Modified Sun, Nov 22, 2009 10:54 PM
Project binds Muslims to Americana
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close xRALEIGH -- Ask most people who were the earliest U.S. Muslims and they might scratch their heads and come up with Muhammad Ali or maybe Malcolm X.
But an exhibit at the Shaw University mosque Sunday dispels the myth that Muslims, adherents to Islam, first came on the U.S. scene in the 1960s, or that the earliest among them were African-American converts such as the retired boxer or the black activist.
The exhibit, "Muslims in America," demonstrates that Muslim explorers may have predated Christopher Columbus and that Muslims fought in every U.S. war since the Revolutionary War. Census records show nearly 300 men with surnames from Muslim areas fought in the Civil War, for example.
The 200 or so adults and children who peered at the photocopies of letters, portraits and tombstones Sunday also learned that North Carolina was home to one of the most learned of Muslim slaves, Omar Ibn Sayyid of Fayetteville.
"I studied this in college but I didn't know North Carolina's role," said Jamaal Albany, a teacher at Al-Iman, a Muslim day school in Raleigh, who brought some of his sixth- and seventh-grade students to the exhibit. "It's amazing."
The exhibit is the brainchild of Amir Muhammad, a Washington history buff who went in search of his own family roots in Georgia a dozen years ago and stumbled on traces of a forgotten Muslim past, made up mostly of West African Muslims who were brought to this country as slaves.
Muhammad has taken his poster boards from Maine to California, stopping in each city on the tour for a few hours. The original portraits and some of the rare artifacts formed an exhibit at the Smithsonian four years ago.
North Carolina's contribution to American Muslim history may have begun with Sayyid, who was born in what is present-day Senegal in 1770. A Muslim scholar who read and wrote in Arabic, he was enslaved at age 37 and arrived in Charleston, S.C., in 1807.
Four years later, he escaped to Fayetteville and, after a while in prison, encouraged James Owen, a general in the state militia, to purchase him. Sayyid wrote his biography in Arabic, and toward the end of his life requested a Bible in Arabic. (That Arabic Bible is now housed at Davidson College.)
"These are brothers we never knew the history of," said Hajj Ali Abdul Malik of Raleigh, who came out to see the exhibit. "Now they are coming to light."
Though historians may quibble that most slaves were not Muslims, it is clear that the early American leaders were open to the Islamic world and treated it with great respect. The exhibit features a letter written by George Washington to the King of Morocco and a peace treaty signed by John Adams and Thomas Jefferson between the U.S. and Morocco.
In a PowerPoint presentation Muhammad made to those who had gathered Sunday at the Shaw mosque, he pointed out Census records contain 584 soldiers with the last name Muhammad (spelled 33 different ways) who fought in World War I.
"We're part of American society," said Muhammad. "It didn't start with the Nation of Islam, and it didn't come with the wave of immigrants in the 1960s."
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About the project
For more information about Muhammad's "Muslims in America" project, go to: www.muslimsinamerica.org.
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