http://sapelosquare.com/: This photo is the first known group photo of visibly-identifiable Muslim women in the United States. It was originally featured in the January 1923 edition of The Moslem Sunrise, the newsletter of the Ahmadiyya Movement of Islam (AMI) in the United States, a South-Asia based Islamic missionary movement that was one of the first major Muslim organizations in the U.S. This image is often included histories of U.S. American Islam, generally as a way of documenting Black American women’s presence in early Islamic movements in the U.S. Yet little attention has been paid to the actual women in the photo, named in the caption as Mrs. Thomas (Sister Khairat), Mrs. Watts (Sister Zeineb), Mrs. Robinson (Sister Ahmadia), Mrs. Clark (Sister Ayesha): who they were, where they came from, and how and why they came to convert to Ahmadiyya Islam.

In my forthcoming book, Gendering American Islam: U.S. Muslim Women and the Question Race, I recount a cultural history of U.S. Muslim women’s lives across the 20^th-21^st century which begins with this image, taken in November 1922 at the Al-Sadiq Mosque on 4448 South Wabash Avenue in the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago. In my exploration of the photo, I examine the ways in which early Black American Muslim women learned to be Muslim and practice Islam in the harsh environments of the post-Great Migration urban North, and in the context of new formations of kinship and difficult working and living conditions in industrial Chicago. For example, how did working-class Black Ahmadi Muslim women find spaces to pray during their workday? How did they explain their sudden avoidance of pork to their non-Muslim families and communities? How were they to raise their children as Muslims? And, how should they dress and express themselves as Muslims? In the image, one sees the innovative and improvisatory approaches of these women in attempting to answer the last question. They wrapped shawls and bed sheets around and over their Sunday church hats and dresses in order to announce their newfound religious identities.

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