Muslims arrived in the Americas with Columbus and led the earliest slave revolts

Evidence

Islam came to the New World with Columbus; converts, both crypto- Muslims and crypto-Jews, arrived as sailors on explorers’ ships. In addition, throughout the fifteenth century and sixteenth century, enslaved Muslim Africans continued to practice their religion in the New World; indeed, they launched the first series of slave revolts in Brazil that culminated in a major rebellion in 1835 (Diouf 1998, 153-63; Gomez 2005; Reis 1993). — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 193

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: the 1835 Brazilian Muslim slave rebellion and its leadership deserves a closer look as a case of religiously-organized resistance.
• SHARE: For anyone into early American religious history or Afro-Brazilian studies, this inversion of the Columbus-origin story is a great conversation piece.
• XREF: connects to: The first significant US Muslim population arrived via the slave trade