Believing in South Central: Everyday Islam in the City of Angels

In Believing in South Central: Everyday Islam in the City of Angels, Pamela Prickett offers a rich ethnographic account of Muslims attending a neighborhood mosque located in a predominantly African American community south of downtown Los Angeles. Based on extensive participant-observation over five years (2008 to 2013), Prickett explores the efforts of many of her interlocutors to live Islam in an urban environment that has witnessed significant change. The book begins by addressing the growth and decline of the mosque—Masjid al-Quran (MAQ)—which, in its heyday, hosted activities that attracted Black entertainment and sports celebrities as well as the first African American mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley, to visit. Located in one of the poorest and most blighted areas of Los Angeles, MAQ was founded in the 1950s as a Nation of Islam temple. For this community of believers, the 1962 LAPD shooting of an unarmed African American Muslim man outside another NOI temple was a defining moment and illustrates that police violence and surveillance are nothing new for African American Muslims. Drawing on interviews with current MAQ members, Prickett recounts how this African American Muslim community concentrated on growing their economic base in Los Angeles during the 1960s and 1970s by running businesses, teaching children, cooking food, importing fish, and selling newspapers on the street. In fact, the community experienced so much growth in the early 1970s that it needed more space, so they purchased a nearby building and converted the commercial property into a religious and educational facility. The community witnessed profound changes to its theological foundations and suffered financial setbacks following the 1975 death of NOI leader, Elijah Mohammed; and an existing schism widened between members who were modestly prospering and those who remained poor. Several of the more prosperous members of MAQ moved out to the suburbs, and poverty rates soared as the local economy shifted to the service sector. During the 1980s, drugand gang-related crime swept over South Central LA, coinciding with a dramatic demographic shift as new migrants from Central America moved in. Those who had moved out to wealthier neighborhoods often joined newer mosques in other neighborhoods, and MAQ was depleted of resources. By the early 2010s, when Prickett conducted her fieldwork, many of the formerly Muslim-owned enterprises catered to a growing Latinx population. Prickett sums up the impact: ‘‘MAQ faced the challenges of sustaining its Muslim, historically Black community in a religious ecology that increasingly favored Latino Christian denominations’’ (p. 57). Through an inquiry into her interlocutors’ stories of economic instability and community life, Prickett skillfully shows how the believers turned Islam into a ‘‘toolkit’’ that incorporated their lived reality into constructions of piety in a neighborhood of changing demographics and disadvantage. The book joins key sociological and ethnographic debates on identity, self, and agency that have been kindled by discussions of women’s piety in Islamicate contexts. One of the book’s most significant contributions is its emphasis not on individual subject formation and embodied religious practices, but on how believers construct a moral community and cultivate virtues ‘‘that must be achieved through engagement with others’’ (p. 3). As a ‘‘piety not independent of others’’ (p. 4), the author argues that collective community formation is just as much a form of taqwa—defined here as religious consciousness—as individual acts such as prayer. The believers of MAQ could no more discard community than the women of Saba Mahmood’s seminal study could discard the veil. This book is effective in analyzing an African American Muslim mosque community in its particular urban landscape, and in examining how the gendered and classed dimensions are negotiated and reproduced Reviews 273