Muslim-American history predates the American republic

Evidence

As far back as the colonial era, many West African Muslims were sold into slavery, making Muslim-American history older than the republic itself. Mustapha, historians tell us, was actually a fairly common name among slaves in colonial South Carolina. For their part, Arabs have been arriving on these shores since the latter part of the nineteenth century, when mostly Christian Arabs from Mount Lebanon packed up their belongings and landed on Ellis Island with an average of 31.85 in their pockets, more than the 12.26 that Polish immigrants carried or the $21.32 of the Greeks. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 974

Categorization

• CANDY: The 31.85 vs 12.26 vs $21.32 pocket-money comparison is a light, tweetable immigrant-history detail.
• SHARE: The Mustapha-as-common-South-Carolina-slave-name detail is exactly the kind of thing to send to a friend interested in African American or Muslim American history.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in the deep-rootedness of identity groups and to immigration-history themes from other curated books. — connects to: America was religiously plural from its beginning. — Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the…, 519; Islam was not formally criminalized in colonial America — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 921; Islam has been raced in America since the early slave era — Cyra Akila Choudhury, Racecraft and Identity in the Emergence…, 148
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 974