18 - Why Muslims Matter to American Religious History, 1730–1945

Summary

Long before the American Revolution, Muslims were a vital presence in the thirteen colonies and throughout the Americas. Though Muslim explorers from North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula may have been among the first Mediterranean peoples to arrive in the Americas, it was slaves from sub-Saharan Africa who composed the first significant population of Muslim Americans. No sidebar to United States history, Muslims at home and abroad became a vital symbolic force in national debates over slavery, the defining of American political identity, the shaping of evangelical Christianity, and the emergence of American consumer culture. As a religious and for the most part racial minority, Muslim Americans in nineteenth- and twentieth-century history helped to define the center of cultural and political power in the United States.

The history of Muslim Americans also illuminates the simultaneous local, national, and global nature of American religious history from the colonial age to the early twentieth century. Shaped by voluntary and coerced travel and resettlement, most Muslims lived both as Americans and as persons whose identities crossed national and regional boundaries. In addition to Muslim slaves from Africa, Muslim practitioners in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries included immigrants who came largely from the Balkans and the Middle East, but also from Eastern Europe and South Asia. These were the first Muslims to establish mutual aid societies and other formal Muslim American associations.