Islam in USA

By: Brannon M. Wheeler
The history of Islam in America goes back some five hundred years. Muslims constitute the second largest religious group (after Christians) in the United States, and Islam is increasingly an important and recognized aspect of American culture.
The earliest Muslims in America were West African explorers of the Caribbean and Muslim guides for Spanish and Portuguese explorers in the fifteenth century. Large numbers of Muslims, many as Moriscos (Muslims with a public Christian identity), immigrated to the Americas in the sixteenth century after the expulsion of the Jews and Moors from Spain. It is estimated that some twenty percent of the African slaves brought to America from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century were Muslim.
Most of the Muslims in the United States have come from a series of immigrations that began in the late nineteenth century. The earliest to arrive were largely peasants who found work as manual laborers, though some became small-business owners, and some became homesteaders in the Midwest. Following World War II, large numbers of Middle Eastern and Eastern European Muslims came to the United States, many fleeing political unrest in their countries of origin. These Palestinians, Egyptians, Iraqis, and Albanians were generally more highly skilled and better educated than previous immigrants. Since the 1960s, Muslims have come to the United States from South and Southeast Asia. To a greater degree than those of earlier waves, these later immigrants have tended to represent a more Western acculturated class seeking professional career advancement rather than political asylum.
It is estimated that roughly thirty percent of Muslims in America are African American. The history of African American Muslims dates back to the earliest Muslim visitors to America, but the Muslim movements that have had the most influence on contemporary African Americans originated in the early twentieth century. Noble Drew Ali was one of the first African Americans to preach Islam as a religion for the \"Asiatics,\" and in 1913 he founded the Moorish American Science Temple. In 1929 a Detroit preacher named Wallace D. Fard founded the Lost-Found Nation of Islam in the Wilderness of North America, a movement that inspired the conversion to Islam of Elijah Muhammad (1897–1975). Proclaimed as the \"Messenger of God,\" Elijah Muhammad assumed the mantle of leadership from Fard and created the Nation of Islam, which became highly successful in its call among African Americans and is responsible for a number of social welfare projects in some large U.S. cities on the East Coast and in the Midwest.
Perhaps Elijah Muhammad\'s best-known follower, Malcolm X (1925–1965) was influential in the spread and success of the Nation of Islam, playing a major role in the civil rights activities of the 1950s and 1960s. After a pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca, Malcolm X began to distance himself from the heretic and separatist ideology of the Nation of Islam. In 1965 two Nation of Islam members were arrested for the assassination of Malcolm X at a religious rally.
Following the death of Elijah Muhammad, the Nation of Islam broke into several groups. One of these groups was led by Elijah Muhammad\'s son Warith Deen Muhammad, who took the title Mujaddid (Arabic for renewer) as part of his attempt to move toward a more integrated, egalitarian vision of what was called Orthodox Islam. In 1976 Warith renamed his movement the American Bilalial Community, and then again in 1980 the name was changed to the American Muslim Mission. A successor to Elijah Muhammad\'s legacy in the Nation of Islam, Minister Louis Farrakhan\'s early leadership was based on a continuation of the more separatist ideology of the movement under Elijah Muhammad.
A third group, with much smaller numbers, is the so-called Five-Percenters, led by Clarence \"Pudding\" 13X. These Muslims claim they are the chosen five percent of humanity, entrusted to live the true Islamic life. This group is known for its use of rap lyrics in the dissemination of its \"Science of Supreme Mathematics.\"
A number of Islamic umbrella organizations exist in the United States today. Begun under Elijah Muhammad, the University of Islam was later renamed the Sister Clara Muhammad Schools, which is represented in a number of American elementary and secondary schools with Islamic studies curricula. The earliest North American federation of mosques, the Federation of Islamic Associations in the United States and Canada, was formed in the years following World War II and had a membership of about two dozen affiliated mosques. In 1963 the Muslim Student Association (MSA) was formed with a mission to support and further \"Islamicize\" American Muslims primarily at the college level, whether residents or visitors in the United States. Numerous scientific associations were also formed around the same time, many as offshoots of the MSA, including the Islamic Medical Association, the Association of Muslim Scientists and Engineers, and more recently the Association of Muslim Social Scientists. The Council of Masajid of the United States merged with its Canadian counterpart in 1985 and is affiliated with approximately two hundred mosques in North America. One of the most visible of American Muslim organizations is the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), created in 1982 and currently affiliated with close to four hundred mosques and Islamic centers.
The academic field of Islamic studies has also had a significant impact on American culture. Although the discipline has its origins in the Orientalist scholarship of Europe, Islamic studies in America is distinguished by the integration of diverse local Muslim perspectives into the scholarly studies of Islam. This broader comparative approach to Islamic studies coincides with other influential academic trends in American academia toward interdisciplinary and multicultural studies. As the number of Muslims in U.S. academic institutions increases, there are growing numbers of Islamic studies specialists and programs and an increasing presence of American Muslims as students and scholars in this field.

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