The First Muslims of North America
Centuries before the American republic, Muslims were present in the Americas — as explorers, enslaved people, and settlers. Their story is beginning to be told.
The history of Islam in North America does not begin with twentieth-century immigration. Scholars estimate that ten to thirty percent of the Africans brought to the Americas as enslaved people were Muslim — making the enslaved Muslim community the largest Muslim population in the Western hemisphere for most of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They left behind documents, in Arabic, that are only now being systematically studied.
Among the most remarkable of these documents is the autobiography of Omar ibn Said, a West African scholar enslaved in the United States in the early nineteenth century, who wrote his life story in Arabic on paper he obtained from his enslaver. His manuscript — the only known autobiography of an enslaved person written in Arabic in the United States — is a window into a world that American history has largely ignored.
