introductory ~8 minSources added — scholar review pending

Muslims in the Americas

Enslaved African Muslims, twentieth-century immigration, and the American Muslim present

Muslims have been in the Americas since at least the sixteenth century — many of the estimated 12 million Africans enslaved in the transatlantic trade were Muslim. Later waves of immigration, and the growth of African-American Muslim communities in the twentieth century, produced today's diverse American Muslim population.

Overview

What you will learn: that Muslims have been in the Americas for centuries, not decades; the specific enslaved African Muslims whose writings survive; the twentieth-century African-American Muslim movements and the pivotal figure of Malcolm X; and the shape of today's diverse American Muslim population.

Context

Historians estimate that of the roughly 12.5 million Africans transported across the Atlantic in the transatlantic slave trade (approximately 1500-1866), a substantial minority — modern scholarship suggests somewhere between 10 and 20 per cent, likely higher in some regions — came from Muslim-majority parts of West Africa such as Senegambia and the Sokoto Caliphate region. This makes Islam one of the earliest non-indigenous religions in the Americas, present long before most Christian denominations that later became dominant in the United States.

What this means

A small number of these Muslims left surviving Arabic-language writings while enslaved. Ayuba Suleiman Diallo (Job ben Solomon, d. 1773 CE) was enslaved in Maryland, wrote in Arabic, and was eventually freed and returned to what is now Senegal. Omar ibn Said (d. 1864 CE) — a scholar enslaved in North Carolina — wrote an Arabic autobiography in 1831 that survives and is held today by the Library of Congress. Bilali Muhammad (d. c. 1857 CE) of Sapelo Island, Georgia, left a thirteen-page Arabic manuscript on Islamic law. These are not romantic footnotes; they are documentary evidence of Muslim religious life sustained under slavery.

What this means

In the early twentieth century, several African-American religious movements reasserted Islam — sometimes in unorthodox forms — as part of the recovery of a heritage stripped away by slavery. Noble Drew Ali founded the Moorish Science Temple in 1913. The Nation of Islam was founded by Wallace Fard Muhammad in 1930 and led for decades by Elijah Muhammad; its theology diverged significantly from mainstream Sunni Islam. Malcolm X (d. 1965) was the movement's most public figure; after his 1964 hajj he broke with the Nation of Islam and embraced mainstream Sunni Islam, a shift documented in his own writings. Warith Deen Mohammed, Elijah Muhammad's son, led the great majority of the Nation of Islam into mainstream Sunni practice from 1975 onward, forming what became the American Society of Muslims. A separate reconstituted Nation of Islam under Louis Farrakhan continues today as a distinct, smaller movement.

What this means

The other major stream of American Muslim history is twentieth-century immigration. Small numbers of Ottoman-era Arab immigrants arrived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act removed national-origin quotas and made possible the substantial post-1965 immigration from South Asia, the Arab world, Iran, Turkey, West Africa and elsewhere that shaped much of today's American Muslim community.

Context

Pew Research Center estimated in 2017 that there were approximately 3.45 million Muslims in the United States, and projected growth to about 8 million by 2050 — which would make Islam the second-largest religion in the country. American Muslims are one of the most ethnically diverse religious communities in the country: roughly one-fifth are African American with deep historical roots, and the rest are drawn from every major region of the Muslim world and from recent conversion. Canada, Brazil, Argentina, Trinidad, Guyana and Suriname all host significant Muslim communities of their own with their own distinct histories.

The Malcolm X shift — a specific historical fact

Malcolm X's post-hajj (1964) turn away from the racial theology of the Nation of Islam toward mainstream Sunni Islam is well documented in his own letters and speeches, especially the Letter from Mecca. It is a specific historical fact, not a rhetorical point. Any account of Malcolm X that stops at his Nation of Islam period is incomplete; the last year of his life — and the community-wide shift Warith Deen Mohammed led a decade later — is the more consequential religious history for American Muslims today.

Application today

The oldest Muslim presence in the Americas is African. Any American Muslim conversation that treats African-American Muslim history as an add-on to a South Asian or Arab-immigrant story has the timeline backwards. Learning that history — reading Omar ibn Said's autobiography, understanding what Warith Deen Mohammed actually did — is a specific practical way of taking that seriously.

Reflection

The earliest Muslims in the Americas were enslaved people who kept their prayer, their Arabic, and their faith through generations of dispossession. What in your own conditions is easier — and what could that comparison ask of you?

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