What events and figures have shaped the development of Islam in the United States?

Answer 1

It is possible Muslims visited the Americas before the arrival of Columbus. The lack of any permanent settlement of distinctly Muslim identity unfortunately renders the evidence circumstantial, but much speculation nonetheless exists. The most widely circulated idea is that Mansa Abu Bakri (the brother of Mansa Musa) of Mali reached the Gulf of Mexico in 1312. Ethno-linguistic analysis shows connections between certain peoples of the West African coast and Native Americans living around the Gulf of Mexico.1

But there is also speculation that Muslims, probably from Andalusia or North Africa, may have visited the Americas before the fourteenth century as such accounts exist in Arabic sources dating from the eleventh century.2 A more controversial idea is that of former British naval officer Gavin Menzies, who believes the great Chinese Muslim admiral, Zheng He, sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and landed in the Americas in 1421.3

The year Columbus discovered America, 1492, was of course the same year of victory for the Christian conquista of Andalusia, so it is not surprising that Muslim should have accompanied the first Spanish explorers in America.4 There were of course examples of others of Muslim descent who were in America before or concurrent with the enslaved West Africans, such as Selim the Algerian (d. 1825).5 But the real story of Islam in the United States must begin with the large numbers of African Muslims enslaved in antebellum America. Sylviane Diouf offers the tentative suggestion of fifteen to twenty percent of the African slaves being Muslim, or somewhere between two and three million.6 The actual number of Muslims enslaved in the United States has been estimated around 30,000.7
African Muslim slaves, mostly from West Africa, were remarkable for their literacy, propensity to become involved in or instigate slave rebellions, and ability to maintain a sense of religious identity in the face of oppression. The Americans system of chattel slavery, where children were separated very young from their parents, did however ensure that Islam, or any other religious/ethnic identity, could not be maintained through successive generations.8 But NYU Professor Michael Gomez has demonstrated how Islamic influences can be clearly perceived through the later years of slavery into the twentieth century. African American groups such as the Ishmaelites of Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky in the late nineteenth century (estimated at 10,000) were known to abstain from alcohol, conduct pilgrimage rituals to towns named Mecca, Mohamet and Morocco and adopt Muslim names.9
The study of Islam's history in America has generally passed quickly from the period of slavery to the arrival of the Nation of Islam in the 1930s and 1940s. The work of Gomez provides a welcome link through a more systematic study of the Moorish Science Temple, founded in the early twentieth century by Noble Drew Ali (d. 1929). Noble Drew Ali grew up in the American South among the descendents of African Muslims, and provides in his movement and ideology the "bridge over which the Muslim legacies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries crossed over into the Muslim communities of the twentieth and twenty-first."10

While the Moorish Science Temple had their own "Circle Seven Koran" and were largely a proto black-nationalist movement similar to Marcus Garvey's United ***** Improvement Association, the "Moors" had several distinctive practices that likely had an Islamic origin. They had similar dietary restrictions to Muslims, considered Friday as their holy day, practiced gender segregation in religious ritual, wore the Moroccan fez, and called God "Allah."11 Most "orthodox" Muslims certainly consider the Moorish Science Temple heterodox, but some contemporary practitioners of the movement nonetheless consider themselves orthodox Muslims, and even have been known to frequent Sunni scholars.12 Indeed, a prominent disciple of Noble Drew Ali, Professor Ezeldeen, was one of the first to study Islam and Arabic overseas (Egypt), though on his return to America he rejected some of the teachings of the Moorish Science Temple, and founded the first nation-wide Sunni Islamic organization called the United Islamic Communities.13

Another early twentieth century Muslim movement largely ignored until recently was the beginnings of an "indigenous" Sunni presence in America long before the immigrant waves of the 1960s. Certainly there were converts to mainstream Islam before the first wave of Muslim immigrants prior and during World War I, most notably, the diplomat and scholar Muhammad Alexander Webb (d. 1916). But a permanent presence would not have been maintained had it not been for the interest of the African American community. The Islam of the early Arab, Indian and Turkish/Bosnian immigrant communities remained largely a matter of cultural peculiarity.

An exception was the Sudanese Azhari scholar Satti Majid (b. 1884), who, upon his arrival in New York in 1904, established the Muslim Union Society. Majid became a virulent critic of Noble Drew Ali's Moorish Science Temple, for he was competing for converts within the same community. It is likely that the first known Sunni African American congregation in the twentieth century, that of Shaykh Daoud Ahmed Faisal's "State Street Mosque," or Islamic Mission of America (1924), was influenced by the activities of Satti Majid (who left America in 1929).14 In any case, the mainstream orthodoxy of Majid and Shaykh Daoud did not preclude their embrace of the ideology of Black Nationalism. Shaykh Daoud, who reportedly converted thousands of Americans to Islam,15 himself agreed with the Moorish Science belief of Islamic origins of the black race, saying that African Americans were "not Negroes, but were originally Muslims."16

It remains a matter of polemic whether the Nation of Islam had links through W. Fard Muhammad with Noble Drew Ali and the Moorish Science Temple. But clearly the same atmosphere of race struggle and black empowerment provided the background for both. The Nation was founded in 1933 by the mysterious Wallace Fard Muhammad (who allegedly came from Mecca, Saudi Arabia) and Elijah Muhammad. The movement began to flourish in the late 1940s, and soon thereafter attracted the dynamic leader Malcolm X as the movement's spokesperson. Malcolm X (assassinated 1965) broke from Elijah Muhammad in 1963 and adopted mainstream Sunni Islam. Malcolm X drew on a long legacy of using Islam to articulate anti-colonial and anti-racist liberation ideology, but through his ability to reach a broad audience, he nonetheless marks a watershed in terms of Islam's place in American society, where many contemporary converts still trace the roots of their conversion to his example.17
When Elijah Muhammad died in 1975, his son Warith Deen Muhammad inherited leadership of the Nation. Warith Deen promptly began to dismantle the Nation and move his followers closer to mainstream Islam, founding an organization called the World Community of Islam in the West (later the American Society of Muslims, then Mosque Cares). A few years later, a former leader in the Nation, Louis Farrakan, revived the Nation of Islam, saying that there was still a need for an Islamic movement specifically geared towards the needs of the black community. Both Farrakan and Warith Deen remain leaders today, and have recently reestablished a working relationship.

Liberalization of immigration policies in the 1960s brought unprecedented numbers of foreign Muslims to America. Unlike earlier immigrations, most of this more recent group were highly educated professionals. The Muslim Student Association (MSA) was founded in 1963 to help foreign Muslim students at American universities. But there were other Muslim student organizations that predated the MSA, such as an organization of the same name formed at the Islamic Center in Washington in 1959.18 Many of the other Muslim organizations active in the United States until this day owe their foundation to the immigration of the 1960s, such as the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), founded in 1982 to "accommodate the shift in leadership to established resident leadership from the foreign student element."19

Other important organizations founded during this time include the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA, founded 1971), the Dar ul Islam organization (1962-1982; largely composed of African American Muslims)20, the Association of American Social Scientists (AMSS, founded 1972), United Muslims of America (1982), Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC, founded 1988). More recently formed organizations include the American Muslim Alliance (1992), the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR, founded 1994, itself inspired by the Muslim Alert Network founded in Chicago in 1987) and the American Muslim Political Coordination Council (AMPCC, founded 1998; with support from CAIR, MPAC and the American Muslim Alliance).

African American Muslims outnumber any other narrowly-defined Muslim ethnic groups in the United States. It should be noted that African-American Muslims have formed other organizations, besides the Nation of Islam and Warith Deen Muhammad's American Society of Muslims. Of particular interest is the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood (MIB), founded in 1967 in Harlem, New York, out of the inheritance of Malcolm X's Muslim Mosque Inc. The MIB's first leader, Imam Ahmad Tawfiq (d. 1988), studied at Al Azhar University and helped to spread Arabic literacy to his constituency in New York.21 Other entities have attempted to combine recent immigrant and North-American Muslims, such as the New Mexico-based Dar al Islam, which was the first to conduct the Muslim Pow Wow and Deen Intensives.22 Other important institutions run by indigenous American Muslims include the Zaytuna Institute (founded 1996) and the Nawawi Foundation (founded 2000).

This brief historical sketch has demonstrated that Islam has existed in America, in some fashion or other, for the last 500 years. As such, Islam might be said to be as "American" a religion as Christianity or Judaism. Where other religions have effectively inserted themselves in the American historical consciousness, largely as agents of integrity and harmony, Islam too must make its own claims. But Muslims in America, as Muslims in any other part of the world, cannot dispense with the need for effective integration in its host society as fully active participants and instruments of peace and justice

BOOK: Islam in the United States of America

This book is a collection of essays written over several years. Professor Sulayman S. Nyang has collected them to share with the reading public his insights and research findings on the emerging Muslim community in the United States of America. Working on the assumption that American Muslims are still unknown to most Americans, the author addresses several issues which are relevant to the whole discussion of religious plurality and multiculturalism in American society. Its contents range from Islam and the American Dream to the birth and development of the Muslim press in the United States.

Answer 2

Louis Farrakhan: he joined the Nation of Islam (Black Muslims) in 1955 and became minister of the Harlem Temple after Malcolm X broke from the group. In 1977 Farrakhan founded a reorganized Nation of Islam that adhered to Elijah Muhammad's(the movement's founder) teachings.

Slavery in the U.S.: a small but significant proportion of African slaves, some estimate 10 percent, were Muslim.

Immigration in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

You might find IslamAmerica.org a useful website.

Answer 3

Many open their minds by themselves figuring they are important as people not as foreigners, some also learn by themselves mistakes are a misconception created to enact and disable natural evolution and peaceful thinking, the whole muslim philosofy broadens the abilities and posibilities of many to earn more and get some success and respect in their comunities, loaning and creating more oportunities. We all know that moving money fast lends oportunities into fulfillment and development, yet it is sad some want to put it safe and help not their own privileges.
In our time everybody notices truth, love and intuition are helping us getting to a broader expanse and communication, thus we know things and see future before it is necesary to us. That is expanse to me, and it happens where one is.