader to excellent studies of this phenomenon, including Ahmed’s discussion of Islamist activism in Egypt and its impact on activism in the US. Also see Mustafa Bayoumi’s work on the influence of the Ahmadiyya movement (already mentioned on p. 8), which originated in India, on the Nation of Islam and other Black American Muslim groups as they worked to generate an “acceptable ontology for living in the racialized United States” (2015:47).
Ahmed cites Omid Safi’s edited volume Progressive Muslims (2003) as containing articles by numerous Muslim writers that argue that being a progressive Muslim involves working for socio-economic justice, pluralism and gender equity.
This is the spelling that the group uses for most of their public presence.
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Acknowledgements
We want to thank all of our research participants, who spent time with us answering a long list of questions, and sharing many fascinating stories of their lives and activism. We would also like to thank the UWM Libraries for enabling this stage of our research through the Fromkin Award; Ken Jackson for his excellent assistance in research; and the UWM Graduate School for funding earlier stages of this research. We thank the anonymous reviewers of Contemporary Islam for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. Finally, we would like to thank Claire Hancock and the Justice, Espace, Discriminations, Inégalités working group of the Labex Urban Futures for inviting us to present and discuss this project on March 15th-17th, 2016, in Paris, France. This discussion helped move our work forward in important ways.
Funding
This work was supported by the Fromkin Lectureship Award from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Library and funding from the UWM Department of Geography.
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Seymour-Jorn, C., Sziarto, K. & McGinty, A.M. The American prophetic tradition and social justice activism among Muslims in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Cont Islam 13, 155–181 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-018-0423-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-018-0423-0