Reading Adventures Continued: Engaged Surrender - African American Women and Islam by Carolyn Moxley Rouse

How can one surrender and stay engaged within that surrender? The book reveals how African American women converts in LA engage in tafsir (interpretation) at the level of the everyday Sunni Islam and as part of community activism. The respondents utilize the Quran, the prophetic traditions (hadith), Islamic history, the Arabic language, and "spirit of Islam" (based on their definition!) to establish a meaningful connection between their sense of reason and their faith. Their re-reading Islam is an attempt of decentralization; that is, divesting it from its middle eastern cultural baggage, decenter its history, and attribute new meanings to the texts through their own social history and life experiences. Moxley Rouse explains that as these women challenge American hegemonic discourses about race, gender, and class, their political consciousness is further mobilized, and their motivation for more engagement with Islamic documents is further enhanced. In order to re-appropriate Islam, women inject it with a discourse of liberation and promote Islamic feminism in the traditional discourse.

I appreciate the presence of the author/researcher throughout the book, and her openness about her initial prejudices: having been schooled in “the virtues of Western feminism”, at first, Moxley Rouse views females’ conversion as irrational and a reproduction of their oppression. Once in the community, however, things made sense. Referring to Pierre Bourdieu, she agrees that the ethnographers must be aware of their informants’ manipulation of cultural symbols in the interest of acquiring power or resisting oppression. Surrender is the key component in Islam but it “doesn’t happen in the absence of engagement with the sources of faith, the texts, and the community” (213). Hence comes the intriguing title of the book: Engaged Surrender, which sounds like an oxymoron, but not in my own engagement with religions.

Like the author, I also find it unfortunate that the modern interpretations of Islam are often challenged as personal opinion instead of as religious truth although Moxley Rouse claims that this doesn’t deter African American Muslim women from creating an indigenous American version of Islam (215). The women attempt to revolutionize from within by rereading historical documents on Islam and challenging the authenticity of some hadith by using modern translations of the Qur’an for their tafsir.

Although researched and emerged in a completely context from my own, the book is still useful for exemplifying several incidents regarding lived religion from women’s view points in a way that can empower them within a patriarchal system. In my next post, I will continue to discuss the topic from a comparative view, introducing two new articles: Rania Kamlas’ “Religion-based Resistance Strategies, Politics of Authenticity and Professional Women Accountants” (2018) in Syrian context, and Taghreed Jamal Al-deen’s “Australian Young Muslim Women’s Construction of Pious and Liberal Subjectivities,” (2020) and look into the concepts of agency and empowerment within lived Islam.