Early American Muslims were among the most literate and cosmopolitan Americans of their era

Evidence

Muslims were consequential figures in Anglo-American history from the eighteenth-century onward. Some of them were among the most educated Americans of the era—of any race or class. These elites were literate in Arabic and often fluent in more than one language. They had ties not only to their homelands but also to global Muslim networks of scholarship, trade, diplomacy, and travel. Contrary to the images that most Anglo Americans had of Africa, these Muslims came from cultures that celebrated literacy, scholarship, calligraphy, poetry, and Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam in which Muslims cultivate personal and intimate relationships with God. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 353

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s scaffold on Islamophobia: the ‘friendly foreigner’ image relied on these elites’ literacy and cosmopolitanism, which later surveillance regimes inverted into the opposite threat profile.
• DEFINE: Defines Sufism in passing as the branch cultivating personal intimacy with God—a useful clarifying beat.

Related

• Early American Muslim elites were better educated than most white Americans (similarity 0.92)
• Early Americans’ image of Islam derived secondhand from British sources (similarity 0.81)
• American rhetoric repeatedly fused Muslim identity with fanaticism (similarity 0.80)
• Literate enslaved Muslims disproportionately shaped early American political discourse (similarity 0.80)
• Early American Muslims deferred religious authority to scholars abroad (similarity 0.80)
• American Muslim identity merges slavery-era and immigrant origins into one racialized type (similarity 0.79)
• Anti-Islam animus was elite-driven before World War II, not populist (similarity 0.79)
• Early American Muslims adjudicated heresy disputes by appealing to Cairo scholars. (similarity 0.79)
• American Muslims are mainstreaming faster than the general public (similarity 0.79)
• American officials read educated Muslims as a racially distinct civilized breed apart. (similarity 0.79)
• American Islamophobia predates modern politics, rooted in mythologies of white utopia (similarity 0.79)
• American racism against Muslims extends back to enslaved Africans (similarity 0.78)
• Muslim America’s narrative is rooted in blackness, not Arab identity (similarity 0.78)
• Americans and Britons alike viewed Islam as inherently expansionist and violent. (similarity 0.78)
• American Islamophobia stems from slavery and anti-Black racism, not just Orientalism. (similarity 0.78)