If Hajj City Could Talk: Long-Lived Black Muslim Women and the Making of Islamic Boston

If Hajj City—as Boston was known in the late 1970s and early 1980s because of the number of local Black Muslims who completed the pilgrimage to Mecca—could talk, it would reveal how Islamic communities across the twentieth century become newly visible when traced through the long lives of Black Muslim women. This paper examines the life of Hajjah Raheemah Abdullah (1929–2019), a South Carolina–born migrant whose religious life spanned Methodist Christianity, the Nation of Islam, and Sunni orthodoxy. Drawing on personal archives, oral histories, newspapers, and pilgrimage records, the paper reconstructs how her life intersected with major transformations in American religious and social history, including the Great Migration and the development of Islam in Boston. By treating longevity as a unit of historical analysis, this study shows how Black Muslim women functioned as institutional mediators whose lives illuminate the formation and continuity of Islamic communities within twentieth-century American urban history.