Editorial Introduction

Abstract

The arrival of Islam in the United States ofAmerica has been dated back to the coming of slaves fromAfrica. During this unfortunate trade in human cargo from the African mainland, many Muslim men and women came to these shores. Some of these men and women were more visible than others; some were more literate in Arabic than the others; and some were better remembered by their generations than the others. Despite these multiple differences between the Muslim slaves and their brethren from various parts of theAfrican continent, the fact still remains that their Islam and their self-confidence did not save them from the oppressive chains of slave masters. The religion of Islam survived only during the lifetime of individual believers who tried desperately to maintain their Islamic way of life. Among the Muslims who came in ante bellum times intoAmerica one can include Yorro Mahmud (erroneously anglicized as Yarrow Mamout), Ayub Ibn Sulayman Diallo (known to Anglo-Saxons as Job ben Solomon), Abdul Rahman (known as Abdul Rahahman in the Western sources) and countless others whose Islamic ritual practices were prevented from surfacing in public.1 Besides these Muslim slaves of ante bellumAmerica, there were others who came to these shores without the handicap of slavery. They came from Southern Europe, the Middle East and the Indian Subcontinent. TheseMuslims were immigrants to America at the end of the Nineteenth Century and the beginning of the Twentieth Century. Motivated by the desire to come to a land of opportunity and strike it rich, many of these men and women later found out that the United States ofAmerica was destined to be their permanent homeland. In the search for identity and cultural security in their new environment, these Muslim immigrants began to consolidate their cultural resources by building mosques and organizing national and local groups for the purpose of social welfare and solidarity. These developments among the Muslims contributed to the emergence of various cultural and religious ...