(Picture supply: Tristan Sosteric/Medium)
As was typically the case, José and I met at an Olive Backyard in Gainesville, Florida.
In our many conversations since assembly on the San Juan Conference Heart in Puerto Rico for Eid celebrations a pair years earlier than, we had settled on the chain as our go-to spot for confabs as soon as José moved to Central Florida searching for work.
And so, for hours one spring night as we refilled bowls of salad and tore aside heat breadsticks, José sketched a imaginative and prescient of the long run.
Between sips of candy tea, José—a half-Puerto Rican and half-Haitian convert to Islam in his forties, residing between Puerto Rico and Central Florida—leaned ahead and mentioned, “The Islamic renaissance will begin right here within the Americas, amongst us, amongst Black, Caribbean, and Latino Muslims.”
As converts minoritized in a number of instructions, he defined, that they had discovered onerous classes about marginality, suspicion, and survival. That was exactly why they might prepared the ground ahead—not by drive, however “by kindness and compassion, equity and justice.”
For the 15,000–20,000 Puerto Rican Muslims residing in Puerto Rico and the USA, marginalization is a truth of each day life. Their authenticity is questioned by fellow Muslims and by fellow Boricua (which means “Puerto Ricans,” derived from Borikén, the Taíno indigenous identify for the island), many who view Islam as a international entity. In addition they reside beneath the shadow of U.S. colonialism and throughout the threat-centered, law-and-order logics of American empire.
To be a Puerto Rican Muslim then, is to barter on a regular basis being and belonging at quite a few intersections of race, faith, class, and political standing.
Once I requested José how Puerto Rican Muslims match into the renaissance he envisioned, he smirked. “We’re pure hybrids, man. No one deliberate to make Puerto Rican Muslims. We simply occurred.” Then, extra significantly: “We’re the subsequent stage within the ummah’s [Muslim community’s] evolution.”
For José and others like him, conversion will not be a break from their ancestry and traditions however a collision of cultures, customs, and communities. The method is never straightforward.
Whereas stereotypes typically recommend marriage or incarceration are the most typical pathways to conversion, most Puerto Rican converts truly encounter Islam by on a regular basis relationships with pals, coworkers, or neighbors, which then results in private research and religious exploration. Many are drawn to Islam’s robust monotheism, each day self-discipline, and emphasis on equality earlier than God. Others arrive by broader social and political issues reminiscent of experiences with racialization or solidarity with international points such because the Palestinian battle, which might spark curiosity about Muslim communities and their beliefs. For some Puerto Ricans, these political or moral entry factors resonate with their very own histories of marginalization and colonization.
Finally, their conversion narratives typically weave collectively religious looking out, private relationships, and social justice commitments, permitting converts to border Islam not as one thing international however as a significant extension of their present cultural worlds. Though they see Islam as suitable with Puerto Ricanness, the Puerto Rican Muslims I met not often felt solely at residence in masjid or barrio, on the archipelago or within the U.S. And but they drew on variegated lineages to craft methods of belonging that refused singular definition. In doing so, they only may level the best way towards the futures José imagines.
Fiction, Energy, and the Powerless
Once I started researching what would grow to be Borícua Muslims: On a regular basis Cosmopolitanism amongst Puerto Rican Converts to Islam, I discovered myself reaching for literature—from the archipelago, the diaspora, and broader Puerto Rican and Muslim worlds—to interpret what I used to be witnessing.
Throughout early fieldwork in Puerto Rico, I met writer Joel Feliciano, who handed me a replica of his debut dystopian novel, Los Impoderes (“The Powerless”). The story unfolds in a future world ravaged by a warfare whose origins have pale from reminiscence. Its characters wander by landscapes which are as psychological as they’re bodily, craving for connection and customary objective. They’re haunted by future and by the phantasm that they could management what comes subsequent. Finally, Los Impoderes means that identification will not be secured by domination however solid in relation. Mastery of our lives, our destinies, is futile. Which means as an alternative emerges in connection.
Though my e book is ethnographic moderately than speculative science fiction, the lives of Puerto Rican Muslim converts echo comparable themes. Many described intervals of profound trying to find theological coherence, ethical self-discipline, and communities able to holding their experiences of race, migration, and colonial marginalization all on the similar time. Like Feliciano’s characters, they weren’t merely searching for perception, they have been searching for a place to belong.
Largely, that’s what drew me to their tales. In a world the place range and distinction drive us all to contemplate who “We” are and who “They” could also be, Borícua Muslim tales present us there’s immense artistic potential and humility to be discovered within the stress between “outsider” and “insider.”
Take my relationship with Khadijah, an artist and documentarian in New Jersey. A convert to Islam whose son was taken from her by gun violence, she and I didn’t share a lot in widespread when my mission started. However after assembly at a espresso store in Newark, we grew to become constant dialog companions and, later, collaborators on a mini-documentary in regards to the Puerto Rican Muslim expertise.
Via our interactions, we have been in a position to share not solely narratives about how Borícua Muslims navigate their a number of marginalizations, however—within the spirit of the Quranic injunction to “get to know one other”—construct a friendship the place distinction of background, perception, and expertise didn’t disappear, however grew to become productive. Our work collectively was not nearly documenting a group, however discovering collectively how relationships throughout creed, confession, “tribe and nation” can generate new tales, new solidarities, and probably, new futures.
Latinx Muslim Cosmopolitanism
Public discourse about Islam and Muslims within the Americas tends to depend on two dominant frames: immigrant communities from Southwest Asia and South Asia, and Black Muslim—or so-called “indigenous”—actions. Each are indispensable to understanding Islam and Muslim communities within the U.S. However this binary additionally obscures the complexities of Latinx Muslim expertise, together with that of Puerto Ricans.
Puerto Rico itself is usually seen as religiously homogeneous—overwhelmingly Catholic, with Protestant evangelicalism as the first various, alongside Afro-Caribbean traditions reminiscent of Regla de Ocha or Espiritismo. With such demographics, Islam seems international, imported, anomalous. A Puerto Rican Muslim lady who dons hijab could also be racialized as Arab or South Asian by Puerto Rican coworkers. Members of the family might accuse her of abandoning her tradition. Within the diaspora, individuals might presume she is an immigrant. A Puerto Rican man who converts could also be welcomed at a mosque but subtly marked as religiously inauthentic due to his accent, cultural commitments, or socio-economic standing. My objective was to bypass these assumptions by centering Puerto Rican Muslims’ experiences within the archipelago and within the U.S. Quite than demographic curiosities, they’re brokers negotiating recognition throughout overlapping identifications (Latinx, Muslim, American, Black, decolonial, immigrant, queer, and in any other case). In fieldwork performed throughout Puerto Rico and diasporic hubs in New Jersey, New York, and Florida, I encountered people conscious about these intersections.
To account for such negotiations, I draw on the idea of on a regular basis cosmopolitanism. Classical notions of cosmopolitanism—rooted in Greek philosophy and later Enlightenment thought—think about the “citizen of the world,” sure by common cause or rights. However the Borícua Muslims I met didn’t inherit cosmopolitanism from summary frameworks. They labored for recognition throughout distinction with restricted socioeconomic and political sources. Their cosmopolitanism is vernacular and pragmatic. It seems in bilingual khutbahs weaving Quranic Arabic with Spanish commentary. It surfaces in Eid celebrations that includes halal habichuelas and pasteles alongside dates and dabke dances. It animates debates over whether or not modest gown should mirror Arab types or can incorporate Caribbean aesthetics.
These should not superficial lodging. They’re acts of world-making that assert Islam’s compatibility with Puerto Rican tradition whereas remodeling what being Boricua can imply.
Puerto Rican Muslim Futures
I resisted portraying Borícua Muslims both as heroic boundary-crossers or as perpetual victims. Their lives are marked each by constraint and creativity. They don’t passively soak up classes imposed upon them. As an alternative, they reinterpret and typically subvert them.
Because the e book has made its manner into the world, I’ve began to seek out it fruitful to position its contents in dialog with Muslim futurism.
As quite a few students and artists recommend, Muslim futurism reimagines Islamic traditions inside numerous speculative, technological, and aesthetic futures. Drawing on Afro-futurist discourse and traditions, it responds to Western science fiction’s tendency to depict Muslims as archaic or antagonistic to modernity. Alternatively, authors and artists foreground themes of liberation, pleasure, moral expertise, and numerous understandings of what it means to belong.
AmeRícan Muslims embody these similar impulses. Their on a regular basis practices gesture towards futures wherein Islam is neither international to the Caribbean nor confined to inherited cultural kinds. When Puerto Rican Muslim communities mobilize zakat [obligatory charity] and sadaqa [voluntary giving] for native hurricane reduction and collaborative tasks to offer providers the place fundamental requirements (electrical energy, water, healthcare) are more and more perilous, they enact a type of Muslim mutual help amid local weather vulnerability and colonial neglect. When Spanish-language Islamic podcasts and on-line research circles proliferate, they problem the predominance of Arabic, Urdu, and English inside American Muslim communities. As they manage various, Spanish-specific or blended gender areas for prayer or re-imagine their relation to Islamic authorized traditions, they search to construct, embody, or in any other case form the futures José forecast from that Olive Backyard in Gainesville.
Expertise, in these processes, acts as each a software and a theater of contestation. On the one hand, digital networks allow remoted converts to seek out solidarity, connection, and instruction. Then again, Muslim communities stay topic to surveillance and algorithmic bias. However, Muslim futurism’s moral engagement with expertise—asking how Islamic values may information innovation towards justice moderately than domination—resonates with the surrender-to-God ethos many converts describe.
Pleasure as Resistance
A placing function of my fieldwork, one which not often seems in media portrayals of Islam and Muslims, is pleasure. There have been Eid celebrations stuffed with Caribbean music and pinchos by the seashore in Piñones, Muslimah activists marching in San Juan’s Pleasure parade or presiding over same-sex weddings, TikTok development movies that humorously tackle the various stereotypes that include conversion to Islam in Puerto Rican contexts.
I’m reminded specifically of Sumayah. Sitting on Escambrón Seaside, as she was drawing henna tattoos to lift funds for Palestine, Sumayah shared her goals of sooner or later proudly owning and working a halal meals truck. The concept could be to mix the perfect of Puerto Rican delicacies with the moral sensibility of Islamic custom and flavors from Southwest Asia and North Africa. Having lived in Egypt earlier than returning to Puerto Rico, she felt uniquely positioned to carry that mixture of cultural influences and seasonings collectively.
Surveying the individuals stretched out within the sand earlier than her, Sumayah was fairly positive alcohol-free piña coladas that mixed pineapple juice, coconut cream, a splash of lime and rosewater or heaping sandwiches made with a fusion of mofongo stuffed falafel would promote.
Even when they didn’t, she mentioned, it could be numerous enjoyable making these meals in any case.
These should not marginal moments. They’re assertions of presence. Closing dates that create alternatives for shock, a wry smile, or easy delight. In a local weather the place Muslims and other people of coloration are sometimes framed by disaster and negativity—terrorism, radicalization, safety—such joyful interludes are subversive.
Muslim futurism’s emphasis on pleasure aligns with this actuality. It refuses dystopian inevitability and insists on the potential for magnificence and communal flourishing. For Borícua Muslims, pleasure doesn’t negate battle. Quite, it coexists with it. It’s a refusal to permit anti-Muslim suspicion or colonial marginalization to outline the horizon of the potential. They’re small acts inside a statistically insignificant constituency. However they matter past their rapid impression.
In my analysis, many converts described Islam as a type of give up that paradoxically liberates them from anxious self-sovereignty. Submission to divine unity reframes accountability moderately than erasing it. If future can’t be mastered, the duty turns into moral participation. Borícua Muslims can not dictate how they’re racialized or categorized. However they’ll domesticate solidarity, charity, worship, and cultural creativity that form communal futures.
In a current interview, group chief Hazel Gómez reframed philanthropy from the Puerto Rican, Mexican, or broader Latinx Muslim perspective not as charity bestowed from the highly effective to the powerless, however as an ethic of solidarity rooted in shared vulnerability. Reflecting on her work amongst Latinx Muslim communities, she challenged the concept giving is measured primarily in {dollars}, noting that marginalized Muslims, typically with out institutional or generational capital or wealth, have lengthy practiced types of care grounded in relationship, reciprocity, and dignity.
Drawing on Quranic teachings about humanity being created “into nations and tribes so that you could be know each other,” Gómez described mutual help after hurricanes and different crises not merely as emergency response however as world-building. Her imaginative and prescient pushes past transactional fashions of help towards a future wherein numerous communities, each Muslim and non-Muslim, acknowledge each other as co-laborers in justice. In doing so, Gómez provides a lived instance of Puerto Rican Muslim futurism, an imaginative but sensible reorientation of Islamic ethics towards collective flourishing, the place solidarity itself turns into a blueprint for the long run. Like Feliciano’s wanderers, she muses, we might not management what is occurring round us – whether or not that be local weather disaster, political upheaval, or technological transformation.
And if José is correct, the renaissance he and Hazel think about is not going to arrive with spectacle. However by on a regular basis cosmopolitan labor and speculative creativeness, Borícua Muslims show that the long run will not be merely one thing that occurs to us. As an alternative, they present us how our futures can be made and unmade within the context of on a regular basis relationships; in how we resolve to be and grow to be this individuals or that individuals, “Us” or “Them,” or one thing past or in between. And that, Borícua Muslims tales clarify, will not be a contradiction or limitless supply of insecurity, however a generative friction that is filled with risk.
Ken Chitwood is the writer of Borícua Muslims: On a regular basis Cosmopolitanism Amongst Puerto Rican Converts to Islam. He is a postdoctoral researcher pursuing Habilitation with the Division for the Research of Faith at Universität Bayreuth, an Affiliate Researcher with the College of Southern California’s Heart for Faith and Civic Tradition, and a Visiting Scholar with the College of Edinburgh’s Alwaleed Centre for the Research of Islam within the Up to date World.
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Inquisitive about extra on this matter? Try episode 68 of The Revealer podcast: “Puerto Rican Converts to Islam.”
