An African-American Muslim Woman Speaks: Using Autoethnography to Examine Race, Class, and Gender in the American Muslim Ummah

This thesis examines the emerging contemporary critical discourse on American Muslims and presents an autoethnographic narrative of one African-American Muslim woman's experiences focused on four axes of analysis: race, gender, romance/sex, and religion. As the exploration of these four variables in the current discourse is critiqued, narratives from the author's own African-American Muslim experiences with racism, sexism, sexuality, and religion are shared in relation to emergent critical literature on gender segregation, dating and sex, and racial polemics within the ummah. This thesis focuses on young Muslim Americans' negotiation of romantic relationships within and outside marriage as well as problems related to the dichotomy between American and Islamic identification. One purpose of this research is to increase representation of African-American women's voices as they tend to be underrepresented within the discourse and literature on American Islam. As Shabana Mir, one of the leading Muslim scholar-critics from which this research emerges, points out, autoethnography is appropriate for capturing the "multiple, complex, and shifting identities" Muslims hold (Mir, 2006, 6). This exploratory study concludes by pointing out the many underresearched areas that remain for Muslim American scholars to investigate.