This paper offers an intellectual history of Black Muslim thought that centers the distinctly feminist epistemologies of Black nationalist organizers Louise Little (1894-1989), Betty Shabazz (1934-1997), and Safiya Bukhari (1950-2003). Through archival research and close reading of posthumously published works, I trace the psychic, intuitive knowledge that Grenadian-born Garveyite activist Louise Little seeded in her son, Malcolm X; Betty Shabazz's use of channeling to refuse the secularization of Black nationalist thought post-1965 and frame Islam as a spiritual turn toward African indigeneity; and Safiya Bukhari’s reliance on co-conspiracy with the divine to liberate herself and her fellow Black Panther comrades from U.S. prisons. I argue that adding self-centered, felt, sensed, and intuited knowledge—alongside the read, ritualized, and revealed—complicates the standard narrative of Black Islam and Black Nationalism, as popularized by Malcolm X, and its equation with masculinist, top-down notions of religious authority and knowledge.
Self-centered modes of knowing were vital to Black women’s livelihoods, spiritual subjectivities, and self-determination in the twentieth century. Though often overlooked in Malcolm X scholarship, Louise Little played a foundational role in his spiritual intellectualism and embrace of Islam. In prison letters (1948–1952), Malcolm described her as his first teacher of Islam, someone who had “instinctively known much of the Truth” and was “a most Faithful Servant of Truth years ago.” He saw her Muslimness in her refusal to “deadening the mind” and in her teachings that helped her children see beyond the veil of anti-Blackness in the segregated Midwest. Echoing Malcolm, Wilfred Little recalled his mother’s most important lesson: talking to the self. She taught him to access his “higher self” through meditation, believing that “the real us is our soul,” capable of leaving the body and returning with deeper knowledge (1995, 36-38). Her practice of talking-to-the-self led to her forced institutionalization in 1939, yet her teachings profoundly shaped Malcolm’s religious thought, as evidenced in his archived speeches, notes to self, and religious teachings. With Louise center stage, Malcolm’s embrace of Islam extends beyond Great Man narratives that portray him as a fatherless Black child seeking male heroes. Rather, Malcolm comes into frame as a child in search of his mother’s garden, nurturing the seeds of intuition she planted within him.
Though Betty Shabazz was often asked to serve as Malcolm X’s medium, she channeled a broader genealogy of Black radical thought in the aftermath of his martyrdom. I use “channeling” to name Shabazz’s evocation of numerous Black worldmaking traditions to inspire people to determine for themselves the future of Black life, even in the face of death. Between 1965 and 1970, she gave interviews, wrote book chapters, and delivered speeches at universities and community organizations. Across these venues, she consistently rejected Malcolm’s secularization into liberal progress narratives, instead emphasizing his internationalist, pan-African vision of U.S. Black nationalism. Consistently affirming her own Black Muslimness, Shabazz invoked Islam’s association with a pre-slavery African past to emphasize Black women’s roles as mothers, warriors, educators, and mystics in the face of their Moynihan-ish degradation. Like her Black feminist peers, Shabazz fashioned Islam as an “everyday Afro-diasporic spirituality” that challenged the racialized gender norms of her time (Maglorie 2023, 70). In 1968, Shabazz became a vice president of the Republic of New Africa (RNA), advocating for a U.N. supervised plebiscite to establish an independent Black nation in the South. Shabazz lent her time, name, and vision to a Black nationalist movement that extended Malcolm’s commitment to self-determination in religious and spiritual terms. Shabazz refused to frame Malcolm’s death as a conclusion to the Black radical thought she and other Black nationalists were actively developing.
In December 1967, Safiya Bukhari co-conspired with the Divine to escape from prison. Bukhari, a COINTELPRO political prisoner and member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army, spent the first three years of her sentence at the Virginia Correctional Center for Women in solitary confinement. As self-narrated in her posthumously published essays, “Becoming a Black Revolutionary” and “’Islam and Revolution’ Is Not a Contradiction,” Bukhari’s solitary confinement marked the beginning of what she described as a relationship “strictly between me and Allah,” with no men or texts involved (2010, 68). When prison doctors were unwilling to treat her life-threatening ovarian tumors, Bukhari “consulted Allah about my decision to leave, and He showed me that I would, indeed, get away from Goochland. But He also showed me that I would return,” and on the evening of December 31, 1976, Bukhari escaped (2010, 70). When Bukhari was recaptured in February 1977, she was charged with escape and represented herself at trial. Bukhari’s narrativization of her self-manumission, self-defense on trial, and unmediated relationship with the Divine offers a critical site for thinking about Muslim women’s relationship to Islam, authority, and agency outside of the traditional framing of subordination vs. resistance, yielding, and negotiation.
Over the past twenty years, scholars of Islam in America have paved the way for Islam’s inclusion in African American religious history, challenging the narrative of Black religion as synonymous with the Black church and theorizing the racialized and gendered logics of Christian hegemony, Orientalism, and secularism. While scholarship on Islam and Muslims is now central to African American religious history, a standard narrative of Black Islam has emerged. This narrative relegates Black Islam and Muslim thought to the domain of Great Men, temples, mosques, and heteropatriarchy. When Muslim women enter the scene, it is often their dress, domesticity, and negotiation with hierarchical religious authority that takes center stage. The feminist modes of knowing otherwise in the lives of Little, Malcolm X, Shabazz, and Bukhari—feminist in their affirmation of Black women’s lived experiences, rejection of supplied states of being, and their non-hierarchical, collective orientations—offer a critical site for thinking with Black Islam beyond its standard narrative and Black religion, spirituality, feminism, and nationalism as overlapping traditions in the lives of U.S. Black women. This work highlights the historical importance of these figures and reveals that U.S. Black nationalism has a feminist history tied to Black women’s spiritual practices and epistemologies.
This paper offers an intellectual history of Black Muslim thought that centers the distinctly feminist epistemologies of Black nationalist organizers Louise Little (1894-1989), Betty Shabazz (1934-1997), and Safiya Bukhari (1950-2003). Through archival research and close reading of posthumously published works, I trace the psychic, intuitive knowledge that Grenadian-born Garveyite activist Louise Little seeded in her son, Malcolm X; Betty Shabazz's use of channeling to refuse the secularization of Black nationalist thought post-1965 and frame Islam as a spiritual turn toward African indigeneity; and Safiya Bukhari’s reliance on co-conspiracy with the divine to liberate herself and her fellow Black Panther comrades from U.S. prisons. I argue that adding self-centered, felt, sensed, and intuited knowledge—alongside the read, ritualized, and revealed—complicates the standard narrative of Black Islam and Black Nationalism, as popularized by Malcolm X, and its equation with masculinist, top-down notions of religious authority and knowledge.