The PBS Series “The History Detectives” some years ago included a program on Islam in America – that is, on the history of Muslims in America, a history that we were asked to believe until recently had supposedly remained “hidden.” Here is part of the text for that program, available online.
“When the first Muslims came to the land that would become the United States is unclear. Many historians claim that the earliest Muslims came from the Senegambian region of Africa in the early 14th century. It is believed they were Moors, expelled from Spain, who made their way to the Caribbean and possibly to the Gulf of Mexico.”
It may be unclear exactly when Muslims came to North America, but what is clear to historians is that when Columbus arrived in 1492 there were no Muslims to be found, no archaeological evidence has ever been found of such an early Muslim presence in the New World. The PBS text airily refers to “many historians” who claim that Senegambian Muslims were in the territory that would become the United States in the 14th century. Who are those “many historians”? PBS doesn’t say. It doesn’t name even one because such a historian does not exist. There is no evidence that West Africans were shipbuilders, much less capable of building vessels large enough to cross the Atlantic from Africa to the New World. It’s a fairy tale fabricated to persuade us that the Muslim presence goes way back; a bit of propagandistic backdating to embellish the preposterous tale that “Islam has always been part of America’s story,” as Obama famously proclaimed in his speech at Al-Azhar University in Cairo.
When Columbus made his journey to the United States, it is said he took with him a book written by Portuguese Muslims who had navigated their way to the New World in the 12th century.
“It is said”? Is that a historical source – “it is said”? Columbus made no mention of such a book “by Portuguese Muslims” who “had navigated their way to the New World in the 12th century.” Nor did anyone else. Online searches reveal no sources for such a claim. No one mentions this book, save for today’s Muslim propagandists and their ignorant non-Muslim collaborators – like those who prepared the PBS script on Muslims predating Columbus. Why didn’t the PBS authors offer a source for this tall tale?
Others claim there were Muslims, most notably a man named Istafan, who accompanied the Spanish as a guide to the New World in the early 16th century in their conquest of what would become Arizona and New Mexico.
“Others claim there were Muslims”? Who are these unidentified “others”? Where are the sources, where is the evidence? What is known is that “Muslims” were not in the New world in the early 16th century. There was exactly one man, known as “Istafan” or “Estevanico”(Little Stephen) who, though undoubtedly raised as a Muslim in Morocco, was almost certainly a Catholic convert. Spain did not allow non-Catholics to travel to the New World, and historians believe that “Istafan” was required to convert to Roman Catholicism in order to join the Narvaez expedition.
His existence is known from an account written by another member of the expedition, Cabeza de Vaca. What PBS ought to have written is this: “Istafan, a Catholic who had converted from Islam, was part of the Narvaez Expedition to what is the American West, and though not a Muslim, was the first person of Muslim descent in the New World.”
What is clear is the make up of the first real wave of Muslims in the United States: African slaves of whom 10 to 15 percent were said to be Muslims. Maintaining their religion was difficult and many were forcibly converted to Christianity. Any effort to practice Islam, and keep the traditional clothing and names alive had to be done in secret. There was an enclave of African-Americans on the Georgia coast that managed to maintain their faith until the early part of the 20th century.
There is again no evidence to support the claim that 10-15% of the slaves were Muslims. These inflated figures have begun to appear only in the last few decades, in books and articles by such people as Yousef Mroueh, an amateur historian who claims to have a doctorate, but no evidence of such doctorate can be found. Had that many slaves been Muslims, surely it would have been noticed and recorded by the plantation owners, or by the overseers, but there are no such records. Nor did other slaves make any mention of these “Muslim” slaves. There are about a half-dozen slaves who are known to have been Muslims when they arrived from Africa. They did not have with them Qur’ans; they built no mosques; they were living in an environment where the slaves were converted to Christianity, and it would have been impossible to maintain, much less pass on to their children, their Muslim faith. This claim that 10-15% of slaves were Muslims was not made until very late in the 20thcentury, when Muslims were engaged in a mighty effort to exaggerate both their numbers in the U.S., and how long Muslims had been in America.
Between 1878 and 1924, Muslim immigrants from the Middle East, particularly from Syria and Lebanon, arrived in large numbers, with many settling in Ohio, Michigan, Iowa and even the Dakotas. Like most other migrants they were seeking greater economic opportunity than in their homeland and often worked as manual laborers. One of the first big employers of Muslims and blacks was the Ford Company—these were often the only people willing to work in the hot, difficult conditions of the factories.
There were Arabic-speaking immigrants to the U.S. from Syria and Lebanon, then still part of the Ottoman Empire, but they were overwhelmingly Christians, hoping to escape both from the Ottoman Turkish rulers and from the Arab Muslims they lived among, both of whom oppressed Christians. There were very few Muslims arriving during this period. From 1878 to 1924, not a single mosque was built in America, evidence of how few Muslims arrived during that period
In fact, the first mosque in America was not built until 1929, in Ross, North Dakota. It was a one-room cement structure that could not have held more than twenty worshippers. The next mosque to be built, known as the Mother Mosque of America, was in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in 1934. By 1940 there were no more than a dozen tiny mosques scattered around America.
At the same time, the Great Migration of blacks to the North helped encourage the African-American Islam revival and the growth of the African-American Muslim Nationalist Movement that still exists to this day. The hope remains to restore the culture and faith that was destroyed during the era of slavery.
The description here is of members not of Islam, but of the Nation of Islam, founded by Wallace Fard (succeeded by Elijah Muhammad) in 1930, a group whose goal was to improve the spiritual, mental, social, and economic condition of African Americans in the United States. This “Nation of Islam’ had nothing to do with the universalist claims of Islam; it was this unorthodox group that about 10,000 African-Americans in Detroit joined in the 1930s. It is incorrect to describe this as a “revival” of “African-American Islam.” The Nation of Islam was entirely new; it was not a “revival” of orthodox Islam; its central creed was Black Supremacy; it did not admit whites. Here is Elijah Muhammad’s creed: “The Blackman is the Original Man. From him came all brown, yellow, red, and white people. By using a special method of birth-control law, the Blackman was able to produce the white race. This method of birth control was developed by a Black scientist known as Yakub, who envisioned making and teaching a nation of people who would be diametrically opposed to the Original People. A Race of people who would one day rule the Original People and the earth for a period of 6,000 years. Yakub promised his followers that he would graft a nation from his own people, and he would teach them how to rule his people through a system of tricks and lies whereby they use deceit to divide and conquer, and break the unity of the darker people, put one brother against another, and then act as mediators and rule both sides.”
This has nothing to do with orthodox Islam. And at no time did the Nation of Islam membership exceed 50,000; it is now believed to have about 20,000 members; it gets more attention than its numbers warrant because of the antisemitic rants of its cretinous leader, Louis Farrakhan.