Islam, African Americans: Historical Overview

Islam is a vital, growing religion in America. Little is known, however, about the religion except through the biased lens of media reports which brand African American Muslims as "Black Muslims" and portray their communities as places of social protest. African American Islam challenges these myths by contextualizing the experience and history of African American Islamic life. This is the first book to investigate the diverse African American Islamic community on its own terms, in its own language and through its own synthesis of Islamic history and philosophy.

In this book Allan Austin, notied scholar of antebellum Black writing and history, tells the remarkable stories of dozen of African Muslims, all from sub-Saharan Africa, and none of them peasants. Austin explores, via portraits, documents, maps, and texts, the lives of 50 sub-Saharan non-peasant Muslim Africans caught in the slave trade between 1730 and 1860. Also includes five maps.

Beginning in Latin America in the 15th century, this text represents a social history of African Muslims and their descendants throughout the Americas, through to the post-slavery period of the 20th century.

This book offers a comprehensive ethnographic study of African-American Muslims. Drawing on hundreds of interviews conducted over a period of several years, Dannin provides an unprecedented look inside the fascinating and little understood world of black Muslims. He discovers that the well-known and cult-like Nation of Islam represents only a small part of the picture. Many more African-Americans are drawn to Islamic orthodoxy, with its strict adherence to the Qur'an.

This book traces the ideoplogical encounter between Islam and Blackamericans, from the proto-Islamic black-nationalist spin-off movements of the early twentieth century through the rise and preponderance of orthodox Sunni Islam by the century's end.

This book explores modern African-American Islamic thought within the context of Islamic history, giving special attention to questions of universality versus particularity.

Part I of the book explores these roots in the Middle East, West Africa, and antebellum America. Part II tells the story of the "Prophets of the City" -- the leaders of the new urban-based African American Muslim movements in the 20th century. Turner places the study of Islam in the context of the racial, ethical, and political relations that influenced the reception of successive presentations of Islam, including the West African Islam of slaves, the Ahmadiyya Movement from India, the orthodox Sunni practice of later immigrants, and the Nation of Islam.

Beginning with the origins of Islam in Arabia and continuing to the African empires of Ghana, Mali and Songhai, Mr. Rashad examines the influence the religion had on the peoples of that continent and the impact of slavery on African Muslims brought to the Americas. He offers several biographical sketches of pre-Civil War Muslim slaves and how Islam was reintroduced into the United States at the turn of the century.

The book begins with the tale of Job Ben Solomon, a 18th century African American Muslim slave, and goes on to chart the stories of sodbusters in North Dakota, African American converts to Islam in the 1920s, Muslim barkeepers in Toledo, the post-1965 wave of professional immigrants from Asia and Africa, and Muslim Americans after 9/11.

A concise history of how Muslims came to America and the major historical events that identify the development of their community. The book is well illustrated with photographs of early Muslim Americans and manuscripts of their handwriting in Arabic.

This book presents a history of African Muslim slaves, following them from Africa to the Americas. It details how, even while enslaved many Black Muslims managed to follow most of the precepts of their religion. Literate, urban, and well traveled, Black Muslims drew on their organization and the strength of their beliefs to play a major part in the most well known slave uprisings.