Introduction

1In 2013, American author Michael Muhammad Knight published a short article in Vice that drew much notice, entitled “The Problem with White Converts” (Knight 2013a). His article offers a critique of two historical figures, both white Americans, who embraced “other” religions: Henry Steel Olcott (1832-1907), a convert to Buddhism, and Alexander Russell Webb (1846-1916), a convert to Islam. According to Knight, both converts took on the mission of reinterpreting their new religious tradition and imposed on it their own understanding of “good religion”, influenced by their shared theosophical heritage: a religion they conceived as rational, rooted in philosophy, liberated all at once from dogma, ritualism, the supernatural and clerics. In Knight’s view, both men disregarded the ways in which these religions were practiced and lived in different parts of the world, and even clearly showed contempt for their believers whom they perceived as unable to grasp the authentic spirit of their religion due to their cultural baggage and “superstitions”. Michael Muhammad Knight uses harsh words for the “two white guys”, who “treated their new religions like other white men treat entire nations: they marched in and claimed to own it”.

2The article spread like fire and produced its effect, not only because of its catchy title, but also because of the personality of its author, who himself identifies as a white convert to Islam. The son of a white supremacist father who was absent throughout his childhood, Michael Muhammad Knight converted to Islam at the age of 15 after reading the autobiography of Malcolm X. At the age of 17, he went to Pakistan to study theology at the Faisal Mosque, before becoming disillusioned by an Islam he portrays as too conservative (Knight 2006). Since then, he has published a dozen books in which he describes, among other things, his immersion and initiation in different currents of Islam, including Salafism (Knight 2015), magic and esotericism (Knight 2016), but also Islamic punk (taqwacore, a term he coined and popularized, Knight 2004), and the black Five Percenters movement (which he managed to join even though the theology of this movement, developed in response to the context of white supremacy in 20^th century America, normally considers Whites as demons, Knight 2011).

He thinks that some white converts try to take cultural practices of [brown] Muslims out of the implementation of Islam because they believe Islam should be intellectual, and that that’s racist. I totally disagree with his analysis.

5Jasmine, a white convert and communications consultant, commented:

How is that racist? I feel like I’m still trying to navigate what is culture and what is real. Ugh he’s getting on my nerves!

6Mohammed, an American Muslim of Qatari origin who works in the film industry, reaffirmed Sheikh Hamza Yusuf’s unquestionable Islamic legitimacy and his respect for Islamic scholars of the global South:

Someone like Sh. Hamza didn’t study alone in a library but he took his knowledge of sheikhs in Mauritania which he speaks about in high regard.

7Nadia, an American teacher of Algerian origin, found, however, that there was valid criticism in the article, both of an American sense of superiority and of the appropriation of language elements from other cultures by the students of Sheikh Hamza Yusuf’s Zaytuna Institute:

I think there’s an issue in general with this subtle arrogance of our American culture. […] It equally upsets me to see a lot of zaytunites use the word “sidi” for one another lol it’s a North African title!

8Fazila, an American of Pakistani origin, also recognized a certain truthfulness in the article and condemned the superior attitude of some American Muslims:

Perhaps the problem is less with the white converts themselves than with other Muslims, who are so used to the white man’s worldview being the “norm” […] that they glorify white male converts and their own understanding of Islam. How many Muslims born and/or raised in North America mock the accents, cultural “baggage” of the older generation from (darker-skinned) Muslim countries? I grew up seeing this all around me, and I am ashamed to say, at one point did this as well. May Allah forgive me for this arrogance and disrespect.

9Finally, John, a white convert, speech therapist by trade and pillar of The Islamic Connection in which I was conducting my ethnography, condemned the concealed and unjust attack on Sheikh Hamza Yusuf and turned the argument against Michael Muhammad Knight and his own position as a white convert:

Sounds like he is rehashing the “white devil” obsession. Not to be rude but I don’t really feel like Mr. Knight has much room to speak on this matter and his under the belt jab at Shaykh Hamza says a lot about who he is.

10Kareem, an African American student, agreed, criticizing the author:

Dawg, why is this guy sneak dissing so hard? this cat is outta his noggin.

11Michael Muhammad Knight, the “enfant terrible” of American Islam, is a controversial figure among his coreligionists. He has pursued his writing career in the margins and recesses of the Islamic tradition (publishing on Salafism, magic in Islam, the Five Percenters, religious experimentation while on drugs, advocacy of queer Muslim movements, etc.), while Hamza Yusuf has made a name for himself as a preacher and teacher at the heart of American Islam (Zaytuna College was the first Muslim educational institution accredited by the U.S. government). The way Knight’s article raises the issue of white privilege and cultural appropriation could not leave anyone indifferent (see also Tourage 2013). In response to the controversy generated by his first article, Knight published a second one a week later, this time explicitly entitled “Michael Muhammad Knight vs. Sheikh Hamza Yusuf” (Knight 2013b). He upheld some of his critiques, while making amends and including himself in this judgment:

Hamza Yusuf is a white convert. This helps his brand because his classical Islamic tradition can be presented as entirely a textual tradition, free of cultural blemish, and universal in its appeal. I am also a white convert. White privilege helps my brand too, because it’s easier to sell black supremacist expressions of Islam when you have a white face.

12Knight used his cynical tone to denounce the use of Islamic tradition for purposes of distinction, popularity and marketing.

13The depth of the debate became clear to me as my fieldwork progressed. My informants were also assiduously listening to the lectures of another white convert close to Sheikh Hamza Yusuf: the Muslim theologian Umar Faruq Abd-Allah (born Wymann-Landgraf in 1948, who became a Muslim in 1970), and whose advice on educating the soul and heart, together with his writings on the need to produce a culturally American Islam, were widely appreciated (Faruq Abd-Allah 2004). As it happens, Umar Faruq Abd-Allah had published a comprehensive biography of Mohammed Alexander Russell Webb (Faruq Abd-Allah 2006), the late 19^th century convert whom Knight criticizes in his article (without citing Abd-Allah’s biography, which was nevertheless Knight’s reference). Faruq Abd-Allah’s book does not gloss over Webb’s racist prejudice toward fellow Muslims (notably the fact that he called some Indian Muslims niggers and attributed the Muslim world’s underdevelopment to “climate and racial influence” [ibid., p. 136]). However, unlike Knight, he does not use these comments to frame Webb’s whole life. Instead, Webb appears at the end of the biography as a precursor of contemporary American religious pluralism, a fervent believer who carried out intense missionary work to establish his religion in the United States, to the extent that he represented Islam at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893 and is an example in his ability to “balance religious identity with American culture, creating a sense of self that is at once genuinely American and truly Islamic” (ibid., p. 271). Umar Faruq-Abdallah seeks to defend this very position in a text much-appreciated by my informants, entitled “Islam and the Cultural Imperative” (2004), in which he declares: “We must engender a Muslim American culture that gives us the freedom to be ourselves.” While Knight sees in Webb the archetype of a process of religious appropriation led by a white man persuaded of his superiority (convinced that he stands beyond cultures and represents the universal), Faruq Abd-Allah sees in Webb a visionary who was able to reconcile his faith and his American culture and is a model for American Muslims today.

14This intertextual debate (i.e., a biography, an online article, a photographic allusion, and the comments they produced) around four white converts of different generations (Knight, Yusuf, Abd-Allah and Webb, born in 1977, 1958, 1948 and 1846 respectively) revolves mostly around questions of “white privilege” within Muslim communities (on this topic see Galonnier 2015). It also raises broader questions about the contrasting uses of “culture”, and what is particular and “universal” in Islam: Who owns the Islamic tradition? Who decides the contours of the “Islam” entity when the need arises to extract it from the cultural contexts in which it has historically taken shape to transpose it elsewhere? Could those who are engaged in such ventures be projecting their own cultural conceptions onto the authentic Islam they claim to convey? In what ways are claims to universality and cultural legitimacy (and the ways in which they are received and perceived) shaped by inequalities of class, race and gender?

Junctures and disjunctures between religion and culture

15Much has been written about the connections between culture and religion since the classic work by American Protestant theologian H. Richard Nieburh, Christ and Culture (1951). The book identifies a variety of religious attitudes toward culture: “Christ against culture” (the uncompromising rejection of culture as immoral) and “Christ of Culture” (harmonization, at the risk of dissolution, of religion in culture) are described as the two opposing poles. Between them, intermediate positions appear, such as “Christ above culture” (a synthesis of culture and religion), “Christ and culture in paradox” (whereby religion maintains a critical distance from culture, which can nevertheless be positively embraced for religious purposes), “Christ transforms culture” (the possibility and hope of a profound transformation of culture through religion) (Spickard 2012; see Hermansen 2009 for an attempt to transpose these categories to American Islam). This typology is just one of many. More recently, Olivier Roy (2008) expressed the diversity of possible links between religion and culture as follows:

Each time there has been a questioning of the relations between religion and culture, prefixes have been added to the word “culture”: to deculturate, acculturate, inculturate, exculturate. Religion deculturates when it attempts to eradicate paganism; it acculturates when it adapts to the mainstream culture; it inculturates when it tries to establish itself at the center of a given culture; it exculturates when it thinks of itself as standing back from a mainstream culture of which it was part, but which suddenly or gradually took on a negative, “pagan” or irreligious –and therefore destructive– aspect. (Roy 2013: 33)

16These operations of “juncture and disjuncture of Islam and culture”, to use the words of anthropologist Jeannette Jouili (2019), have led to multiple and intense discussions among Muslims, since the good and bad ways of dealing with culture generate intense definitional struggles in the Islamic context. Even though such literature is rich, it rarely enters in dialogue with studies about the notion of cultural or religious appropriation (Rogers 2006).

17Most debates on the appropriation of religious practices and beliefs in Euro-American societies have focused on Eastern (Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.) or Native American, and sometimes Jewish (Kabbalah) traditions that have undergone processes of secularization and commodification. In these debates, appropriation refers to the incorporation of some of the aesthetic, ritual, sartorial or culinary attributes of these religious traditions into secular cultural practices or forms of New Age spirituality increasingly dissociated from their original religious context (Brunk and Young 2009, Altglas 2014, Lucia 2020). Unlike Buddhism (Borup 2020), Islam has rarely been included in these discussions –one author has even called it the “unpillaged Eastern religion” (Bruce 2017). However, the evolution of certain forms of Sufism (Philippon 2014) and recent controversies over World Hijab Day or the use of the hijab by certain fashion brands (Bucar 2022) have led here and there to accusations of cultural appropriation of the Islamic tradition. In a recent book entitled Stealing My Religion: Not Just Any Cultural Appropriation, American religious studies researcher Liz Bucar (2022) defines religious appropriation as follows:

When individuals adopt religious practices without committing to religious doctrines, ethical values, systems of authority, or institutions, in ways that exacerbate existing systems of structural injustice. (p. 8)

18She points out that not all religious borrowings are considered appropriation: such borrowings have always existed, and are even desirable and desired by religious actors themselves, particularly in the case of religions with universal claims such as Islam or Christianity, which are by definition intended to be “appropriated” by followers in the whole world. The appropriation category only concerns borrowings that the author defines as “ethically harmful”, i.e., those that perpetuate inequality. As Denis-Constant Martin (2014: 52) reminds us, “the appropriation relationship is most often one of inequality”.

19However, defining the scope of appropriation is primarily an empirical question that poses a set of challenges.

• To speak of “borrowing” implies that we can identify one or more owners (or insiders), which is far from representing a consensus among religious actors themselves (who decides who is an insider or outsider of a religious tradition, particularly of Islam?).

• To speak of “harmful effects” in ethical terms implies that we can map the mechanisms of domination that are thus reinforced. However, the social relationships that contribute to reproduce inequalities are multiple and intertwined (class, gender, etc.) which implies that this domination is both multidimensional and multidirectional.

• To speak of “religious practices” is not easy either, because practices defined as “religious” by some can be conceived as “cultural” by others.

• Lastly, to distinguish religious appropriation from religious conversion requires the ability to assess the degree of sincerity of “borrowers” and their level of engagement in the practices being borrowed, which means probing their “inner selves” or determining the authenticity of their actions and declarations –operations that are potentially fraught with normative or inquisitive judgments for which the social sciences are not intended.

20These important and difficult discussions become even more complex because of the accusatory charge of the term “appropriation” –a term “with connotations” (Derlon and Jeudy-Ballini 2015: 10), an “overused and polarizing” concept according to Liz Bucar, which often obstructs rather than encourages debate:

The term is an accusation, a condemnation, an expression of moral outrage. Once it is deployed, conversation halts, as each party digs its heels in. This polarization assumes that the ethical implications of cultural borrowings are cut and dried, which they rarely are. (Bucar 2022: 11)

21While the concept of appropriation can be positively reinvested (Derlon and Jeudy-Ballini 2015), this article mainly examines the way its negative meaning circulates.

23This article discusses the controversies over the desired interaction between “religion” and “culture” within contemporary American Islam, where several interpretive communities (formed at the intersection of theological positionings, class affiliations and racial categorizations) express divergent conceptions of both Islam and the United States. These controversies often make use of the prism of “authenticity”, either cultural or religious, when defining the content and scope of what is “truly” Islamic or “truly” American. The article begins by tracing a brief history of borrowings from the Islamic tradition by groups holding different positions in the U.S. system of social and racial stratification, showing how the specter of appropriation is hovering or not over each one. It then examines three registers of discourse around the notion of culture in Islam, which reveal contrasting understandings of authenticity among converts. Acculturation (i.e., assimilation to Muslim-majority countries’ cultural codes) is condemned as a loss of self and a dilution of the religious message, and is opposed by two responses: exculturation or the claim to an Islam unburdened by the traditions of the countries of origin, and which considers religious purity as the condition for Islamic authenticity and legitimacy; and inculturation, or the construction of an American Islam, which insists on the universal and culturally adaptable character of Islam but is faced with the problem of identifying what would be an authentic American culture. As we shall see, in a context shaped by profound inequalities, these claims of authenticity raise the specter of both appropriation and expropriation, and cannot be dissociated from an understanding of the relations of domination that run through the American Muslim minority.

The circulation of Islamic references in American history and the specter of appropriation

24A detour through the history of the United States confirms the presence of multiple cultural borrowings from the Islamic tradition by social groups holding different positions in the country’s systems of social and racial stratification. These groups are characterized by varying degrees of commitment to Islam as a religion, and by a more or less subversive relationship to the established social order, which leads to contrasting assessments of their degree of authenticity and the risk of appropriation.

By the existence of Allah and the Creed of Mohammed, by the legendary sanctity of the Tabernacle at Mecca, we greet you. (Gomez 2005: 244)

The fact that […] the founders and leaders of the New York and national Shriner organizations were the first members of Webb’s very serious movement casts much doubt on the persistent academic characterization of the Shriners as people who simply made a joke of Arabic and Islamic culture. (Bowen 2015: 148)

27If today’s Shriner members are overwhelmingly white non-Muslims (with no recent migratory ancestry), the religious sincerity of the movement’s original founders remains contested.

28The specter of the Shriners hovered over my fieldwork, and sometimes, though rarely, weighed in when assessing the religious sincerity of converts. Stephan (24, social worker, Chicago), a white convert who studied Middle Eastern history at a liberal arts college and discovered Islam as a result of his commitment to the Palestinian cause, explains that the initial reasons for his conversion were, in his view, questionable: “On some level, there really was this youthful, bougie [bourgeois], Western thing that led me to exotify Islam.” His pro-Palestinian activist friends found his conversion “ridiculous” and rolled their eyes when he told them. In his interview with me, he explained that he had since brought more reflection to the matter. As this example shows, conversion was sometimes, albeit rarely, perceived negatively and the sincerity of converts doubted because their approach was perceived as yet another Orientalist fantasy that amounted to “eating the other” with Islam functioning as a “spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture” (hooks 1992: 21). One of my interviewees, Mary (33, project manager, St. Louis), mentioned a stormy conversation she had with a Syrian-American friend of hers who refused to help her at the time of her conversion: “She reacted very strangely. Almost as if it was ‘their’ religion and she didn’t understand about people converting.” The specter of appropriation and religious insincerity also haunts all the work of Michael Muhammad Knight, who wrote the following in 2006, including himself in this characterization: “I can say with authority that every white Muslim in America [is] at least a little off” (Knight 2006: 87). “Off” here refers to being superficial, uncultured, appropriating Islam for one’s own satisfaction and from a position of dominance. In 2011, he repeated his fears: “Here I am, a white man consuming Islam. By embracing what I love, I may poison it” (Knight 2011: 89). The question of religious appropriation, while not very present in my inquiry overall, would arise from time to time in relation to converts categorized as white. It was entirely absent, however, when talking about African American converts (who represent the majority of converts to Islam).

While white Shriners used these symbols ironically, Black participation in such lodges and parades and appropriations of Oriental signs was neither playful nor politically neutral. […] The turbans, crescents and stars, the exotic robes worn by MSTA members […] were far more than exotic fashion and performance; they symbolized a historical and divine recovery of knowledge lost in the tragic upheaval of American slavery that had wrenched Islam from African slaves. (Grewal 2013: 96-97)

31These debates about cultural appropriation do not, however, fully capture the complexity of the relationship between religion and culture in American Islam, which is also influenced by logics of acculturation, exculturation and inculturation.

The risk of acculturation, or the discourse of “reverse appropriation”

32Interviews with converts revealed anxieties about the links between culture and religion in the context of their conversion. These anxieties frequently revolved around the fear of acculturation, the process by which religion adapts to the culture of the dominant group, to the point where it becomes entirely subordinated to it and loses its substance. In conversations recorded with white and black converts during my fieldwork, the “dominant culture” was described as the culture of Muslim immigrants or their descendants, mainly from the Middle East or South Asia, who were perceived as hegemonic. Thus, converts who too obviously embraced cultural rather than religious practices from these parts of the world (such as ways of speaking, dressing or cooking) were criticized for falling into the “cultural trap” of religious conversion. In Detroit, Khabir (23, hairdresser), an African American convert to Islam, with a Christian Baptist mother and a Nation of Islam father, criticized the current tendency of new Muslims to adopt the cultural codes of Muslim communities of immigrant origin:

Personally, it disgusts me. […] Why do you want to be other than yourself? One day you are James Collar, the next day, you know what I am saying, you turn your name to Abdul Rasheed. And there, from Abdul Rasheed, you get around a community of Indo-Pakistanis. Now you want to talk with an accent, and carry yourself like you come from South Asia... It is like “Bro! you are from Dexter! You went to school in the hood. You went to Cooley high school. You and your family isn’t South Asian. Where did you get this from?” […] Before your slave master was a European God figure. Now you think God is an Arab. Now you think God is a South Asian.

33Khabir was critical about the confusion between Islamic authenticity and Arab or desi culture, which he believes reproduces the racial domination of African Americans in the religious sphere.

34Jonathan (36, technician, Chicago), a white convert from a working-class neighborhood, who embraced Islam as a teenager and soon became part of the Syrian-Lebanese community in the Chicago suburbs, also explains that he felt drowned in the Arab culture to the point of picking up the accent: “I don’t even remember how I used to speak before I became Muslim. Everyone I meet tells me that I have this accent now.” Jonathan considers that he has been “culturally brainwashed”, a process which he said “affects Caucasian Americans [sic] much more than any other group” because they “have no culture” and are therefore overwhelmed by the culture of others. While reproducing the concept that whiteness is neutral, culture-free and therefore universal, Jonathan reverses the direction of domination: this whiteness is bland, subject to cultural contamination and under-represented in the Muslim circles in which he now moves. He does not consider himself a dominant white person who has appropriated elements of foreign culture, but a dominated convert (because he is a novice, but also because of his working-class background, while his foreign-born co-religionists are often better off economically) on whom cultural content other than his own has been imposed under the guise of religious training. Here, the discourse of appropriation is completely turned on its head.

The promise of exculturation and the specter of expropriation

35In response, comments made during interviews often included a critique of “culture” and a desire to separate “cultural” markers from “religious” ones and identify an authentic Islam, purified from the cultural influences that would have contaminated and distorted it. These discourses, which are the product of secularization and of the era of “religion without culture” so well analyzed by Olivier Roy (2008), are typical of the Islamic renewal that is sweeping through Muslim communities worldwide, and to which converts are particularly sensitive. This idea is expressed by Jasmine in her Facebook post quoted above (“I feel like I’m still trying to navigate what is culture and what is real”), and what is real here is explicitly distinguished from what is cultural.

36The belief in the existence of a pure or “real” religion that could be clearly distinguished, while wishful thinking, nonetheless functions as a powerful criterion for distinguishing conversions considered authentic from those that are not (Galonnier et al. 2019). This was why Jonathan criticized his past practice of the religion (in the early days of his conversion) and now subscribed to a Salafist version of Islam. This branch proposes a return to the pure or “fundamental” Islam of the time of the pious predecessors, and promotes an “exculturation” approach, i.e., “the reformulation of this religion in a number of norms” (Roy 2008: 234), detached from the cultural context of the regions of the world in which it has historically developed. It is interesting to note the appeal of Salafism among converts worried about distinguishing cultural markers from religious ones and about affirming the legitimacy of the fact that they belong to Islam (Adraoui 2019). Another white convert interviewed for this inquiry, Umar Lee (40, cab driver, St. Louis), also from a working-class background, wrote in a book published online The Rise and Fall of the Salafi Da’wah in America (Lee 2014), that Salafism was the only Islamic movement in the United States in which “he did not feel like a tourist” as a white American. This supposed absence of culture is what makes Salafism so attractive to newcomers in search of legitimacy, while chasing away the specter of appropriation. Indeed, fundamentalism “accepts its own deculturation and makes it the instrument of its claim to universality” (Roy 2013: 5): it minimizes relations of domination by implying that there are no differences other than religious between the faithful.

37However, it cannot be excluded that these processes of exculturation are also exercised from a position of domination, as Michael Muhammad Knight suggests in his article (which, however, does not deal with fundamentalism) and as well documented by Esra Ozyurek in the case of converts to Islam in Germany, some of whom have embraced Salafism. According to her:

Salafi puritanism –that is, a conversionist, literalist, anticulturalist, and antihistorical version of Islam– is attractive to both converts and born Muslims who did not necessarily grow up as practicing Muslims. […] Salafism even permits them to feel superior to Muslims with immigrant backgrounds and invites them to true Islam, which is not Turkish, Arab, or Pakistani. (Ozyurek 2015: 130-131)

38The aim is no longer to appropriate, but to expropriate the different cultures (Arab, Indo-Pakistani, North African, Senegalese, etc.) that have become too closely associated with the Islamic tradition, and to free it from the cultural fog that shrouds it.

“The cultural imperative”: attempts at inculturation and the return of appropriation

39The exculturation typical of fundamentalist movements was not, however, the posture most observed in my fieldwork. The desire was greater to develop an Islam culturally compatible with the American context than to see the emergence of a totally “deculturated” Islam. Umar Faruq Abd-Allah, the American convert and Muslim theologian discussed above, even considers the path of exculturation harmful. In his seminal article “Islam and the Cultural Imperative” (2004), he is critical of the “cultural phobia” that characterizes certain currents of Islam, and he explains:

Many in our community today look askance at culture but with only the vaguest notions of what culture actually is and the fundamental role it plays in human existence. For them, “culture” is a loaded word, something dangerous, inherently problematic, and “un-Islamic”. Culture, for them, is a toxic pollutant that must necessarily be purged, since Islam and culture are mutually exclusive in their minds. […] Such cultural phobia is untenable in the light of classical Islamic jurisprudence and is antithetical to more than a millennium of successful indigenous Islamic cultures and global civilization.

40Conversely, what Faruq Abd-Allah describes as the “cultural imperative” is the need for the emergence of an American Islamic culture, which he describes as “indigenous”:

Islam must be indigenous –not in the sense of losing identity through total assimilation or of being the exclusive property of the native-born– but in the word’s original sense, namely, being natural, envisioned, and born from within. We must be producers of culture, not passive consumers of it.

41For him, this cultural imperative takes on the dimension of a sacred obligation: “Our sacred law requires us to undertake the task.” In everyday life, the development of an American Islamic culture involves a whole range of practices involving culture, language, food, clothing, etc. In terms of language, the American accent is proudly claimed when pronouncing Arabic terms. Brian (23, Islamic studies student, Chicago), an American convert of Italian origin, has a perfect command of Arabic pronunciation, but he deliberately keeps his American accent when using Islamic expressions, and explains:

I can do the whole as-salaam’alaykum [perfect pronunciation according to classical Arabic standards]. But I refuse to do that shit. For me salamalekum will always be salamalekum [pronounced with an American accent]. […] So I am just like blatantly disrespecting rules of pronunciation or like cultural bullshit. I don’t know… It’s like if you came into my house and I told you “We are going to have gnoocchi [exaggerated Italian pronunciation] today.” I would not expect you to say gnooocchi! And if you said gnooocchi, I would be like “get the fuck out of here!” You are not Italian, you are never going to be Italian, so why try?

42Brian explicitly refuses to adopt the speech norms of languages other than English in order to maintain what he considers to be authenticity in his religious practice and to remain true to his American-ness. These efforts can also be seen in the relationship of converts with eating customs and the question of what represents “Muslim cuisine”, beyond the South Asian, North African or Levantine style of cooking usually represented. On the Facebook page of the organization The Islamic Connection, an African American convert explains:

Muslim food is the mac & cheese, collard greens, turkey sticks, Lima beans, corn bread, BBQ, sweet potato, and bean pie that I was raised on. Muslim food is so diverse!

It’s a sign that we move forward and we make progress when the scholars invited to speak don’t even know what the topic means. American spiritual authenticity… I don’t even know what it means!

45Laughter broke out among the large audience that had gathered that day in the university auditorium. The panelists then expanded on the subject, focusing on the notion of “spiritual authenticity” and offering several perspectives on what this authenticity implies in terms of humility, self-sacrifice, generosity –skillfully leaving aside the adjective “American” which was nevertheless in the title of the conference. They went on until the audience was allowed to respond. Amina, the Sudanese-American blogger mentioned above, with whom I was sitting in the auditorium, playfully brought up the subject by repeating the words of Umar Faruq Abd-Allah’s article: “What does it mean to be an indigenous American Muslim?” Silence fell among the panelists, who looked at each other smiling, each waiting for the other to speak. Finally, Ubaydullah Evans spoke up, side-stepping the issue:

I know the label indigenous is controversial. I would say that it depends on how you see America. Do you see America as home or do you see somewhere else as your home? But I recognize it is a problematic term.

47Identification of the locus of American Islamic authenticity is therefore a source of conflict. In their efforts to indigenize Islam, American Muslims could certainly draw on the long legacy of the movements of the early 20^th century (Moorish Science Temple, Nation of Islam, etc.), which helped reinvent the Islamic tradition and adapt it to the American context. Deepa (38, social worker, Chicago), an American convert of Indian origin from a Christian family points out:

There wouldn’t be an American Islam without African American Islam. They really paved the way for us. They are our first teachers, they are our first models to combine that, America and Islam.

Look at the Muslims in Europe. Frankly, I don’t know what they are going to do there. Because they have no indigenous Muslim community. America is unique in that regard. It is the only country which has a home-grown Muslim community.

49Such discourse on the need to promote an authentically American Islam circulates in different circles, is defended from different positions in the American racial stratification and draws on multiple historical heritages. Umar Faruq-Abdallah refers to this in his article:

One size does not fit all. […] But to embrace all and foster a true sense of continuity and community among us, our culture must address Islam’s transcendent and universal values, while constructing a broad national matrix that fits all like a master key, despite ethnic, class, and social background. […] In drawing upon the fertile resources of the American cultural legacy, we must pay special heed to the rich and often neglected heritage of Native Americans and Hispanics as well as Anglo- and African Americans.

50By listing them, he suggests a rediscovery of the too-often despised heritage of Native Americans, Latinos, Anglo-Americans and African Americans, to promote an alternative vision to the Islam of immigrant communities from South Asia or the Middle East, too often placed at the center of narratives about Islam in the United States.

At Webb, culture is at once the problem and the solution. […] The inclusive rhetoric of “American culture” at Webb is itself laden with appeals to American superiority. (Howe 2018: 56-57)

52While the culture of Muslim immigrants is rejected as religiously inauthentic and culturally unsuited to the American context, the American culture, though vaguely defined, is established as a condition for freedom. The cultural solution to the problem of Islamic authenticity in the American context therefore raises other issues, namely that there are competing visions of cultural and religious authenticity that intersect with unequal race and class relations. The attempts to reinvent a culturally American Islam presented above revisit the African American heritage and draw from it, but often strip it of its most radical elements. Practices from the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam such as community engagement, clothing, food or the arts are kept, but not necessarily their theology of subversion of the established racial order. In a historical loop effect, African American Islam, itself the fruit of a reappropriation of the Islamic tradition, is now being selectively appropriated for purposes other than those for which it was initially intended: to promote a culturally “comfortable” Islam for Muslim Americans of all backgrounds. This takes place in a context of strong Islamophobia in which American Muslims are challenged to demonstrate their allegiance to the American nation and culture, and where any speech deemed radical or subversive is under surveillance (Curtis 2013, Kamali 2017).

53In turn, the appropriation of the African American cultural and religious heritage gives rise to further dissension. Mia is a 37-year-old social worker of Puerto Rican origin from a working-class Christian family, who first encountered Islam through African American friends in her neighborhood (some belonging to the Nation of Islam, others Sunni) and later embraced it as she became more and more involved in the local hip-hop scene. In an interview, she mentioned her uneven interactions with what she characterized as middle- and upper-class Muslim women of South Asian immigrant descent living in affluent suburbs. One day, as she was driving one of them home after an Islamic artistic event in Chicago, she played the album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998). Although hip-hop artist Lauryn Hill is not Muslim, she draws inspiration from the heritage of African American Islam, and some of her lyrics include Islamic references (“I make salah like a Sunni” in the track “The Final Hour”; “Don’t forget about the deen, sirat-al-mustaqeem” in the track “Doo Wop”, etc.). Anyone who listens to the whole album will notice that it is organized around skits inserted at the beginning of each song, in which a class of teenagers can be heard discussing various topics (love, etc.). However, when the songs are played on the radio, the skits cannot be heard. Mia tells how her desi fellow Muslim raved when she heard the Lauryn Hill CD but did not seem to recognize the skits, which in Mia’s eyes betrayed the inauthenticity of her music consumption.

These [Muslim girls], they kind of talk like me, and they are quoting these hip-hop songs that I literally listened to my whole life… You know, like, it was just weird! […] And I remember giving a ride one time in my car, and I had Lauryn Hill… Are you familiar with the CD, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill? So, there is the songs, but she has these little skits in-between the songs. So, anybody could know the song, it is always played on the radio. But I was playing the CD and I remember one of the girls being like “what is this? I never heard… these little comments in the middle! What are they doing?” And I was like “It is the whole story! They are at school and they are asking these kids these questions!” And I remember being offended, like “How can you talk about how cool this song is and you got no idea what was going on!” It does not seem authentic to me. It is authentic to them, because in their home, they are the only person who probably listen to American music, right? But it is not authentic to me.

54In this ordinary conversation inside a car, the details of the composition of a musical album are no longer details. They serve to define the contours of authentic belonging to an American Islamic culture which, for Mia, is anchored in an experience of inner-city life, an immersion in the world of hip-hop and an intimate knowledge of the African American Islamic heritage which, she believes, only represents a cosmetic reference for some Muslims.

Conclusion

55In his article “What is Universal and Local in Islam?”, anthropologist John Bowen (1998) shows that Muslims are torn between “struggles to define the universal qualities of the ‘religious’ and attempts to develop distinct identities, local by definition, with regard to these universal qualities”. Culture holds a central place in these struggles, and is approached in different ways, whether to acculturate, exculturate or inculturate religion. This article demonstrates that efforts to connect and disconnect Islam from “culture” in the American context are received differently depending on the social position of those who defend them. Converting to Islam, proposing to reform it, adapting it to the American context and reinventing its heritage are activities that take shape in the intertwined power relations that run through American society, and which take on a different meaning depending on whether one is categorized as White, Black, Hispanic, Arab or Pakistani, and whether one belongs to the lower or upper class. The specter of appropriation –and of expropriation as well– hovers over these attempts, and raises the question of ownership of the Islamic tradition: who has the right to take, reshape, culturalize or deculturalize Islam? In their contrasting responses to these questions, American Muslims show above all that they are a “community of debate”.