Muslim Women & Practice

A network for Muslim women of African and African-diaspora descent — Sunni, Shia, Sufi, and the many communities our practice has built across the continent and the Americas. Sisters across the African American Muslim community, the West African Muslim community, the East African Muslim community, the North African Muslim community, and the Afro-Caribbean Muslim community. Reverts, born-Muslim, newly practicing, lifelong observant. We are in this practice together and we hold a wide tent.

Membership includes women across the full range of practice. Women who are deeply observant and structure their daily life around prayer and Quran and community. Women who are observant in some areas and still working on others. Women who were raised Muslim and have stepped away and are considering return. Women who are seeking and have not yet taken shahada. Women in interfaith marriages. Women whose extended family is mixed-faith. Women whose Islamic practice is the center of their public identity and women whose practice is private and quiet by choice.

What we talk about. Practice. The five pillars and how we live them in lives that are also full of careers and children and obligations and chronic illness and the realities that other Muslim women in the room understand. Prayer timings around work schedules. Wudu in public spaces. The accommodations we have asked for and received and the ones that we have done without. Fasting in pregnancy and postpartum and lactation and chronic disease and the fiqh that has guided us. Zakat and how we have structured our giving. Hajj preparation and Hajj memory.

Hijab choices. The decision to wear hijab. The decision not to. The decision to wear it sometimes. The decision to wear it differently across phases of life. The conversations we have had with our mothers and daughters and the cultural specifics in our communities. The professional implications. The legal questions in specific jurisdictions. We do not tell each other what to wear. We share what we have done and why.

Children. Raising Muslim children in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, and on the African continent. The Islamic school options and the public-school options and the homeschooling options. Halal food in school cafeterias. Friday prayer with school-age children. Ramadan as a family practice and the way we have involved children of different ages. The conversations our children are having with their non-Muslim friends and the way we are equipping them.

Marriage. The work of finding a partner inside our community. The decision about marrying outside the faith and the family conversation around it. The cultural and ethnic specifics — African American Muslim families navigating marriage with families from elsewhere, West African Muslim families navigating marriage with families from elsewhere, the long work of marrying across cultures even when everyone is Muslim. The premarital conversations. The marital conversations.

Divorce. The conditions under which Islamic and civil divorce structures interact. The local imam interactions and the imams who have been helpful and the ones who have not. The work of leaving a marriage and what that has cost in community standing in some cases and what it has not cost in others. The remarriage conversations.

Community. The masjid we attend and what it has been for us. The masjid we attended in childhood that we no longer feel home in. The women's sections and the gender-segregation conversations and our varying positions on them. The slow work of changing local masjid culture toward fuller inclusion of women. The Black-Muslim space within broader American Muslim community and the way our specific history (the Nation of Islam, the post-1975 transition, the parallel growth of West African and East African immigrant Muslim community) shapes who we are now.

Scholarship and study. Quran study circles. Hadith study. Tafsir. Fiqh in the schools of jurisprudence. The female scholars we are learning from — Aminah Wadud, Asma Lamrabet, Asma Barlas, Kecia Ali, contemporary writers and teachers. The slow work of centering women's scholarship in our practice.

Sufism. The tariqas that members are connected to. The dhikr practices. The shaykha relationships. The respect for variation across traditions while holding a shared core.

Politics. Anti-Muslim policy in the United States and Europe. The Palestine question and the Sudan question and the West African security crises and our community's response to all of them. The way American Muslim political organizing has and has not centered Black Muslim voices.

Cadence: a daily check-in thread, especially active during Ramadan. A weekly long-form thread on a single topic. A monthly virtual majlis. A quarterly session with a guest scholar or community leader. An annual in-person gathering, often tied to Eid.

Rules. Adab in conversation. Respect across schools of thought and across ethnic communities within the wider African Muslim ummah. No recruitment. No conversion attempts toward members who are non-practicing or who are exploring. No screenshotting. No naming specific masjids or community leaders in identifying ways outside closed contexts.

What we are: a circle of African and African-diaspora Muslim women supporting each other in the long arc of practice. We hold the specificity of being Black and Muslim in spaces where neither community fully sees us, and we make a place where we do see each other, fully and without apology.