A brief history of Islam in America

posted on: Dec 24, 2015

So much of the recent debate in the US over Syrian refugees and Islamophobia has tended to assume that Muslim Americans are mostly migrants and that Islam is a new phenomenon in America, along with questions about integration and assimilation.

In fact, Islam has a long history in America, going back to the earliest days of the country’s founding. In the past two-plus centuries, Islam and Muslim Americans have been intertwined with American history. That story is not well-known, and while admittedly that’s in part because the Muslim population of the US has often been quite small, Islam still appears in ways that most Americans might find surprising — particularly, for example, in the history of American slavery and emancipation.

What follows is a brief history of Islam in the United States, from its founding up through today, and a guide to the Muslim American community as it has grown and as it exists today.

How the Founding Fathers thought about Islam and Muslims in America

The most visible role of Islam in the America of the Founding Fathers was perhaps in the words and actions of the founders themselves, who deliberately sought to include Islam as they established the principles of religious liberty.

“The Founders of this nation explicitly included Islam in their vision of the future of the republic. Freedom of religion, as they conceived it, encompassed it,” explains James H. Hutson, the chief of the Manuscript Division of the US Library of Congress.

Thomas Jefferson, who famously owned a copy of the Quran, had much to say about Islam’s place in America. According to Hutson, Jefferson, while campaigning for religious freedom in Virginia, demanded “recognition of the religious rights of the ‘Mahamdan,’ the Jew and the ‘pagan.'”

Even the issue of whether a Muslim could one day be president of the United States — an issue that recently came up when Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson stated that he “would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation” — was an issue the Founding Fathers discussed while ratifying the US Constitution.

In 1788, at a state convention in North Carolina on whether to ratify the newly forged federal Constitution, those who opposed ratification warned that Article VI of the Constitution allowed for the possibility that one day, “in the course of four or five hundred years,” a Muslim could become president of the United States. Article VI states that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

Of course, the Constitution was eventually ratified, and that clause stayed in. The Ben Carsons of America’s founding era lost the debate.

There is even a bas-relief statue of the Prophet Mohammed on the north wall of US Supreme Court that, while constructed in 1935, deliberately harks back to much earlier roots. As noted by scholar Timothy Marr in his book The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism, the “larger-than-life representation of the Prophet Muhammad” is situated “between Charlemagne and Justinian as one of eighteen great law givers of history.”

Franz Jantzen/public domain
Frieze depicting Mohammed in the United States Supreme Court.
The first communities of Muslim Americans were slaves

In the early years of America’s founding, the vast majority of Muslims weren’t citizens but slaves. Scholar Richard Brent Turner explains that researchers disagree over the number of Muslim slaves that were brought to the Americas, and estimates range from 40,000 (in just the US) all the way to 3 million across North and South America and the Caribbean.

Many Muslim slaves were educated and literate in Arabic, Turner writes, and they “often occupied leadership roles in the jobs that slaves performed on plantations in the American South. … Their names, dress, rituals, and dietary laws were perceived as powerful significations of Islamic identities in the slave community.”

Historian Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, whose book A History of Islam in America is one of the most comprehensive on the subject, states, “Muslims in colonial and antebellum America came from a variety of ethnic, educational, and economic backgrounds. In America, their experiences varied depending on when, where, and how they were transported to these shores.”

Similarly, writes GhaneaBassiri, “there was no singular interpretation nor practice of Islam. In some instances, Islamic beliefs and practices were means of self-identification that distinguished, and at times even isolated, African Muslims from other enslaved Africans or white Americans.”

But although many African Muslim slaves tried to maintain their Islamic identities and traditions once they came to America, they also needed to adapt to their new environment and form new communities. And this ultimately led almost all of them to convert to Christianity.

GhaneaBassiri writes:

Conversion to Christianity was arguably the most widespread method by which African Muslims reconfigured their religious practices and beliefs to adapt to their new context and to form new communal relations. While we do not know exactly when and how (or even whether) the open practice of Islam completely ceased in nineteenth-century United States, it is clear from our sources that the American-born children of African Muslims did not practice Islam nor did they self-identify as Muslims.

Thus, despite the massive influx of Muslims from the Atlantic slave trade, by the end of the 19th century Islam had all but disappeared among these communities.

The first mosque and the first Muslim immigration after slavery

At the same time that Islam was fading among communities of slaves and former slaves, millions of immigrants began arriving on America’s shores toward the end of the 19th and especially the early 20th centuries. They included tens of thousands from Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East, South and Central Asia, and Eastern Europe. They were spurred in part by the Industrial Revolution that erupted once America finally emerged from the ashes of the Civil War and Reconstruction era.

America’s first mosque was built in Chicago, according to historian Sally Howell, in 1893 as part of the “Street in Cairo” attraction at the World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. It was meant to be a “close replica of the Mosque of Sultan Qayt Bey in Cairo,” she says, and to “display Islam for American audiences.”

C. D. Arnold (1844-1927); H. D. Higinbotham (Project Gutenberg/public domain)
The scene at the Chicago “Cairo street” mosque provides a glimpse of the Islamic experience in America in the 1890s — both among Chicago’s Muslims and as a sort of exoticized curiosity for non-Muslims. Here is Howell’s description:

The Muslim workers and performers at the exhibition, including a trained imam, were encouraged to remain in their “native costumes” by the fair’s organizers. But it was on their own initiative, and to the apparent delight of the public, that when the adhan (call to prayer) was made from the mosque’s minaret five times a day, the visiting Muslims would duly gather inside and perform their obligations. At the exhibition’s close, the mosque was torn down, and the staff and the performers at the “Cairo Street” exhibit, who had been imported to the United States as objects of spectacle, returned to their more prosaic lives in Egypt, Morocco, and Palestine, where the ritual of prayer would draw little comment.

The second mosque built in the United States wouldn’t show up for several more decades: It was located in Highland Park, Michigan, and was completed in 1921. Howell describes it well:

Built by Muslim migrants for use as a place of worship, this mosque, like the one on “Cairo Street,” was intended to represent Islam to American observers, but the Muslims of Highland Park hoped to create a very different impression of their faith. The Islam to be practiced in the Moslem Mosque of Highland Park would not be exotic, foreign, or a thing of spectacle. It would be an American faith tradition not unlike those found in nearby churches and synagogues. It would attract worshipers who were American citizens.

Islam grows in early-1900s America — and not just through migration

The early 20th century saw Muslim immigrant communities in America beginning to establish small, local community organizations across the country.

At the same time, Howell writes, African Americans also “began to embrace Islam in the 1920s and 30s partially in response to the radical dislocations and racism they experienced prior to and during the Great Migration (the movement of disenfranchised southerners to industrial regions in the North).”

Several of these African-American Muslim associations would go on to have significant impact on the face of Islam in America by promoting the idea of Islam as a lost part of black African heritage. Howell writes:

For many, it was Marcus Garvey’s Negro World, the newspaper the United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) established in New York in 1914, that first popularized the link between Pan-Africanism and Islam. By 1920 the UNIA had more than 100,000 members and 800 chapters worldwide.

Other organizations created during this period — such as the Moorish Science Temple of America, established in the mid-1920s by Noble Drew Ali, and the Nation of Islam, established by W.D. Fard in 1930 —helped lay the groundwork for the emergence of Islam as an influential part of the Black Power movement and the broader civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s.

In 1924, the US Congress passed the National Origins Act, which “restricted immigration from Asia and other Muslim-sending regions and thus stemmed the flow of new Muslim arrivals.”

But as the 20th century progressed, Muslim immigrants who had already arrived on America’s shores, as well as the African Americans who had connected with the religion (or, in perhaps some cases, reconnected with long-lost Muslim roots), began playing a much more active role in American politics and society.

Islam’s role in the civil rights era and in black nationalism

Many Americans know the story of how the shared experiences of World War II helped lead African Americans to demand equal rights that recognized their role in defending the country during the war. It turns out a similar phenomenon happened with Muslim Americans as well — and the two communities, at this point in American history, overlapped considerably.

Today, we rightly remember and commemorate the role of Christian leaders, most famously Martin Luther King Jr., in the civil rights struggle. But Islam played a role as well.

According to sociologist Craig Considine, “As they had done during the Civil War, Muslim Americans fought and died in World War II and Vietnam. Over 15,000 Arab Americans, some of whom were Muslim, fought for the U.S. in North Africa, Europe and Asia during the second World War.”

“World War II significantly altered America’s national identity,” GhaneaBassiri, the historian, writes. “Americans of varying ethnicities, religions, and gender united to fight a devastating war under the banner of liberty.” He goes on to explain how this led Islam to play a growing role in civil rights and black nationalist movements:

Within African American Muslim communities, the chasm between the realities of discrimination and the democratic ideals through which America self-identified after World War II was a powerful example not only of hypocrisy but also of the fact that nearly a century after the Civil War, black Americans still remained outside America’s national narrative. In this context, black nationalist Muslim movements’ critique of Christianity as a “white man’s religion” and their appropriation of Islam as the national religion of African America proved very appealing. It attracted numerous converts and ensconced Islam in black America as a religion of liberation. During the Civil Rights Movement, it Islamicized a significant segment of African America.

But this history is a controversial one. Although many Americans came to associate Islam with black nationalist groups such as the Nation of Islam, represented by the charismatic civil rights leader Malcolm X, and by the Five Percent Nation (also known as the “Five Percenters”), the reality is that the religious beliefs, rituals, and practices of these groups were far outside the mainstream of Islam.

Indeed, most Muslims do not view adherents of the Nation of Islam and similar movements to actually be Muslims, as many of their beliefs are contrary or even downright blasphemous to many of the core tenets of Islam.

The idea of the superiority of one race over another — a central theme of some hard-line black nationalist Muslim movements — is viewed by mainstream Muslims as contrary to the teachings of Islam. Malcolm X himself would come to reject the beliefs of the Nation of Islam. After a trip to North Africa and the Middle East in 1964, which included a pilgrimage to Mecca, the man who for millions of Americans represented the face of black nationalist Islam converted to mainstream Sunni Islam and changed his name to el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz.

Source: www.vox.com