About

Su'ad Abdul Khabeer is an associate professor in the Department of American Culture at the University of Michigan, with additional affiliations in the Program in Arab and Muslim American Studies, the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, and Latino/a Studies. She holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University, earned in 2011, and her fields of study include race, Blackness, Black Islam, anthropology, Black women's history, popular culture, and Arab and Muslim American Studies. Trained as an anthropologist, her scholarly work explores the intersections of race, religion, and popular culture in the 21st century, notably through her book 'Muslim Cool: Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States,' which defines a new way of being an American Muslim through ideas, dress, social activism, and complex relationships to state power, constructed through hip hop and Blackness. She is a scholar-artist-activist committed to public scholarship, engaging diverse audiences via performances such as 'Sampled: Beats of Muslim Life' and leadership of the online resource 'Sapelo Square: An Online Resource on Black Muslims in the United States.' Her current interdisciplinary project, 'Umi's Archive,' investigates Black women's thought and archives, using digital humanities to explore Blackness and memory. Khabeer has contributed to public discourse through writings for major outlets, appearances on Al Jazeera English, and her poetry featured in anthologies. Recognized as one of 25 influential American Muslims by CNN in 2018 and recipient of the Open Society Equality Fellowship in 2019, she was also a Hunting Family Faculty Fellow at the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities in 2022-2023.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Social Science
• Psychology
• Environmental science
• Geology
• Geography
• Criminology
• Gender studies
• Art
• Pedagogy
• Linguistics
• Aesthetics

Selected publications

• Pedagogies of Resistance: Why Anti-Muslim Racism Matters

  UNC Libraries · 2025-06-27

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The following interview with a collective of scholars describes the organization, conceptualization, and thematic framework of the online syllabus #IslamophobiaisRacism. The goals of the syllabus include theorizing anti-Muslim racism and developing strategies to combat white supremacy.

  PublisherDOI

• [In] Searching Our Mothers’ Archives

  African Journal of Gender and Religion · 2023-07-31

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Black feminist scholarship provokes us to reimagine archives in creative and speculative ways and echoes everyday Black communities’ deep investment in memory that rejects the idea of African people as a people without history. I enter this discourse through Umi’s Archive is an interdisciplinary and multimedia research project that draws on my family archive to engage everyday Black women’s thought to investigate key questions of archives and power. In this article, I describe my experience curating, preserving, and presenting the archive and how that became a process of de-disciplining myself, turning to intimacy and mourning to learn from Black women by searching in my Umi’s archive.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• ‘Knowledge of self’: How a key phrase from Islam became a pillar of hip-hop

  2023-08-04 · 2 citations

  preprint1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Muslim Cool

  New York University Press eBooks · 2020 · 91 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Geology
  • Environmental science
  • Geography

  Interviews with young, black Muslims in Chicago explore the complexity of identities formed at the crossroads of Islam and hip hop This groundbreaking study of race, religion and popular culture in the 21st century United States focuses on a new concept, “Muslim Cool.” Muslim Cool is a way of being an American Muslim—displayed in ideas, dress, social activism in the ’hood, and in complex relationships to state power. Constructed through hip hop and the performance of Blackness, Muslim Cool is a way of engaging with the Black American experience by both Black and non-Black young Muslims that challenges racist norms in the U.S. as well as dominant ethnic and religious structures within American Muslim communities. Drawing on over two years of ethnographic research, Su'ad Abdul Khabeer illuminates the ways in which young and multiethnic U.S. Muslims draw on Blackness to construct their identities as Muslims. This is a form of critical Muslim self-making that builds on interconnections and intersections, rather than divisions between “Black” and “Muslim.” Thus, by countering the notion that Blackness and the Muslim experience are fundamentally different, Muslim Cool poses a critical challenge to dominant ideas that Muslims are “foreign” to the United States and puts Blackness at the center of the study of American Islam. Yet Muslim Cool also demonstrates that connections to Blackness made through hip hop are critical and contested—critical because they push back against the pervasive phenomenon of anti-Blackness and contested because questions of race, class, gender, and nationality continue to complicate self-making in the United States.

  PublisherDOI

• 2. Policing Music and the Facts of Blackness

  New York University Press eBooks · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Aesthetics
  • Criminology
  PublisherDOI

• Pedagogies of Resistance: Why Anti-Muslim Racism Matters

  Amerasia Journal · 2020 · 19 citations

  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Gender studies

  The following interview with a collective of scholars describes the organization, conceptualization, and thematic framework of the online syllabus #IslamophobiaisRacism. The goals of the syllabus include theorizing anti-Muslim racism and developing strategies to combat white supremacy.

  PublisherDOI

• 3. Blackness as a Blueprint for the Muslim Self

  New York University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Hip Hop Matters: Race, Space, and Islam in Chicago

  City & Society · 2018-06-27 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract In this article I examine pious Muslim placemaking against the backdrop of race and class tensions in the United States. I contend that ideologies of anti‐Blackness converge with pious Muslim space and placemaking practices to create a moralized division of space for Chicago Muslims. Specifically, I look at the ways that pious Muslim placemaking in Chicago suburbs by Muslim immigrant parents is entangled in elisions of race and class in the US. I show that whereas a generation of Muslim parents pursued a pious Muslim life in proximity to a White, middle‐class, American dream, groups of young Muslim activists are making Muslim space and place through Blackness in the 'hood. I argue that young Muslim activists embrace hip hop's remaking of space and place to remap the pious geographies of Muslims in Chicago and challenge conceptions of pious Muslim identity that are inflected with anti‐Blackness. I demonstrate how these young Muslims find value in Blackness, as an ethic of social justice and an exemplar of Muslim piety, to contest hegemonic isomorphisms of race, space, place, and morality. Thus, I argue that by reclaiming and remaking space and place, young Muslims oppose anti‐Black racism found within broader US society as well as within the entrenched divisions of pious Muslim space in Chicago.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Muslim Dandies

  Anthropology News · 2017-09-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Citizens and Suspects: Race, Gender, and the making of American Muslim citizenship

  Transforming Anthropology · 2017-10-01 · 18 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Working at the intersection of anthropological engagements with cultural citizenship and interdisciplinary scholarship on the racialization of Muslims in the United States, I examine the making and unmaking of American Muslims as both citizens and suspects. Based on my ethnographic research with young Chicago Muslims, I argue that state surveillance and multiculturalism shape U.S. Muslim claims to citizenship as rights and belonging. I chart racialization across different domains to argue that the fetish of Muslim body and behavior can actually render Muslim identity both legible and illegible. It is instances of legibility and illegibility, I argue, that illuminate how race and gender coproduce differential experiences of suspicion for American Muslims, and also different beliefs in the very possibility of, and thus desire for, citizenship. Ultimately, I contend that the experience of the American Muslim indexes the centrality of both race and gender to citizenship in the United States.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Juliane Hammer

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  12 shared

• Sylvia Chan-Malik

  Rütgers (Germany)

  3 shared

• Zareena Grewal

  3 shared

• Rosemary R. Hicks

  2 shared

• Kambiz GhaneaBassiri

  2 shared

• Timur R. Yuskaev

  2 shared

• Paul C. Johnson

  Colorado School of Mines

  2 shared

• Edward E. Curtis

  2 shared

Labs

• U-M LSA American CulturePI

Awards & honors

• Open Society Equality Fellowship (2019)
• Hunting Family Faculty Fellow at the University of Michigan…
• Profile as one of 25 influential American Muslims by CNN (20…