Centering the Black Muslimah: Interrogating Gendered, Anti-Black Islamophobia

Islamophobia is an everyday Muslim reality. It takes spectacular acts of violence, such as the brutal 2021 slaying of a London, Ontario Muslim family, to bring this common Muslim experience to public consciousness (Zardosky, 2021). Yet, extensive studies show that Islamophobia has a firm foothold in Canada as in much of the contemporary world (Allen; Bouchard and Taylor, 2007; Wilkins-Laflamme, 2018). For all the generality of the Muslim experience of discrimination, however, Islamophobia is like all forms of systemic oppression more acutely experienced at particular intersections. Perhaps the most palpable of these intersections is the meeting of the Muslim identity not only with gender but also specifically with race. If the body of the Muslim woman is constantly marked and othered, that of the black Muslim woman inhabits an even more precarious intersection. Studies of Islamophobia and the state’s complicity in its systemic and structural forms, including those that pay attention to gender and those that interrogate Islamophobia as anti-Muslim racism, have, however, been inattentive to the precarity of the black Muslim woman. This essay tentatively interrogates how Islamophobia in its systemic forms encounters the black Muslim woman. This essay maps out what interrogation of this encounter might entail, the voices it will foreground, the forms of questions it might enable scholars and activists to ask, and its possible contributions to scholarly and policy debates.