The Sacred Geographies of Twentieth Century Muslim Americans

This paper examines conceptions of sacred geography invoked by two Muslim groups in the first half of the twentieth century, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, and the Moorish Science Temple of America (MSTA). These two groups had considerable differences, the Ahmadiyya began as a minority theological movement in South Asia, while the MSTA had their own version of the Qur’an and never spread outside of the United States’ borders. Despite these differences, both groups adopted a similar proselytization tactic: presenting a vision of Islam that would eliminate racial inequality in the United States. The American branch of the Ahmadiyya and the MSTA were also both founded in Chicago, in 1922 and 1925 respectively. Remarkably, there is no documentation of the founders of the Ahmadiyya and MSTA movements in the United States, Mufti Muhammad Sadiq and Noble Drew Ali, meeting or acknowledging one another, although they must have been aware of one another as they competed for converts. However, as the two movements grew, subsequent generations of leadership, as well as everyday people involved in the Ahmadiyya and the MSTA, did interact.

Through community newspapers and periodicals, the Ahmadiyya and the MSTA mapped out an imagined Muslim world. Cemil Aydin explains that the racialization of Muslim identities was bound up in the transformation of Islam into a universal and civilizational tradition. The idea of a Muslim world provided the Ahmadiyya and MSTA with a vision in which their small burgeoning groups in the United States could be understood as integral components of much larger global forces. Geographic touchstones for both groups included Chicago, New York, Medina, Mecca, Kashmir, Qadian, North Carolina, the American South, India, Egypt, Morocco, Asia, and Africa. This seemingly eclectic mix of locations, ranging from cities to regions to continents, were consecrated and stitched together through repeated invocation. Each of these sacred locations came with a specific purpose, a history of symbolic meaning tied to racial and religious identities. When placed together, these locations created a mental map of sacred Muslim space.

The Ahmadiyya were born in the context of British colonial rule, and both the American chapter of the Ahmadiyya and the MSTA were created in response to the conditions of Black Americans, who are internally colonized peoples within the United States, to use Sylvester Johnson’s term. The geographic assemblages mapped out by the Ahmadiyya and the MSTA in the early twentieth century were no more or less arbitrary than the binary division of the world into East and West often promoted by economically dominant world powers today. Categorization is a means of establishing mastery of knowledge, and in drawing specific maps of an imagined Muslim world, members of the Ahmadiyya and MSTA attempted to chart a course for the world as it could be, a worldwide coalition of Muslims or Moors that shifted current global power dynamics.

In addition to mapping sacred space across the globe, the MSTA and Ahmadiyya drew on metaphors for movements between spaces, narratives of migration and diaspora that I theorize as a poetics of hirja, to present their current coalitions and physical location as destined, or at least endorsed, by God. Drawing on Stuart Hall’s understanding of diaspora, I explore how both the MSTA and Ahmadiyya sought transformation through their articulations of diaspora, not necessarily through one pure static identity, but through an intentional utilization of hybridity. The MSTA’s congregation was drawn almost exclusively from the Great Migration, the exodus of Black Americans who left the American South for cities across the United States in the twentieth century, fleeing violence and seeking new opportunities. The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in the United States was born of a double diaspora and migration, Ahmadi South Asian immigration, and the Great Migration. The founder of the Ahmadiyya, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, famously proclaimed that the Ahmadiyya should seek “the spiritual Colonization of the Western world,” a phrase repeated by Mufti Muhamad Sadiq and subsequent Ahmadiyya missionaries to the United States. Through missionaries Ahmadis in the United States were connected to a network of Ahmadis in Africa, Asia, and Europe.

In seeking to solve the problem of American racism both the Ahmadiyya and the MSTA imagined a Muslim world, and in the process, presented different interpretations of a racialized Muslim identity. The MSTA presented Islam as a racial category, and the Ahmadiyya presented Islam as an equalizer that would create a coalition between racial groups. Following Adrienne Rich’s invocations that “the geography closest to us are our bodies,” I examine what the spatial imaginings of these groups meant in terms of how members of these groups envisioned their own physical bodies as Muslims, and what this meant in terms of reclaiming processes of racialization from the state.