Spiritual Multilingualism in Black Muslim Community Literacies

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 7:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Curriculum in collaboration: Exploring multilingual family and community literacy practices as resources for curriculum development

Abstract

1. Objectives
This paper seeks to contribute to theorizations of multiliteracies and intergenerational literacies (New London Group, 1996) by exploring how Black Muslim immigrant families in the U.S. Midwest engage in community literacy practices across 4 local mosques in weekly events called halaqas. The purpose of this project is to investigate how Somali, Arabic, and English are used across generations, and how spiritual literacy practices shape multilingual meaning-making within sacred community spaces.
2. Theoretical Framework
This study is guided by a decolonial orientation to knowledge (Mignolo & Walsh, 2018), which troubles dominant Eurocentric epistemologies, calling for ways of knowing that are rooted in historically marginalized communities.
I also draw on frameworks of community literacies (Hull & Schultz, 2001), which emphasize the importance of out-of-school learning spaces such as the halaqas, spiritual learning circles, examined in this study. Additionally, language socialization (Schieffelin & Ochs, 1986) offers an understanding of how language learning occurs through participation in social and cultural routines. These theoretical commitments build understanding of “spiritual multilingualism”, a term this study proposes to describe the sacred and relational practices that emerge within halaqas.
3. Methods
This ethnographic study explores how participants use multiple named languages to make meaning, centering storytelling as a dialogic, transformative process that reshapes both researcher and participant (Hymes, 1980).
4. Data Analysis
Building on over a year of sustained engagement with four mosque communities in the Midwest, data collection methods included participant observation, field notes, audio recordings of weekly literacy sessions, participant interviews, artifact collection (e.g. journal reflections, drawings, flyers), and data member-checking sessions.
I conducted two rounds of descriptive coding (Saldana, 2021), organizing these codes into broader thematic categories (Braun and Clarke, 2021), and then identified one or two key themes that directly address the research questions. Finally, I reduced the data to focus on events that are most representative of these themes.
5. Results
While participants frequently translanguaged (Garcia & Wei, 2014) across Somali, English, and Arabic, the study showed that participants used each language in distinct and purposeful ways. Arabic was primarily used for prayer or to cite the Qur’an to support religious reasoning during discussion. Somali was often used for background exchanges and for informal commentary. Of note, English emerged as the primary language for discussion in the halaqa, with the facilitator and attendees reverting to English after briefly using Arabic to cite Islamic texts and Somali between some attendees as side remarks.
5. Significance of the study
These patterns carry ideological weight and constitute a form of what I call spiritual multilingualism, a sacred and strategic deployment of languages that affirm the cultural identity and faith of the participants. This multilingual negotiation resists deficit-based understandings of Black Muslim immigrants as solely “English learners”, asserting their complex and purposeful literacy practices. However, the reliance on English as lingua franca (Seidlhofer, 2011) is important to note since it may contribute to the gradual erasure of heritage languages, like Somali, especially in religious contexts in which Arabic is also being mobilized.

Author

• Kaha Abdi, The Ohio State University