Provisional history of Islam in US introduction

Abstract, Preface and Introduction

A Provisional History of Muslims in the United States

By Susan McKee

Working Paper (begun in 1994)

PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE FOR PUBLICATION WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR

(working paper subject to revision)

�� Abstract

�� Islam is a world religion following an ancient tradition forged in the Middle East, where Judaism and Christianity also began. Close to 2% of the American population is now Muslim, exceeding the membership of many Protestant Christian denominations.

�� Although the first Muslims probably set foot on American shores before 1600, their religion left no imprint on what was to become a predominantly Christian nation. The few Muslims among the African slaves effected no conversions either among their fellow slaves or amidst their masters.

�� Beginning in the last decades of the 1800s, the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire brought the first noticeable numbers of Muslims to the U.S., submerged in the overwhelming larger tide of Christian immigrants from the Middle East.

�� Slowed by laws restricting immigration by non-Northern Europeans between the two World Wars, numbers of Muslim immigrants from Muslim majority countries have increased rapidly since immigration law changes in 1965. Thousands of Muslims continue to arrive annually not only from the Middle East, but also from Pakistan, Malaysia and Indonesia.

�� Factions of an indigenous movement called Black Islam (begun in the 1930s) have, since 1975, merged into the Islamic mainstream although a vocal minority remains committed to the original Black Muslim separatist tradition and variant theology.

�� Directions for future research on Islam in the U.S. are suggested.

�� PREFACE

�� As no general history of the Muslim minority in America yet exists, this paper is a first attempt to begin the process of tracing the history of Islam in the United States from its arrival on these shores to the present day.

�� Several histories of Arab-Americans have been written, including one by the noted Princeton University historian Philip Hitti (himself a Syrian-American). However, more than 90 percent of Arab immigrants from the former Ottoman Empire -- including Hitti himself -- were Christian, and available research emphasized this religious tradition. Mentions of Muslims among the Christians are perfunctory.

�� The origins of Black Islam are explored in depth in an attempt to explain how this initially schismatic group (which I argue began as a Christian sect) eventually came to merge with the Muslim mainstream (which refers, cautiously, to the movement as indigenous Islam). However, a significant faction, reaffirming the designation of Nation of Islam, remains outside the beliefs and practices of traditional Islam.

�� Because existing scholarship on Islam in the U.S. is sparse, fragmented and often of questionable objectivity, more information on sources of material is included within this provisional history than would be included in a general interest, "textbook" version of this subject. Unfortunately, because this topic has not been researched in depth by other academics, there is much reliance in this early stage of exploration on secondary sources while primary sources are being ferreted out and tracked down.

�� There is no question that this paper is merely the first attempt at telling the story of Islam in the U.S. and much work remains to be done.

�� INTRODUCTION

�� Two stories can be told of Islam in America: that of traditional Islam as practiced in Arabia and that of indigenous Islam, whose practitioners are popularly known as Black Muslims. These two threads begin to intertwine in the 1970s as some Black Muslims turn to the beliefs and practices of traditional Islam.

�� But, because there are two stories, a dichotomy exists in the study of Islam in the United States. On the one hand, Black Muslims are arguably the most researched religious minority in America. It is said that, for example, Malcolm X "got more press than any other Islamic leader in U.S. history."[i] On the other, Muslims (no matter what their skin color) who follow the traditional Islamic paths known as Sunni and Shi'ia are seldom mentioned in histories of religion in the U.S. Religious groups sharing the appellation "Muslim" have been overlooked in a predominantly Protestant Christian culture that treats them as exotic at best and "statistically insignificant"[ii] at worst.

�� Muslims, whether native-born or immigrant, often appear to be invisible to sociologists and historians of religion. Will Herberg's influential 1960 essay on American religious sociology covered only Protestant, Catholic, Jew.[iii] Samuel Eliot Morison's The Oxford History of the American People,[iv] even though it was published in 1965 and included the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was silent on Islam, not even mentioning Malcolm X in passing. In The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II, William H. Chafe put Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X and the Black Muslim movement together -- and dispatched all in the same footnote.[v]

�� No reference to Islam is found in the Encyclopedia of American History edited in 1970 by Richard B. Morris[vi]. Even the third edition (1965) of George Eaton Simpson and J. Milton Yinger's Racial and Cultural Minorities made no mention of Muslims (except Black Muslims). They included Jews, Mexicans and Chinese, for instance, but not Arabs.[vii] Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, in The Future of Religion, asked research subjects in the early 1980s whether they were "Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Other or None,"[viii] at a time when numbers of Muslims were approaching the numbers of Jews.

�� In The Restructuring of American Religion,[ix] the sociologist Robert Wuthnow mentioned neither Islam nor Muslims, although they numbered at least 4 million in the United States at the time of the book's publication in 1988. (By contrast, much smaller religious denominations, including Jehovah's Witnesses, Buddhists and Christian Scientists, were covered by Wuthnow.) The University of Chicago-based data-gathering organization producing the General Social Survey does not yet offer "Muslim" as an option for designating religious preference.

�� Sulayman S. Nyang, a professor of African studies at Howard University, put it succinctly: "the field of Islamic studies in the United States is virgin territory."[x]

[i].Steven Barboza, American Jihad: Islam After Malcolm X (New York: Doubleday, 1993): 74.

[ii].Edwin S. Gaustad, "America's Institutions of Faith: A Statistical Postscript," in Religion in America, ed. William G. McLoughlin and Robert N. Bellah (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 121.

[iii].Will Herberg, Protestant, Catholic, Jew (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1960).

[iv].Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965).

[v].William H. Chafe, The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 318.

[vi].Richard B. Morris, ed., Encyclopedia of American History (New York: Harper & Row, 1970).

[vii].George Eaton Simpson and J. Milton Yinger, Racial and Cultural Minorities: Third Edition (New York: Harper & Row, 1965).

[viii].Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, eds., The Future of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 382.

[ix].Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion: Society and Faith Since World War II (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988).

[x].Sulayman S. Nyang, "Islam in the United States: Review of Sources," Journal, Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs 2 and 3 (Winter 1980-Summer 1981): 198.