The poly-religious common ground African Muslims sought with white Christians and non-Muslim Africans, though distinctive, was symptomatic of the times. Emerson's description of religious life in America in a letter to the historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) captured the experimentalist, adaptive, heterogeneous, spiritualist, and individualistic ethos of religious life in antebellum America. The religious issues facing African Muslims were unique in many ways because of slavery and institutionalized racism, but as Nicholas Said's embrace of the teachings of the scientist, mystic, philosopher, exegete, and visionary Emanuel Swedenborg reminds us, not all African Muslims were cut off from the socio-religious reform movements to which Emerson referred. Americans sought to adapt their religious lives to Enlightenment ideals and the founding principles of their new republic, and they were not wanting in prophets, visionaries, fraternities, or volunteer associations. Mormons, Shakers, Evangelicals, Theosophists, Transcendentalists, Freemasons, Adventists, and Millenarians (just to name a few) all offered their own interpretations of religion and communal life.

The rapid growth of immigration to the United States in the latter half of the nineteenth century further altered America's religious landscape. In 1775, Catholics numbered about 25,000. By 1860, an estimated 3 million Catholics lived in the United States, and by 1900 their number rose to 12 million.

In the late nineteenth century, Robert Bayles, president of the Market and Fulton National Bank of New York City, reviewed historical records of his ancestry. He discovered that family heirlooms, including a bronze pan, a copy of the Qur'an, and a copper teapot probably belonged to Anthony Jansen van Salee, also known as Anthony Jansen van Vaes and Anthony “the Turk.” Bayles would have known that “Turk” was the contemporary and derogatory term for Muslim (regardless of ethnicity); “van Salee” and “van Vaes” signified that Anthony was “from Salé” or “from Fez,” Morocco. Anthony immigrated to New Amsterdam some time around 1630 as a colonist for the Dutch West India Company. There, in what eventually became New York City, he settled down as a farmer and at times dealt in real estate. Upon his demise, he left behind four daughters, the youngest of whom, Eva, was an ancestor of Mr. Bayles.

Anthony at some unknown time was joined by Abraham Jansen van Salee, a possible brother or half-brother, who was also referred to as “the Turk” and “the Mulatto.” Anthony may be the first settler from a Muslim background in the territories that eventually formed the United States, but he was not the first person of Muslim heritage to traverse America. From the time Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic, West and North Africans served as involuntary servants to Europeans arriving in the Americas.

In the mid-1960s Congress introduced landmark civil rights and immigration legislation intended to reconcile the reality of racial and gender discrimination in the United States with the nation's democratic ideals. These laws significantly altered the racial and religious landscape of the country by outlawing discrimination in immigration policy, educational institutions, the workplace, and the housing market. The old melting pot ideal came under assault and was replaced by a more pluralistic vision of America in which cultural and ethnic differences were not only recognized but increasingly valued for their distinct contributions to American society. White Protestant triumphalism in all of its varieties was taken to task as racist, sexist, and downright un-American.

As white, Protestant cultural and political hegemony receded, however, rivalries between different ethnicities surfaced, resulting in what is sometimes referred to as an era of “identity politics.” These rivalries were fueled by governmental “affirmative actions” taken to correct the racist and sexist policies of the past. Social justice, it was argued, demanded more than the simple outlawing of discrimination; it also required giving assistance to those who had been wrongfully discriminated against so that they could finally establish a place for themselves in society. Since these “affirmative action” or “equal opportunity” programs were directed toward women and minorities, many male white ethnics felt left out. They believed that their success in overcoming prejudice by hard work and ingenuity had been overlooked.

World War II significantly altered America's national identity. As Americans of varying ethnicities, religions, and gender united to fight a devastating war under the banner of liberty, American citizenship could hardly have been conceived through a conflated matrix of race, religion, and progress. The old, white, Protestant establishment was reconfigured and a new national identity emerged based on political loyalty to the founding liberal democratic values articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. In response to this new American identity, immigrant Muslims began developing national organizations. The American-born children of Muslim immigrants took the lead in creating a national umbrella organization to complement and promote American Muslims' local activities. They were no longer satisfied with simply rooting Islam in America but wanted Islam recognized as an American religion.

Within African American Muslim communities, the chasm between the realities of discrimination and the democratic ideals through which America self-identified after World War II was a powerful example not only of hypocrisy but also of the fact that nearly a century after the Civil War, black Americans still remained outside America's national narrative. In this context, black nationalist Muslim movements’ critique of Christianity as a “white man's religion” and their appropriation of Islam as the national religion of African America proved very appealing. It attracted numerous converts and ensconced Islam in black America as a religion of liberation. During the Civil Rights Movement, it Islamicized a significant segment of African America.

The history of Islam in America begins in the context of rivalries and encounters of the Atlantic world that shaped the American republic. The presence of Muslims in the territories that eventually formed the United States of America dates back to the earliest arrivals of Europeans in the Americas. Muslims neither came to America in large numbers at that time nor did they play a primary role in colonizing the Americas. They were, however, deeply embedded in the commercial and political rivalries that led to the establishment of the Atlantic world. Given the enormous impact the European discovery of the Americas has had on the modern world, it is easy to forget that during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, European empires navigated the Atlantic in order to establish new trade routes that would circumvent the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern trade routes dominated at that time by Muslim empires. Subsequently, as Europeans conquered and colonized the Americas, an Atlantic world emerged relating Africa, Europe, and the Americas through a triangle of mercantile relations and imperial networks. Muslims from North and West Africa were active participants in this triangle, and many of them ended up in America as slaves. Since that time, there has been a continuous presence of Muslims in America.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the United States is home to about three million Muslims who arguably comprise the most diverse Muslim population in any single country in the world.

In the last chapter I argued that the challenge facing American Muslims in the future is not to settle a struggle between a “good Islam ” and a “bad Islam, ” but to bridge the gap between the reality of their lives and the stigmatizing context in which they were interpolated by a polarizing discourse on “Islam and the West. ” Just as Muslims face the challenge of conforming their circumstances to the realities of their day-to-day lives, the academic study of Islam in America also faces a challenge in developing effective analytical categories and a vocabulary that allows for a representation of the historical realities of Islam in America. Much of the existing scholarship furthers the politicized dichotomy of “Islam and the West ” by inquiring primarily into the assimilation of Muslims in the United States rather than focusing on the histories of their institution and community building efforts, which, as I have shown, were persistent and significant.

In the nineteenth century, increased travel and communication between cultures and the greater accessibility of visual and textual sources on the lives of others forced any understanding of an American national identity to necessarily grapple with alterity. During this time, however, very few Americans actually interacted with the non-Christian other. Americans ’ contact with Muslims at this time was limited for the most part to their interactions with enslaved West African Muslims. Most Americans only encountered non-Christians in the abstract, in books and magazines.

The preceding chapter contextualized the early history of Islam in America within the rivalries and encounters of the Atlantic world that formed the American Republic. It demonstrated how the perceived liminality of African Muslims provided avenues for European Americans to advance their commercial and missionary interests and to re-evaluate the morality of a “civilized” Christian country that permitted slavery. In doing so, it placed the early history of Muslims in America within larger narratives of the rise of mercantile capitalism, the military and economic ascendancy of Western European states, and the formation of an American national identity. The present chapter covers the same historical period but examines another side of the early history of Islam in America. It tells the story of the role Islam played in the lives of African Muslims in colonial and antebellum America. The following chapter shifts focus from the passive, liminal role Muslims played in reaction to forces external to them. This was a moment for them to re-evaluate and reconfigure Islamic beliefs and practices in an American idiom to form new communal relations and to make sense of their historical context.

As the reader has already gathered, the limitations and paucity of the available sources and the fledgling state of historical scholarship on Islam in America restricts any account of the role of Islamic beliefs and practices in colonial and antebellum America to the tentative rather than the conclusive.

Since the late 1980s, the history of Islam in America has become increasingly more multifaceted. Between the time when the Berlin wall fell and when George W. Bush left office, many more Muslims immigrated to the United States. The United States became home to a large number of Muslim refugees from such war-torn regions as Afghanistan, Bosnia, Somalia, Iraq, and the Sudan. The number of converts to Islam increased to include sizeable Latin and European American communities alongside a growing African American Muslim community. American Muslims of varying religious understandings and ethnic backgrounds established many more mosques, self-help organizations, and political and civil rights advocacy groups. They became more active in public service both in their local communities and in the federal government. American Muslims also became more visible participants in cultural ventures as comedians, musicians, actors, and authors. Acts of violence carried out by militant Muslims and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq brought American Muslims into America's collective conscience as a security threat - a potential enemy within. Consequently, hundreds of American Muslims have found their civil rights abused and an untold number have been deported.

Most of the scholarship on Islam in America has focusesd on the activities of Muslims in this period. It is impossible for a single chapter to adequately represent the findings of this scholarship and to detail the complex developments that shaped Islam and Muslim lives in the United States at the turn of the twenty-first century.

In the hagiographies of Inayat Khan, his arrival in the “West” is explained through a charge his Sufi master gave him when he attained enlightenment: “Go, my child, into the world, harmonize the East and the West with the harmony of thy music; spread the wisdom of Sufism, for thou art gifted by Allah, the most Merciful and Compassionate.” This otherworldly explanation of why Khan came to the United States in 1910 allowed Khan, as we have seen, to transcend the color of his skin and his stigmatized Islamic background. It situated him neatly within the contemporary universalizing discourses of liberal Protestantism and metaphysical religions. It concealed, however, the fact that he left India for the United States at a time when a few thousand north Indians were immigrating to the United States in search of economic opportunities.

The establishment's groping for a cohesive national identity and social order through such universalizing concepts as race, religion, and progress in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries concealed the actual workings of American industry, commerce, culture, government, and science, most of which were advanced by the diligence and ingenuity not only of white native-born Protestants, but also of immigrants and natives who were not considered white (Irish Catholics, Eastern European Jews, African American Baptists, and others) who made up the mass of American workers, thinkers, and entrepreneurs.

The interval between the world wars was pivotal for the history of Islam in America because it marked a period in which American Muslims' institutions and community building efforts took root and thus helped shape future developments in the history of Islam in America. Among these American Muslim institutions were local mosques and benevolent societies and a number of prophetic movements, mainly: the Ahmadiyya missionary movement, founded by the Indian reformer Mirza Ghulam Ahmad; the Moorish Science Temple, founded by the African American religious leader Noble Drew Ali; and the Nation of Islam, founded by Fard Muhammad whose identity is shrouded in mystery.

As the Muslim population in the United States became more diverse, particularly after the reformation of immigration and civil rights laws in the 1950s and 1960s, understanding of Islam and the character of Muslim institutions also changed and became more diverse. So, while the communities and institutions formed in the interwar period set roots for Islam in America and thus helped shape consequent developments in the history of Islam in America, they did not circumscribe the future practice of Islam nor the subsequent character of Islamic institutions in this country.

From Sojourners to Settlers

In the first stage of Muslim's voluntary immigration to the United States, which took place between the Civil War and World War I, the practice of Islam was generally ad hoc and improvisational.