That chicken sandwich—floating, glowing, miraculous—was featured in a 2007 Forbes article on Chick-fil-A, an Atlanta-based restaurant chain that currently has about 1,600 separate locations in 39 states. Founded by S. Truett Cathy (also pictured above) and incorporated in 1964, Chick-fil-A is well-known in the South—and increasingly in other parts of the U.S.—for a menu that includes the standard fast-food fare of soda, milkshakes, and (waffle-cut) French fries as well as southern staples like sweet tea and carrot n’ raisin salad. But it is most well known for its signature chicken sandwich.

In real life, nothing about a Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich makes it illuminate and levitate. Best I can tell, its culinary chemistry is as follows:

– Two buttered hamburger buns
– Two sliced dill pickles
– One boneless, skinless chicken breast, battered and pressure cooked
– Salt, pepper, and other “seasonings”

Nothing spiritual there. Again, best I can tell.

Still, Cathy has imbued his chicken sandwiches with a spiritual aura ever since his company started to grow by leaps and bounds in the 1980s and 1990s. That’s certainly one reason why an illustrator for Forbes saw fit to Photoshop a pietà of poultry for the magazine’s story on Cathy and Chick-fil-A. It matched the story that Cathy told about himself, his company, and his chicken sandwich.

The story goes something like this. Born poor (but not too poor) in rural Georgia, Cathy started up a small diner in a working-class neighborhood of Atlanta shortly after World War II. He then set up another diner, lost it to a fire, and switched up his business model to prioritize the selling of chicken sandwiches over burgers. He then moved his operation into the suburban mall market. Then he moved into the strip-mall market. Then he moved into the just-off-the-interstate-exit market. He is now a billionaire. Through it all, Cathy remained a faithful Baptist and a self-professed “born again” evangelical Christian. Thus, Cathy claimed that the success of his sandwiches came not just from good business decisions or favorable market conditions. God blessed his chicken sandwich because Cathy had been a wise and godly steward of his time and talent.

Out of gratitude for God’s gracious affirmation of Cathy’s efforts and ideas, Cathy decided to return the favor. For that reason and that reason alone (again, so goes the story), Chick-fil-A donates millions of dollars each year to youth programs, foster homes, and college scholarships. It sponsors marriage retreats and youth camps. It encourages “God-focused,” evangelical-style dedications at every franchise opening. And, most notably, it requires every Chick-fil-A franchise to close on Sunday.

That chicken sandwich—a product, in Cathy’s estimation, blessed by God because of Cathy’s own faith in the possibility of that work-derived blessing—made all this happen.

How should we interpret this? How do you write about a company that sees its signature product as a spiritualized “good,” in both senses of that word? How do we navigate such a spirituality in the marketplace?

There are a few options, but no matter how you look at it, Chick-fil-A and its chicken sandwich present some dilemmas.

The first is one of taxonomy. Chick-fil-A spirituality fits awkwardly within available definitions. Cathy and many of Chick-fil-A’s executives and employees are evangelicals. Many are classic institutionalists in that they attend churches regularly or support distinct evangelical denominations. And, of course, they work for an organized, bureaucratic institution—the corporation.

But they also exude a kind of non-sectarian spirituality that is highly individualistic, captured by notions of spiritual transcendence, and strongly informed by the possibility of participatory engagement with the divine or sacred or “authentic.” Moreover, their Jesus and God and Bible are not very specific in terms of moral injunctions or “truth” statements, although Chick-fil-A executives and customers vary on that point. Still, they generally eschew the us-versus-them worldview and turn-or-burn rhetoric of a Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson. Indeed, most affiliates of Chick-fil-A are quiet—or at least not very public—with such views, even if they hold them privately. As a result, only on rare occasions have they been cast and criticized as exclusivists with their religious or spiritual claims and practices.

More often than not, Chick-fil-A sees “faith” not as ammunition in a cultural war but an inspirational resource for personal uplift and empowerment. If it’s activism, it’s of a different type than the kind of explicit public politics of the Christian Right. It is instead a kind of nice-and-smiley spiritual activism. “Faith” means “having faith in faith” and using the power of positive thinking to self-actualize and attain personal purpose and, by proxy, broader social influence. Maybe all that doesn’t fit cleanly into a definition of spirituality, which can be—let’s admit it—a shifting, amorphous, “know it when you see it” kind of category. But it sure does seem like they are trying to be “spiritual but not religious”—or at least prioritize the “spiritual” over the “religious,” while maintaining a distinct sense of trying to change the world, one chicken sandwich at a time.

Another dilemma in our parsing of Chick-fil-A’s spirituality is the problem of misdirection. If we nod along with what Cathy claims about his sandwich and his company, we risk ignoring or downplaying or overlooking or justifying the processes that actually made the chicken. Skinless, boneless, battered, and butter-bunned chicken filets do not appear ex nihilo. Chicken farmers, sometimes in debt to large-scale processors and often struggling to make ends meet in the contemporary agricultural market, hatch and raise the company-owned chicks to maturity. Workers—often Latino, sometimes undocumented, usually uninsured and underpaid—in poultry plants wash, slice, and cut the live chickens for Chick-fil-A. Truckers drive the chickens to slaughter and then drive ready-to-cook cutlets to every Chick-fil-A distributor or franchise. Hourly part-time employees, often teenagers or college-age young adults, cook the chickens behind the counter at Chick-fil-A and then sell them to customers, who likewise invest whatever meaning or desire they want into the sandwich.

All of these people contributed their time and talent to the chicken sandwich, not just Cathy and certainly not some vague collusion of spiritual entities or forces. Some of these people contributed so much more.

ALBERTVILLE [AL]—The federal government has proposed $59,900 in fines for Wayne Farms LLC after a teenage worker died at its Albertville poultry-processing plant in April, labor officials said Wednesday. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s investigation of the accident found the worker, 17-year old Augustin Juan, was trying to free a stuck door on a bird cage when he was crushed between two cages. “These so-called ‘struck-by’ accidents are a leading cause of worker death in the Southeast,” said Roberto Sanchez, OSHA’s Birmingham-area director. . . . Company representatives could not be reached for comment Wednesday.
– The Gadsden Times, September 23, 2004

Wayne Farms LLC was—and still is—a major supplier of processed bird meat to Chick-Fil-A.

If there’s something spiritual to the sandwich, then it cannot become a glare that blinds us. Indeed, spirituality—something arguably protected by the First Amendment—potentially makes the corporate workplace a sacred site and, therefore, off limits to outsider involvement and critique. If anything can be claimed as spiritual in a work environment, then everything might be permissible, from beneficial social service to human catastrophe. That might sound alarmist. But it stands to reason that we should ask why a company might want to be the arbiter of spirituality and, therefore, a producer of the sacred that should be respected and accepted, more so or at least on par with those entrusted by the public to keep business within the limits of the law, as voted on and written. Indeed, the fact that many corporate CEOs liken notions of “spirituality” and “faith” as the key to “leadership” at work should make us pause and ask: Who made you God? If we understand spirituality in the marketplace as somehow divested from the marketplace and the people and decisions that make it up, then I’d argue we are not really doing our jobs. At best, we are studying hagiography. At worst, we might be enabling the use of “spirituality” by corporations as a kind of regulatory antidote.

What, then, are other options? I think any understanding of material goods made and sold by any company, especially self-declared “spiritual” companies doing “spiritual” business, needs to be grounded in the human element. It just has to be, whether it’s a copy of I Ching or a falafel or a “Jesus is My Boyfriend” T-Shirt or an iPhone 4S or a 3D-HDTV or a $35,000 industrial sprocket or a $35 shovel. That is not saying that we cynically dismiss the spiritual as de facto corporate cover—as merely the smoke and mirrors of the marketing and P.R. department. But we do have to recalibrate. Physical goods and personal services—and the men and women who make and price and value and sell them—are not quite like analyzing the “spiritual” in prophetic ecstasy or tribal song or mural-gazing or a contemplative moment by a lake. Material production and spiritual or quasi-spiritual fetish can and do intersect, just as Marx, Weber, and others have said.

But they also do not do so in simple, direct, and always predictable ways. The spiritual is not just a product of the material. The material is not quite a product of the spiritual. The chicken sandwich, again, stands before us with multiple and complex spiritual meanings which must be dealt with because they are there—stubbornly there—instead of not being there in the face of corporatization. Cathy’s chicken sandwich didn’t need to float and glow. Plenty of products and services are made, sold, and bought without overt spiritual overtones. Why Cathy and his company injects spirituality into the process of making and selling chicken sandwiches stands as a dilemma not quite explained by raising awareness about Chick-fil-A’s supply chain. Moreover, calling the company on the carpet for its lack of awareness or interest in that supply chain seems too easy, especially if we don’t seek to understand how Chick-fil-A’s spiritual affectations might hinder or enhance the company’s ability to be aware of or interested in those who sacrifice for its sandwich.

This circles us back to the question I raised earlier. How do we navigate spirituality in the marketplace? Let’s expand that question further by considering how we might address the movement in contemporary corporate America to bring spirituality into the workplace, a movement that Chick-fil-A certainly fits into. Whether you call it a “God at Work,” “Faith in the Workplace,” or “Spirituality in the Workplace,” there is an impetus toward making work mean “something” more than a means to profit-maximization. Why? To what end? By which means? In what ways? It’s also important to ask who is backing such initiatives and why. If Walmart and Tyson Foods are behind you, what does that mean for how we understand God-faith-spirituality at work?

Call it a movement devoted to delegitimizing regulation or killing unions or ensuring the docility of the employed (maybe it’s that). Or, call it a movement devoted to advancing personal self-satisfaction or revitalizing “business ethics” or “corporate social responsibility” (maybe it’s that too). Regardless, spirituality is there in certain corners of corporate America and it’s making singular and multiple, coherent and incoherent claims—while perhaps precluding other claims—about the value of work and human dignity, about the “essence” of the spiritual self, and about the possibilities of spiritual community through commodity-imagining, commodity-making, and commodity-buying.

We can’t take Chick-fil-A’s claims about its sandwich at face value because we lose something in the process. We lose the connection between spirituality and the people who make up the marketplace and the networks and chains that support contemporary capitalism. But we also can’t just dismiss these claims about the spirituality of work, of goods, of companies, of people—or stop with investigative exposés of how it has or has not filtered down to the bottom or up to the top of the corporate triangle. That doesn’t really dive into the messy endeavor to explain spirituality in the marketplace, either as a complicated and layered phenomenon or as an organized but diverse and divided movement.

I have my own thoughts about what history, as I understand it, has to say about the construction of spirituality in the world of buying and selling, of sweating and sacrificing, of hope and fear, of living and dying. I will share them and strive to sell them in the form of a niche or (fingers crossed) mass-market book. I will sell them as an extension of my scholarly persona in the marketplace of ideas. And, I will probably call my work a “spiritual” enterprise, intended to fill my own wants and needs, to better those around me, or to distract them from my own foibles and failures.

I suppose, then, I cannot saddle up on too much of a high horse when considering the chicken sandwich and those who spiritualize it, especially because I am captured in the same pushes and pulls of motive and morality and materiality in the contemporary market.

I also cannot do this because—despite what I have read and written, despite what I have averred, despite what I wish was and was not there –I must confess.

I have tasted and believed.

The Chick-fil-A chicken sandwich is like heaven on earth for less than five bucks.

We have been up all night, my friends and I, beneath mosque lamps whose brass cupolas are bright as our souls, because like them they were illuminated by the internal glow of electric hearts.

F.T. Marinetti, “The Futurist Manifesto.” Le Figaro, February 20, 1909.

Anselm defined God as a being than which nothing greater can be conceived. This is never the case for the ultimate demitasse of espresso, known as the godshot. Occasionally a godshot is reported, a triumph of technique, technology, and nature. But mostly godshot suggests deferral, a perfection yet to come. Prospects of better gear, superior beans, purer metals, and more advanced knowledge fire the imagination of finer versions, an espresso to produce still more intense experiences of taste and stimulation, a truer sense of terroir and origins. It is just over there, and we can taste it. Espresso mediates, and is used to transform, the relation between subjective experience and the external world. The most valuable coffee bean ground for espresso, Kopi Luwak, is collected after being ingested and excreted by Indonesian civets. Now that’s a spiritual food, beans chock-full of inner life, and the potential of its expression.

Though the nomenclature of the godshot may be said to be mere semantics, semantics are rarely merely mere. The recent expansion of third-wave coffee conoisseurship and technologies, producing myriad new and reformed public shops and cafés (McCafé in the Golden Arched Holy of Holies), and ever more accoutrements for the home, is dramatic. In this short flight, I explore spirituality through espresso, as a history of exchanges between people and machines that brokered, adjusted and defined the relation between outer and inner, between external “things” and inner experience.

Coffee beans are, of course, the produce of a plant, not precisely a thing. They are even actors of a sort—enliveners, vivifiers, catalytic converters. Their origin legend tells of an Ethiopian goatherder boy named Kaldi who, in the tenth century (or eighth, or fourth, or seventh) first observed the excited behavior of his goats as they gnawed wild berries, and decided to try the same. The stimulating force of coffee was always a major part of its appeal, albeit in diverse ways, from its emergence in Ethiopia to its systematic plantation in Yemen to its global transport via the expansion of Islam and then the Ottoman Empire, to the arrival in Europe via Turkey in the hands of Venetian traders, to the first coffeehouses of Europe by the mid-1600s. Those seventeenth-century “penny universities” arrived just in time to help produce the public sphere, and to construct diagnoses of the secular that poured from the chatter over cups. Etymology presents a similarly global arc—English coffee from Turkish kahve, from Arabic gahwa, abbreviated from gahwat al-bun, “wine of the bean.”

The nominative tether to that more famously spiritual food, wine, is suggestive. Wine has a long pedigree as a thoroughly religious sort of drink, from Dionysian to Christian rites, and in metaphysics from the Symposium to the theory of transubstantiation. Roland Barthes called wine the totem-drink of France. Wine not only represented France the nation, it also converted its subjects into citizens. As a converting substance, wine miraculously extracts opposites from its object: youthfulness from the aged (as Socrates says), and boldness from the shy. Wine is of the earth, producing not only the bacchanal but also dreams and reverie, a theme addressed in depth by Bachelard. For some, wine’s spirituality has to do with its indigeneity, the inseparability of its identity from particular lands, as terroir. Other writers, like Michel Leiris, found in it the dread of the alloy, the blend, the complete interpenetration of one thing by another. Wine and water, like coffee and milk, can completely fuse, connoting the horror of the total breaching of boundaries and loss of identity, an unavoidable risk of conversion.

Other familiar ingestibles that modulate interior human experience in relation to the material world have been addressed in spiritual terms too. Fernando Ortiz’ masterpiece, Cuban Counterpoint, juxtaposed sugar and tobacco:

Food and poison, waking and drowsing, energy and dream, delight of the flesh and delight of the spirit, sensuality and thought, the satisfaction of an appetite and the contemplation of a moment’s illusion, calories of nourishment and puffs of fantasy, undifferentiated and commonplace anonymity from the cradle and aristocratic individuality recognized wherever it goes, medicine and magic, reality and deception, virtue and vice. Sugar is she; tobacco is he. Sugar cane was the gift of the gods, tobacco of the devils; she is the daughter of Apollo, he is the offspring of Persephone.

Ortiz insisted on the spiritual dimension of these ingestible things by pointing to their resemblance to religion proper: “The smoke that rises heavenward has a spiritual evocation … like a fumigatory purification. The fine, dirty ash to which it turns is a funereal suggestion of belated repentance.”

Those religious resemblances are less intriguing to me than Ortiz’s approach to spirituality through material, edible things, his poetic exploration of the techne (in Heidegger’s sense of technique plus poiesis: methods of causing to emerge) that people apply to building correspondences between inner and outer worlds, however construed. “Spirituality” refers to the practices and things used to find and make more or less direct ties between subjective experience and the shared empirical world. For Kant or Durkheim, spirituality is strictly impossible—and quixotic—since the world is irremediably mediated, refracted and translated via symbols. Spiritual practices, contrariwise, enact the possibility of a real and direct fusion of the self and the world. It was in this sense that Henri Bergson, Durkheim’s schoolmate and peer, was called a spiritualist, sometimes derisively, since he posited the direct experience of the world through what he called Intuition.

Spirituality from this perspective is but tangentially related to “religion.” It can take more or less religious forms, in the sense of mapping correspondences between subjective experience and the external influence of gods, but it need not be religious in that restricted sense at all. In spirituality’s most intense expressions of direct internal-external, subjective-objective mappings, it can verge into something like shamanic magic, the use of private visions to exert even causal power on the outside world; raising the sun, say, or healing another’s body. In its softer, more secular and more consumerist forms, spiritual practices seem to produce a more or less barometric idea of interiority, in which inner states are felt and presented as meaningfully indexed to the outside world—the melancholy that mirrors, and even takes part in, the rainy day. Bergson the “spiritualist” used the example of the feeling of impatience he felt as he waited for sugar to dissolve in water he wanted to sweeten. The fact that he must wait is, he wrote, “big with meaning.” As the sugar’s time to dissolve and his impatience are merged, the sugar-water is conjoined with a piece of his own life’s duration, producing a fullness of time that we only artificially parse out into segments. This fullness is the Whole. Later he called it the Duration.

It is surely not incidental that Bergson was terrifically concerned to remind readers of the Whole and the Duration at just the fin de siècle moment when machines that transformed and transmitted nature at ever-accelerating speeds were also increasingly mediating peoples’ relations to each other, to the world, and to the experience of self. Espresso machines were one of many innovations that came from harnessing the power of steam—steamships, steam locomotives, steam coffee. The earliest contraptions forcing water through tightly packed coffee grounds using the force of steam were built in France in the early 1800s, employing a rough technique that remains in use today in almost all Italian homes in the stovetop moka pot. The espresso machine referred not only to the new technique of making coffee at pressured speed—the same word was applied to fast-traveling trains, for example—but also to individually prepared servings made expressly for one customer. The early machine-builder and entrepreneur, Victoria Arduino, joined the images of the speeding train and the steaming new coffee served for the on-the-go solo customer, in a striking 1922 advertisement drawn by Leonetto Cappiello:

The first brass pressure machine was Italian, made by Luigi Bezzera and Desidorio Pavoni between 1901 and 1903, and it was mostly Italian machines that filled the art nouveau cafés of Europe’s belle époque. Bezzera probably built the basic machine, but it was Pavoni who first marketed the name, “espressso,” and also Pavoni who first attached the wand that released surplus steam and later allowed for the theatrical fashioning, and then the fashion, of foamed milk drinks like cappuccinos. Early lever-pump machines were also Italian, built by Giovanni Achille Gaggia in 1945, using a spring-piston design to increase the pressure brought to bear on more finely ground coffee. The pressure generated by Gaggia’s machine created the crema that became the signal feature of correctly made espresso. These Gaggia-made espressos with crema and foamed milk were the drink that sated the post-war boom in the cafés of Europe, filled to bursting as rations on coffee were lifted and public life revived. Many of the art nouveau and deco cafés, at least in Paris, look much the same today as they did in Bezzera and Pavoni’s time. The solid, dazzling espresso machines of polished copper, brass and steel are still manufactured as a retro-look today, and they afford a sense of the aesthetic effects they must have made on patrons a century ago: Sleek, angular metal set against lush velvet in elegant cafés, industry tamed and polished, steam-locomotion civilized in the salon, piston progress welded to fashion and desire. After the Second War, espresso became totemic, sharing with wine, tobacco, and sugar the status of what Barthes called “converting substances.” They were bio-technes to cultivate desired relations of interior states with the external world, or even occasionally blurring them, as in the unmediated Whole of the godshot.

Still, what could be “spiritual” about the espresso brewing process itself? At first glance, this looks like the opposite of the spiritual, more like a story of industry, speed, efficiency, of workers’ schedules that required 25-second rather than minutes-long extractions for their quickening, of standing at counters rather than sitting at table, of white European masters pressing still more energy from brown tropics, of power, and Italian nationalism; in short, about control. Maybe even, kind of, about fascism, the brass and steel, eagle-topped machines that yoked the totemic drink to striding national aspirations? F.T. Marinetti, the early bard of Italian fascism, included in his 1932 Futurist Cookbook dishes made with espresso, like “The Excited Pig”: A whole salami, skinned, then cooked in strong espresso coffee and flavored with eau-de-cologne. Surely this sort of techno-industrial orgy was the opposite of the spirituality of wine or tobacco, of conviviality or reverie or dreams or intuition or the Duration.

Yes, yes, yes… and yet. This is “spirituality” too, pipes and ducts traversing interiority and exteriority using metals and steam and technique, not to mention, of course, the giant southern storehouse of beans yanked suddenly much nearer through the power of steam, the steam of ships, rail, and coffee. As the flipside of romantic spirituality, here was a precursor of the cybernetic spiritual, the holy machined human as a fusible sequence of evercharging parts. Marinetti wrote in yet another manifesto, “The Futurist Sensibility” (1919): “Instead of humanizing animals, vegetables, and minerals (an outmoded system) we will be able to animalize, vegetize, mineralize, electrify, or liquefy our style, making it live the life of material.” Animalize, electrify, liquefy: espresso was a steam-arm prosthetic with which Kaldi the Ethiopian goatherder boy of the mythic origins of coffee, after a thousand years of imitation and approximation, finally became the ecstatic goat, dancing in the Duration.

The ecstasy of the electrified and liquefied individual soul is not the only conversion espresso achieves. Parisian cafés, for example, offer an alternative to mediating the self with spiritualities of speed or solipsistic reverie. Here, inner experience is mediated by espresso in hyper-social style, and Durkheim smiles from the cemetery of Montparnasse. Café tables are filled three-rows deep before you can even get inside. The chic and the hoi polloi alike are gathered to gab, look around, and peer over their standard-issue espresso at other people. The bentwood and rattan chairs are always faced out toward the big stage of the street. None are turned inward. Espresso is supremely public and visual, a prop for seeing and being seen.

To the taste of Italian traditionalists and third-wave American and Australian coffee geeks, it is also often careless: Robusta rather than Arabica beans, dosed to fill the order but probably ground awhile ago, and not enough of them, and barely leveled or tamped anyway, and the shot inattentively pulled during a chat with another customer. But not only that! Cigarettes and wine are being consumed alongside espresso, whether at 10:00 am or 10:00 pm. This is quite unlike the rational segmentation of converting substances, time schedules, and kinds of socialization or reverie operative in U.S. public and private houses (caffeine, only until noon; liquor, only after five; cigarettes, I think I saw one in Mad Men once.) The easygoing style of French espresso preparation, and the promiscuous Parisian mingling of espresso, wine and tobacco, ruffles coffee geeks’ view of the solemn focus called for in approaching the elixir. The French barmen are sure to mishandle the proper roast and temperature, the purity of the water, and the microfoam texture of respectable crema. French consumers are likely to overlook the citrus tones or nutty notes, and to misrecognize the overall mouthfeel. Critical connoisseurs arriving from the U.S. or Australia find the beautiful old espresso machines of Paris wasted in flip sociality. For these coffee geeks, tending their spiritual discipline, there is nothing so insouciantly social about espresso. Theirs is more of a Shaker ethos, built on the love of process and craft and tools, and an indivisible sympathy with and through espresso, like Bergson’s intuition of the Whole as he watched sugar dissolve in his water.

Like Bergson, they’ve had a revelation that inspires reform. Walk into Café Coutume in Paris, on Rue de Babylone in the conservative 7th arrondisement, for example. The owners are an international group of third-wave missionaries—Portuguese, Australian, American, and a lonely Frenchman—embarked on the quest to redeem the loose Parisian cafés. They describe them as lost in their old traditions, whereas they take part in the “new coffee culture.” No rattan chairs out front to watch the world go by here. Instead, hanging naked bulbs and lots of luscious metal gear decorate the interior—vacuum siphons, a drip system of beakers, grinders, roasters and, very prominently, a fine red and chrome Italian La Marzocco GB/5 three-group espresso machine. The Strada, the ultimate espresso machine, is “coming soon,” and will be the first in France. (The godshot is near, the Duration is imminent). The gleaming machine is right up front, on display rather than buried behind the bar as in most bistrots and brasseries. Antoine Netien, creator of the café, explained, “The French are more accustomed to things that are more hidden. Our open motif is very American. You can see everything happening.” But it’s also visually focused on the gear needed for the perfect, expressly individual experience, despite the owners’ hope that the new café will be the hub of the promised new culture. Solitary drinkers are common. They are not here to talk, unless it is to ask about the equipment, or to demand intricate espresso drinks of precise individual formulae. Their orders require even an experienced barista’s fixed attention. It’s a good thing they recruited Kevin, from Iowa City, for the job.

“They” are the wider community of the Nation of Islam, some still members, some not. “They” are those who welcomed and nurtured Hassan when she came to the U.S. from Pakistan as a young doctor in the late 1950s. Dr. Hassan came to take up an internship at Northwestern University Hospital, eventually choosing to specialize in anesthesiology, and then to a teaching appointment at the University of Chicago Hospitals. As a young woman in her early twenties, new to Chicago, and not entirely comfortable with American student life, her husband-to-be Zia Hassan introduced her to Elijah Muhammad, as well as to Muhammad’s wife, Sister Clara, and their eight children.

As she sees it now, looking back half a century, as she began her professional career she also launched her spiritual path. Dr. Hassan’s life as a Muslim in the United States displays unexpected conjunctions challenging us to enlarge our assumptions about the Nation of Islam, its forms of spirituality, and the ways its practices of food and dress produce and cultivate forms of piety across cultures, continents and generations. Now working with Bill Kurtis to produce a film about sounds in the three Abrahamic traditions, Dr. Hassan traces the beginnings of her interfaith sensibility to the generosity and hospitality of “them”—Elijah and Clara Muhammad, her first U.S. family in faith (as well as the nuns who welcomed her at St. Mary of Nazareth hospital in Chicago where she also worked as a young resident physician.)

Zia Hassan, Hassan’s husband, had met Elijah Muhammad through his older brother, who had preceded him to the U.S. Zia’s brother, a thoracic surgeon, had himself met Elijah Muhammad when he treated him as a patient, and had been invited to his home. At that time, Zia’s brothers-in-law were the Pakistani publishers of the most widely sold English translation of the Qu’ran. When Zia Hassan’s brother mentioned to Elijah Muhammad that his younger brother would be coming to the U.S. to study, the leader of the Nation insisted on having them met at the airport in New York City. The young man Elijah Muhammad sent to greet Zia Hassan and his brother that day was none other than Malcolm X.

Shakeela Hassan remembers many evenings sitting at the dining room table in Elijah Muhammad’s house. Sometime in the late 1950s he said that he wanted a special hat for a special occasion: a fez. As they sat talking, she drew a hat on a piece of paper, combining a Pakistani style with what she proposed as symbols of the Nation of Islam, namely a Crescent and Star woven into the design motif. She bought fine velvet fabric at Marshall Field’s department store, fabric which she sent back to Lahore with friends who arranged for the embroidery to be applied to her specification. It was the first of many she would have made in different colors:

Some of Shakeela Hassan's fezes

When she speaks of Elijah Muhammad and Sister Clara today, now some fifty years later, Dr. Hassan speaks warmly of their hospitality—of how food was brought to her house when each of her children were born—of how she learned to make a soup that she still makes in quantity to share with friends and family—of how Sister Clara arranged for clothes to be made for her at the Nation’s clothes factory, jackets and long skirts that Sister Clara thought suitable and dignified for Shakeela Hassan to wear as a woman doctor in a hospital. Some of the clothes that were designed for the women of the Nation were, in turn, modeled on the shalwar kameez that Shakeela had worn when Sister Clara first met her. The long tunic tops and “baggy pants” of her home country now became the inspiration for the distinctive dress of the women of a new American religious movement.

Zia and Shakeela Hassan were first-hand witnesses to Elijah Muhammad’s role in shaping the destiny and determination of Cassius Clay to become the world’s best and foremost boxing legend as a convert to Islam. Shakeela recalls how lovingly and gracefully Sister Clara would attend to details of table etiquette to taking turns in table conversations with the dynamic young guest, Ali, at the family dinners, where the Hassans were frequently present.

Asked about what it was like to know Malcolm X, Dr. Hassan responds:

I . . . met Malcolm and his wife Betty, in the late 1960s. She was a nurse. I’ll never forget what great pride Elijah Muhammad took in introducing us to one another because we were both healthcare professionals! There was such a simple elegance in just being able to share our experiences working to care for the sick. But more than that, this immigrant new kid on the block found the greatest of human comforts in the home of Elijah Muhammad: home cooked meals, love of elders and children, a strong family presence, and someone to look up to. At the time, the Muslim identity of our (Zia’s and mine) new ‘family’ was not as important as it became later in our relationship—later as my own identity as an American Muslim began to develop. What I will always cherish from that time is the vivid memory of a family who devoted themselves to giving their community a deep sense of self-respect, rooted in a commitment to self-improvement and self-empowerment—against tremendous odds and in the midst of horrible discrimination and prejudice. To take charge and be themselves was an awesome lesson in grass root participation—a vision of immense humanity and community.

She continues:

I can remember being invited for the first time to the home of Elijah Muhammad and his wife Sister Clara Muhammad. Zia and I were always welcomed with open arms. Not only were we invited to be at table with the family, but Elijah Muhammad treated us like family. Not unlike my own dear father, he entertained any and all questions from a young Pakistani woman doctor whose curiosity never allowed her to remain silent. As for Sister Clara, she was nothing short of a mother to me. Whatever she did, she always understood herself to be setting an example for others—from the way she meticulously arranged the contents of her purse and attended to the minutest details of keeping a clean home ‘where the angels would feel welcome,’ to the loving way in which she prepared meals for her family and guests. As dignified a woman as she was, however, she was never stiff or aloof. My fondest memories are her teaching me how to make her famous navy bean soup—something I make to this day for her grandchildren who are like children to me.

Sister Clara Muhammad’s Bean Soup

2 pound bag small navy beans
1 pound bag lentils
1 large onion—chopped
1 sweet green pepper—chopped
1 bunch celery—chopped
1 small can tomato paste
1 cup oil
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp rubbed sage
1 tsp black pepper
1 tsp paprika
salt to taste

Soak beans and lentils well covered with water over night. Rinse and cover with fresh water together with all other ingredients. Boil and then simmer till beans are tender. Serve whole or pureed in a food processor to a course or smooth grind. The prepared soup can be saved frozen in plastic containers. To serve add boiling water to achieve desired consistency.

Shakeela Hassan’s recipe remarks:

Sister Clara’s favorite was the smooth grind. She introduced me to the food processor of its time—the Foley Food Mill. I still have that hand-held machine that gave me the pleasure to know I could follow Sister Clara’s recipe with perfection. Pleasure and pride and my purpose was to feel good about healthy eating and inclusion of whole grains, proteins and food values in terms of vitamins, minerals thru the use of lentils, fresh vegetables and preparing it with patience and love to make that taste worth its weight in grains and gratitude. Croutons and extra sharp cheddar cheese cubes and Tabasco hot sauce are the memorable ingredients from Sister Clara’s times. Sister Clara served her soup with home made whole wheat bread—sliced and slow oven-toasted accompaniment with a smile—her smile was meaningful to convey—the message of good eating for health and human reasons to share with love, generosity and gratitude. To this date I make about twice a year a very large amount to share with my family and have it in the freezer ready for serving ourselves or to visiting family and friends! Thank you Sister Clara—some day I hope to write the Bean Soup Legacy and a poem in sharing the memories and moments of learning lessons in life, love and sharing any and everything!

Since her retirement, Dr. Shakeela Hassan has worked to foster greater understanding among Jews, Christians, and Muslims—seeing this work both as an extension of her healing work as a physician and as honoring the hospitality shown to her as a young immigrant woman by Elijah Muhammad and Sister Clara and to honor the grassroots movement of its kind in achieving social justice and civic responsibility.