as the Arabs), Muslims discovered that establishing
families often required extraordinary effort (import-
ing a spouse from a distant country). Not until 1965
were these laws to relax and allow a much more free-
flowing creation of family life to occur. American
Muslim women faced the additional problem that
they could not marry unless the husband-to-be pro-
fessed Islam. Spousal conversion is a significant
theme encountered from the inception of Islam in
North America. When it failed, parents had to send
daughters back to the country of original to procure
suitable mates, usually through the good offices of a
relative. Poor families could not afford this luxury
and even wealthier Muslims found it problematic.
Moreover, while arranged marriages are the norm in
Islam, such marriages usually only apply to the first,
with the result that divorced immigrant women, or
women whose husbands are deceased, must rely on
their own initiative or well-placed community re-
sources to find a further spouse.
Another area of conflict was the Muslim accept-
ance of polygamy, a practice at odds with law in the
United States; those who had more than one wife
had to adopt divergent means, such as maintaining
a second household, but without the legal benefits
accorded the first wife under the law of the country.
Clearly the roadblocks to appropriate marriage
spurred adaptation, and marriages were often bro-
kered with a Muslim from a different ethnic group,
or even of a different, but related religious group,
such as Christian Arabs, providing continuity at
least in cultural if not in religious affairs.
Early on, Muslim gendered differentiation also
had an impact on attitudes toward premarital sex.
Values derived from Muslim countries affirmed the
central role of the female in maintaining family
legitimacy and/or Islamic veracity, and for the im-
migrant community, great emphasis was placed on
a segregated and honor-bound space for Muslim
girls. By contrast, while sexual experimentation
with non-Muslim women was officially denounced
by religious authorities, it was often tolerated for
young males. By the twenty-first century these con-
cerns had shifted. Faced with the threat to family
integrity posed by HIV and other sexually-trans-
mitted diseases, families became equally concerned
that both males and females adhere to a Muslim
standard, whether they be male or female. Where
parents of daughters were almost universally con-
cerned about the perils of sexual involvement with
young men, now many American Muslim parents
fret just as much over the potential waywardness of
sons. Hence resistance to the perceived rampant
sexual freedom in American society is now en-
joined upon all youth. Since arranged marriages168 family: modern islamic discourses
continue to be the vehicle of choice for Muslim
youth of immigrant families, the concept of mar-
riage as a contract between families, rather than
individuals committing themselves to each other,
continues to be an important feature of Islamic life.The rise of African-American
Islam
With the advent of the Moorish Science Temple
in 1913, Timothy Drew began the articulation of a
discrete and crucial element in contemporary
American culture: the African-American Muslim
movement. Its most vigorous and empowered son
was to be Elijah Muhammad (1897–1975), whose
Nation of Islam succeeded in reaching the poor and
largely neglected inner city ghettos. The movement
was partly successful because Elijah Muhammad
insisted on the validity of the Nation’s family life.
For him, broken homes with many children, all
without the required Islamic male supervision, were
wreaking havoc in African-American society. He
set out to re-establish the traditional Islamic family
structure through several innovative ways: he built
upon the strength of women to construct his educa-
tional institutions and women’s organizations; he
insisted on the training of girls as much as boys; he
reinforced the role of women in the home and family
by highlighting their achievements; and he assigned
his paramilitary organization, the Fruit of Islam, a
role in disciplining recalcitrant males. He aggres-
sively insisted on the Fruit’s role in re-directing male
responsibilities toward spouses and children. He
affirmed the Islamic norm of marriage contracts
and commitments. All these actions, and others of
similar intent, were to have a powerful impact on
the burgeoning growth of the movement.
The success of Elijah Muhammad may be the
most spectacular, but it is not the only African-
American story. Charged by a religious sense of
hijra, or migration, African-Americans clustered
into little communities, attempting to withdraw
from the larger society into a space bordered by an
Islamic consciousness. Such social experiments as
Jabul Arabiyya in West Valley, New York, or the
Universal Islamic Brotherhood in Cleveland estab-
lished a sense of distinctiveness and promoted a
connectedness to Muslim culture in the Middle East
and Africa. Key to the founding of these communi-
ties was the Islamization of gender, marriage, and
family. Thus, Imam Da±ud, founder of the Universal
Islamic Brotherhood, insisted on the segregation of
boys from girls in his schools, instituted the use of
veils for all women and girls, and promoted a sense
of equal but distinctive space within the commu-
nity, in effect, a gendered space similar to that