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Islam in America:
From African Slaves to
Malcolm X
By Thomas A. Tweed
When students think
of Islam—if they do at all—they might summon an image of Denzel Washington
playing a stern and passionate Malcolm X in Spike Lee's 1992 film, or maybe
they imagine Louis Farrakhan on the speaker's platform at the Million Man
March in 1995. Some might have encountered Middle Eastern Muslims on the
nightly news, mostly as "fundamentalists" and "terrorists." A few have
met immigrant Muslims in their neighborhood. Muslim students might be among
their classmates. But Muslims are more diverse than popular images allow,
and American Muslim history is longer than most might think, extending
back to the day that the first slave ship landed on Virginia's coast in
1619. It encorporates two groups—Muslims from other countries who migrated
to America by force or by choice, and African Americans who created Muslim
sects in the twentieth century. Thus, a consideration of the Islamic presence
in America provides a new perspective on several important (and familiar)
issues that will be used to organize this essay:
-
What is the history of
slavery in the United States?
-
How have immigrants resisted
and accommodated American culture?
-
What were African Americans'
experiences in the northern cities after the Great Migration?
-
How has African-American
Islam addressed race relations since the 1960s?
-
Is America a Christian
nation?
At first, you will need
to introduce Islam to your students, and a helpful way to do this is to
invite their responses to the word "Muslim." What comes to mind when they
hear the word? Write their responses on the board without comment, and
then use the list to establish the dominant images of Muslims—for example,
as militants, extremists, newcomers. Then you can begin to contest these
impressions and establish that Islam is a diverse and long-standing American
religion—one that has had a significant presence in the United States.
At this point you will
need to introduce the basic beliefs and practices of the world's one billion
Muslims, most of whom live in Asia, not in the Middle East as most Americans
presume. As in Christianity and Judaism, Islam (which is second only to
Christianity in worldwide adherents) includes a number of communities or
branches. The two major groups are Sunni Muslims, who constitute about
85 percent of Muslims, and Shii (or Shiite) Muslims, who account for 15
percent of the world's Islamic population. All traditional groups are represented
among the five million Muslims in the United States, along with some new
movements that have been cultivated on American soil.
Despite their diversity,
Muslims have a good deal in common. They look to the
Qu'ran— the
sacred book that records the message of Allah [God] as it was revealed
to his final prophet, Muhammed (A.D. ca. 570-632), and they seek to follow
the example (sunna) of the prophet. All accept the Five Pillars
of Islam, the basic beliefs and duties of Muslims:
-
A profession of faith
(shahada). All Muslims must proclaim "There is no God but Allah
and Muhammed is his prophet." Note here that Muhammed is not God in
Muslim theology but rather a spokesperson or mouthpiece for the divine.
-
Prayer (salat).
All Muslims pray five times daily while facing the holy city of Mecca in
Saudi Arabia.
-
Alms (zakat). Faith
also means outreach. To give thanks and follow the example of Muhammed,
Muslims with the economic means must give alms to those who are less fortunate.
-
Fasting (sawm or
siyam). Muslims who are physically able are to fast from dawn to
dusk during the ninth month (Ramadan) of the Islamic calendar.
-
A pilgrimage (hajj)
to Mecca. At least once in their lives, all Muslims who are able must make
a pilgrimage to the Great Mosque in the holy city of Mecca, toward which
they have knelt while praying five times daily during their lives. (Chapter
seventeen of The Autobiography of Malcolm X offers a vivid account
of this pilgrimage, which was life-transforming for him. It was on hajj,
he recounts, that he first glimpsed the possibility that people of different
races could get along.)
Slavery and Islam
A small but significant
proportion of African slaves, some estimate 10 percent, were Muslim. You
might tell the story of Omar Ibn Said (also "Sayyid," ca. 1770-1864), who
was born in Western Africa in the Muslim state of Futa Toro (on the south
bank of the Senegal River in present-day Senegal). He was a Muslim scholar
and trader who, for reasons historians have not uncovered, found himself
captive and enslaved. After a six-week voyage, Omar arrived in Charleston,
South Carolina, in about 1807. About four years later, he was sold to James
Owen of North Carolina's Cape Fear region. In 1819 a white Protestant North
Carolinian wrote to Francis Scott Key, the composer of The Star Spangled
Banner, to request an Arabic translation of the Bible for Omar, and
apparently Key sent one. Historians dispute how much the African Muslim
leaned toward Christianity in his final years, but Omar's notations on
the Arabic bible, which offer praise to Allah, suggest that he retained
much of his Muslim identity, as did some other first-generation slaves
whose names have been lost to us. (Omar's Arabic bible, which has recently
been restored, is housed in the library of Davidson College in North Carolina.)
Muslims and Immigration,
1878-1924
Most history courses cover
the immigrants who changed America's population throughout the nineteenth
century. You might point out these immigrants were not all European or
Christian. Many were Chinese and Japanese migrants who practiced Buddhism
and other Asian traditions. Thousands of Muslims came as well, and most
of these first Islamic immigrants were Arabs from what was then Greater
Syria. These Syrian, Jordanian, and Lebanese migrants were poorly educated
laborers who came seeking greater economic stability. Many returned, disenchanted,
to their homeland. Those who stayed suffered isolation, although some managed
to establish Islamic communities, often in unlikely places. By 1920, Arab
immigrants worshiped in a rented hall in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and they built
a mosque of their own fifteen years later. Lebanese-Syrian communities
did the same in Ross, North Dakota, and later in Detroit, Pittsburgh, and
Michigan City, Indiana. Islam had come to America's heartland.
The first wave of Muslim
immigration ended in 1924, when the Asian Exclusion Act and the Johnson-Reed
Immigration Act allowed only a trickle of "Asians," as Arabs were designated,
to enter the nation.
African-American Islam
in the Urban North
A Euro-American, Mohammed
Alexander Webb (1847-1916), proclaimed himself a Muslim at the World's
Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, but converts have been more prominent
among Americans of African descent, especially those who followed the mass
migrations of southern blacks to northern cities beginning in the early
decades of the twentieth century. Noble Drew Ali established a Black nationalist
Islamic community, the Moorish Science Temple, in Newark, New Jersey in
1913. After his death in 1929, one of the movement's factions found itself
drawn to the mysterious Wallace D. Fard, who appeared in Detroit in 1930
preaching black nationalism and Islamic faith. Fard founded the Nation
of Islam there in the same year. After Fard's unexplained disappearance
in 1934, Elijah Muhammed (1897-1975) took over, and he attracted disenchanted
and poor African Americans from the urban north. They converted for a variety
of reasons, but, for some, the poverty and racism in those cities made
the Nation of Islam's message about "white devils" (and "black superiority")
plausible.
Race Relations since the
1960s
Elijah Muhammed won an
important convert when Malcolm Little (1925-1965) joined the faith in a
prison cell. Malcolm X, the name he took to signal his lost African heritage,
became a public figure during the 1960s, although he separated himself
from the Nation of Islam before his death. After Elijah Muhammed's death
in 1975, the movement split. One branch, under the leadership of the fifth
son of Elijah Muhammed, moved closer to the beliefs and practices of Islam
as it is practiced in most of the world. This group, which would later
change its name to the American Muslim Mission, is the largest African-American
Islamic movement. The much smaller Nation of Islam, which the American
Muslim Mission and other Islamic groups condemn as racist and unorthodox,
is much more familiar to most Americans. Many American Muslims would claim
that the Nation of Islam, led by Louis Farrakhan, is not representative
of either immigrant or convert Islam in the United States.
As you teach the Nation
of Islam, you might ask students what the history of African-American Islam
since the Great Migration tells us about race relations. Why were Malcolm
X and others in northern cities so willing to believe that European Americans
were "white devils"? In what sense, you might ask, is the Nation of Islam's
sacred story about the origin of whites as the mistake of a black scientist
a "truthful" representation of many African Americans' experience?
Muslims and the New Immigrants
after 1965
If you are able to reach
the post-1965 period in your class, you might reintroduce Muslims in a
discussion of demographic changes in contemporary America. Palestinian
refugees arrived after the creation of Israel in 1948. More important for
the history of American Islam, the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 relaxed
the quota system established in 1924, thereby allowing greater Muslim immigration.
The gates opened even more widely after the 1965 revisions of the immigration
law. Since then, Muslim migrants have fled oppressive regimes in Egypt,
Iraq, and Syria; and South Asian Muslims, as from Pakistan, have sought
economic opportunity. By the 1990s, Muslims had established more than six
hundred mosques and centers across the United States.
Is America a Christian
Nation?
Toward the end of your
discussion of Islam in America, you might raise this final issue concerning
religion and national identity. Islam may soon be the second largest American
faith after Christianity, if it is not already. Estimates vary widely,
and a moderate estimate is five million American Muslims in 1997—more than
Episcopalians, Quakers, and Disciples of Christ. When recounting this to
students, and recalling the history of Islamic slaves and the early debates
about the First Amendment, you might ask students whether America is a
Christian nation as some have proclaimed. Could we, you might ask to focus
the discussion, elect a Muslim president? If so, would she (while we are
imagining, let's get bold!) view this land as a New Israel or take her
presidential oath on a Christian Bible, as has been traditional?
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