Yet if the American Jewish and Christian experiences are well documented in countless journals, research institutes, museum collections, in business, and in popular culture and entertainment, the American Muslim experience mostly appears to sit outside the broader narrative of stories Americans tell themselves about their history, according to religious scholars such as Lior Sternfeld, who specializes in Jewish Studies.
“Muslim-Americans were a much smaller and more marginalized community, but it’s changing,” said Sternfeld, who teaches at Penn State University.
Muhammad, of America’s Islamic Heritage Museum, wants to do something about this.
He spends his spare time traveling around the USA searching for Islam’s forgotten roots in a country where they were never fully remembered in the first place.
He has collected gravestones all over the South dating to the 1800s with Islamic names written on them in Arabic. He has two-hundred-year-old census records and wills and testaments from virtually every U.S. region that show vestiges of Islamic immigration.
We still need to know the number, and the dates (how many are from the 1800s?), of these gravestones “with Islamic names written on them,” that Amir Muhammad claims to have located. Did he find 500, or 50, or 5, such headstones in all of his searches across the country? And how many — 200, or 20, or 2 — that dated from the 1800s? We also need to have photographs of these gravestones posted online, clearly showing what Amir Muhammad claims to be Arabic script. It is possible that what he takes to be such script are merely decorative elements, that could be misunderstood by non-Arabic speakers. And even in some cases where Arabic script on a gravestone can be identified as such, was the dead person a Muslim or, quite possibly, a Christian Arab? For there were hardly any Muslim Arabs who arrived in the 1800s, while Christian Arabs began coming in noticeable numbers the 1880s, fleeing Muslim persecution and their dhimmi status. Christian Arab immigrants continued to outnumber Muslim Arab immigrants until the late 1960s. So Arabic writing, where found on gravestones, does not necessarily implicate Islam.
He also has the robe of the first U.S. Muslim judge, the uniform of the first Muslim U.S. Army chaplain and a wall filled with photos of contemporary American Muslim newsmakers, and sports stars from Muhammad Ali to Sam Khalifa, the only Muslim player in the history of Major League Baseball.
From this description, Amir Muhammad’s collection appears be an unsystematic amateurish olla-podrida, consisting of this and that: here the first U.S.Muslim judge’s robes, over there a Muslim army chaplain’s uniform, and apparently lots of photos of Muslim “newsmakers” and “sports stars.” One photograph is of Sam Khalifa, the only Muslim player in Major League Baseball. But I suspect there is no mention of Sam Khalifa’s father Rashad, a much more important figure in the history of Muslims in America. Rashad Khalifa worked at the mosque in Tucson, and claimed that he was a messenger of God but not a prophet, and that the archangel Gabriel “most assertively” told him that chapter 36, verse 3, of the Quran, “specifically” referred to him. Khalifa also claimed that the Quran contains a mathematical structure based on the number 19. Starting in 1968, Khalifa used computers to analyze the frequency of letters and words in the Quran, with his first book on the topic appearing in1973. But while he was clearly bizarre, it was not his bizarreries, but his moderate interpretation of Islam that led to his being stabbed to death in1990, at the mosque, by Muslim fundamentalists connected to Al-Qaeda. He was thus the first American citizen to be murdered by Al-Qaeda. The story of Rashad Khalifa — his life, works, and death — would make for a fascinating exhibit.
In all, his [Amir Muhammad’s] collection consists of a few thousand examples of American Islamia.
“Not even American Muslims always know this stuff exists,” he said.
Hani Bawardi, a professor at the Center for Arab American Studies at the University of Michigan in Dearborn, outside Detroit, said the story of Islam in America “awaits excavation.” He said no good scholarship exists on the subject, partly because “no one traced sufficiently the archival evidence on enslaved Muslims. Every time we think we know the location of the oldest mosque an older one is discovered,” he said.”I can’t even point you to a good study there. But Muslims were represented in very remote areas.”
Hari Bawardi wishes us to believe that because there is scant evidence for Islam’s presence in America before the 20th century, that this must mean that the real “story” still “awaits excavation.” But Muslims have been engaged in a full-court press, trying to push back the dates of the Muslim presence in America, and to find evidence of the “Islamic influence” in American life. The alternative and obvious conclusion is that there is not much of a story to excavate. As for the slim archival evidence “on enslaved Muslims,” we have seen a mini-industry grow up in the last two decades of “scholars” making wild claims about the the number of Muslims among the slaves, from those who claim that between one-third and one-fourth of slaves were Muslims — a figure plucked from the air — to “Dr.” Mroueh, who asserts, without any evidence, that Muslims formed the largest group of slaves in the Americas.