This panel showcases three papers that challenge established religious and social norms through racial and gendered embodiment. One paper explores the experiences of U.S. Black Muslima Betty Shabazz, emphasizing her acts of refusal against racial, religious, and gendered discourses that sought to limit her subjectivity. Another paper focuses on American Muslim comedians who perform halal comedy as a form of daʿwa to encourage ethical conduct and engage with various religious communities. A third paper examines the work of comedian-actor Kumail Nanjiani, who takes to task representation and stereotypes as a Muslim storyteller in American popular culture. His physical transformation for his role in “The Eternals,” sparked debates around masculinity, race, and Islamophobia, and showed the complexities of embodying a Muslim identity in Hollywood. Together, these papers offer nuanced insights into the ways that racial and gendered embodiment can be a site of resistance and defiance against societal norms and expectations.
This paper examines the relationship between U.S. secularism and blackness through an engagement with U.S. Black Muslima thought, focusing specifically on Betty Shabazz (1934-1997), a figure powerfully aligned with Black Muslima life. It identifies three acts of refusal preserved in her mid-twentieth-century archive. Shabazz resisted integration into existing racial, religious, and gendered discourses from her first encounters with the NOI in 1955 to her corrections to Malcolm X’s politics post-1965. Shabazz’s negations rejected the status quo and envisioned alternative possibilities for black life (Campt, 2019). Attention to Shabazz’s refusals allows scholars of religion to see moments where a religiously, racially, and gender-identified subject disagrees with how the world diagnoses their religion, gender, and race. Secularism is the term that I argue integrates Blackness into what is Thinking with Shabazz shows that this integration depends on erasing Blackness as an epistemology for thinking and imagining otherwise in the twentieth century.
Over the last three decades, several American Muslim stand-up comedians have positioned themselves at the forefront of a halal circuit, such as Preacher Moss, Omar Regan, Yasmin Elhady and Moses the Comic. These four comedians share a commitment to clean comedy and have dedicated a considerable part of their career to connecting with their religious community/ies. Research shows how their performances broadly partake in efforts to (re)model a religious community around norms of virtuous conduct in Muslim diasporic contexts (Thonnart 2023). Following their trajectories, this paper examines what it means when comedians make propositions about religious norms to their coreligionists; and 2) argues that these ethico-religious projects constitute a form of *da‘wa*. Building upon the work of anthropologist Charles Hirschkind, this paper seeks to open and deepen the study of socioreligious activism in and through comedy, and critically engage our vocabularies in doing so.
The Pakistani American comedian Kumail Nanjiani stands among the most prominent Muslim storytellers in the U.S. television and film industries today. Through his training in standup, Nanjiani is aware that this body communicates something to be addressed and redressed for audiences immediately – what Jasbir Puar calls the “queer perversity of terrorist bodies.” His comedy routines, shows, and film all articulate and platform Pakistan as a very "Muslim" place; a mythical homogenous home to inequality and suffering, particularly for Muslim women but also for the men who cannot overcome Islam's determinism. Nanjiani names and enacts that deficiency through the seemingly woeful masculinity of a "beta male" body. His 2019 transformation for the Marvel Cinematic Universe reveals the fraught nature of Muslim masculinities that can only temporarily approximate the ideal white masculine form before suspicion and cruel assessments turn, once more, against those bodies from which Islam cannot be extracted.
| Hussein Rashid | hr@husseinrashid.com | View |