Enslaved West Africans were the first significant US Muslim population

Evidence

Muslims first entered the United States with slavery. Kambiz GhaneaBassiri in A History of Islam in America suggests that even before the rise of Atlantic slavery, Muslims trickled in to the New World. However, the first significant population of Muslims were enslaved West Africans. There is little consensus among scholars about the number of enslaved Muslims from West Africa in colonial America, not least because the religion of slaves was not well documented. In his pioneering book on black Muslims in the antebellum era, Afro-American studies scholar Allan Austin estimates that tens of thousands of black Muslims were among the enslaved population. In the Americas as a whole there were more. Historian Sylviane A. Diouf acknowledges the absence of accurate data on the religion of slaves but nevertheless asserts that there were “hundreds of thousands of Muslims in the Americas.” — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 204

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• XREF: Connects to midwives’ tale histories of Black America and to scholarship on African cultural survivals in the diaspora.
• CANDY: A striking elevator fact: the first significant Muslim community in America arrived in chains, contrary to the common association of Muslims with immigration/post-1965.

Related

• Roughly one in five enslaved Africans in America was Muslim (similarity 0.87)
• Ten to twenty percent of enslaved Africans were Muslims. (similarity 0.87)
• The first significant US Muslim population arrived via the slave trade (similarity 0.86)
• Muslims constituted 15 to 20 percent of enslaved Africans in America. (similarity 0.83)
• Tens of thousands of colonial slaves were Muslims (similarity 0.83)
• American Muslims now outnumber Episcopalians and will match US Jews by 2030 (similarity 0.81)
• The American Muslim population will become the nation’s second-largest faith group by 2050 (similarity 0.80)
• Black slaves entered the Americas as early as 1501. (similarity 0.80)
• For early modern Europeans Islam functioned as a civilizing intermediary toward Christianizing Africans (similarity 0.80)
• Muslims arrived in the Americas with Columbus and led the earliest slave revolts (similarity 0.79)
• American racism against Muslims extends back to enslaved Africans (similarity 0.79)
• American Muslim identity merges slavery-era and immigrant origins into one racialized type (similarity 0.79)
• Muslim America’s narrative is rooted in blackness, not Arab identity (similarity 0.79)
• American Muslim diversity of ancestry and arrival pathways fragments unified anti-Islamophobia resistance (similarity 0.79)
• Muslims are about one percent of the US population but growing fast (similarity 0.79)