Book review: Muslim American city: Gender and religion in Metro Detroit

Alisa Perkins’ book Muslim American City: Gender and Religion in Metro Detroit (2020) uses critical insights from intimate conversations with Yemeni and Bangladeshi women in Hamtramck, Michigan to resituate debates about Muslim belonging in a multicultural American city. Muslim American City asks, “How have Muslim women engaged civic duties while acting as religious ambassadors and negotiating gender norms across social contexts?” The immigrant women’s narratives responding to this research question reveal that there is no one single story about what it means, or how it feels, to navigate public life as a Muslim American woman. Through a skillful combination of anecdotal and analytical summaries, Perkins draws particular attention to Yemeni and Bangladeshi women’s narratives about embodiment, space and social change to disrupt the dichotomization of democracy, citizenship, and agency into private and public spheres. Chapters 1 and 2 provide a historical overview of race, gender, and religion in Hamtramck—a city that boasts the largest concentration of Muslim residents in America, and the first municipality to have a majority Muslim city council, despite the large Polish Catholic population. As a growing Muslim metropolitan city, Hamtramck is the perfect landscape from which Perkins’ grounded theory of civic purdah emerges. As social actors whose experiences entangle the interpersonal, municipal, and international meanings of politics, Muslim American City is filled with Muslim women’s stories about making a place for themselves in local high schools, city council meetings, markets, and mosques. Through rigorous ethnographic focus on place, civic purdah, or Perkins’ conceptual framework to describe how Yemeni and Bangladeshi Muslim women symbolically interact with unrelated men in the public sphere, is a feminist approach to gendered inequality and faith-based gender segregation. By emphasizing the various ways Muslim women engage their citizenship rights to space— rather than assuming uncritically that Muslim women are excluded from the public sphere—it centers women’s agency, beyond the binary of its relation to men’s consciousness, control, or perception of them. Elaborated in Chapters 3 and 4, Perkins demonstrates clearly how Yemeni and Bangladeshi civic purdah acknowledges women’s power to actively and intentionally participate in debates about gender segregation as knowers and doers, rather than passive receptacle for religious and cultural oppression. This I think is the most significant original contribution of the book. The climax of the book in my opinion is Chapter 6, where Perkins’ analysis of the intersection of sound, time, and space is the most seductive. In this chapter, the author’s critical reading of municipal records, newspaper articles, and interviews allows her to elegantly paint a soundscape of the city in 2004, when the al-Islah Islamic Center in Hamtramck, Michigan, set off a contentious controversy by requesting permission to use loudspeakers to broadcast the adhān, or Islamic call to prayer. Using another original concept, this time of ordinance and municipal time, Perkins revisits the 1163463 COS0010.1177/00207152231163463International Journal of Comparative SociologyBook review book-review2023