Resisting the Veil of Universalism: Muslim Womanist Philosophy as a Lens for Authentic Representations of African American Muslim Women

From the moment I took myshahāda—the Islamic declaration of faith—in 1998, and formalized my journey to Islam from Christianity, I realized that whatever theoretical paths I would traverse, I might first have to clear a course myself or revise one developed by others. From conversations with African American Muslim women who guided my matriculation in Islam to explorations of the history on African American Muslim life, I became convinced that identity formation, cultural tradition, and religious representation can be as contextually-determined as they are intertwined. As Sherman Jackson has observed, “self-definition is always and fundamentally a social