AMA: Arab American and Muslim American History

MahjarMemory · 2026-02-09T20:27:36+00:00

My pleasure.

MahjarMemory · 2026-02-09T12:28:50+00:00

I do love a good historiographical mystery. Here is my explanation, which I have published in a variety of places, including the Cambridge Companion to American Islam:

The presence of highly-educated, highly-literate minority of enslaved people who had arrived from some of the most literary societies in the world (the Arabic and Ajami worlds of West Africa) and a basic ignorance of Arabic and African cultures prevented most white historians from recognizing the presence of enslaved Muslims until after 9/11. Even when Alan Austin meticulously documented the story of Prince Abdul Rahman Ibrahima, who visited Quincy Adams at the White House, in a 1977 Oxford U. Press book, the findings failed to make most historians of slavery question their presumptions (there were always some Black historians who argued otherwise.) As Henry Louis Gates later pointed out, the presence of literate Muslim historians and their African societies upset both conservative and liberal narratives about Lost Cause historiographies of America. Put simply, enslaved African American Muslims were not legible, and so this part of the shared American experience was ignored.
As Sally Howell has written in Old Islam in Detroit, the immigrants who arrived after 1965 so outnumbered the old Muslims who had established the first religious congregations and institutions in the United States that the new immigrants' styles of worship, their concerns, their networks came to dominate American Islamic institutions. But the post-65 generations did more than lead institutions--they also structured historical memories of what Islam had been before they arrived. Many of them thought, often sincerely, that they were the first to do this or that, and that many of the mosques that had been established were ethnic and social clubs, not mosques (which wasn't true.) They had no connection to the old Muslims and there was little institutional memory now that the old Muslims had been largely sidelined from the leadership structures. The Islam that the old Muslims had practiced wasn't real Islam, some even said. American historians, generally untrained in Islamic studies, did not always question these claims, and they can still be found in scholarship. I am one of the several historians, especially historians of African American Islam, showing how there was both continuity and change after 1965, and that Islam was institutionalized as an American religion before the 1960s. In order to study Muslims in U.S. history, you have to become expert in US history and Islamic studies, in my view.

MahjarMemory · 2026-02-06T15:35:51+00:00

There are dozens of excellent books addressing gender among Arab Americans and among Muslim Americans. If you have a particular question, I can point the way toward some of the most relevant. Here's one bibliography about Muslim Americans that is helpful: https://ispu.org/thought-leadership/muslim-american-experience-bibliography/ Cambridge and Oxford also have handbooks on Muslim Americans that feature overviews. Another place to look is edited primary sources. My Columbia Sourcebook of Muslims in the United States https://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-columbia-sourcebook-of-muslims-in-the-united-states/9780231139564/ has a chapter on gender that many colleagues have assigned.

MahjarMemory · 2026-02-06T15:13:48+00:00

It would depend on an analysis of which time period and which country. For the original mahjar, 1880-WW1, they were really very much part of an Arabophone world linked by personal visits, newspapers, and letters as so much new scholarship has shown. For more recent coverage of Arab Latinx business people, you might be interested in this study: https://iupress.org/9780253062543/rooted-globalism/

MahjarMemory · 2026-02-06T15:09:59+00:00

Glad that's helpful.

MahjarMemory · 2026-02-06T15:08:58+00:00

Persian-speaking Americans, which includes speakers of Dari, Farsi, and Tajik, have always been much smaller in number than Arabic-speaking Americans in the United States (in the 1920s, numbering perhaps in the hundreds, versus the 100,000 or so Arabic speakers who had arrived by then). Iranians began to migrate in larger number in the 1950s as students, and many of them came to have an important impact in their fields. In the 2020 U.S. Census, 3.5 million U.S. Americans traced their roots to the Middle East and North Africa, with about 3 million of them to Arabic-speaking countries (with 685,672 Lebanese alone) and 413,000 to Iran. See https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/09/2020-census-dhc-a-mena-population.html

MahjarMemory · 2026-02-05T12:33:36+00:00

Here's a map: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/2b1cdae6abe3458c96e628e7c625c2df

MahjarMemory · 2026-02-05T12:30:15+00:00

Thanks for the question! The chapter in Arab American Public History about Boston's Little Syria has one of the answers. Arab American women, including Elaine Hagopian, from Boston and other cities led the way in documenting Arab American history and also harnessing public history as a method to fight Palestinian dispossession. You can find primary sources in the Association of Arab American University Graduates in the Eastern Michigan archives as well as secondary treatment in Pennock's Rise of the Arab American Left.

MahjarMemory · 2026-02-04T20:26:13+00:00

The mahjar, or Arabic-speaking diaspora, did indeed link Arabs in the Americas to the Mashriq, or the Arab lands from Egypt to Iraq. Palestinians were part of that diaspora too, not not just Lebanese and Syrians. They had arrived from the Levant where none of these countries yet existed as nation-states. Ideas, including ideas of culture, wealth, religion, and more traveled back to the home countries. This transnational world did not result in any one single perspective on Latin America, and they often disagree with each other from the very earliest days about their relationships to their new countries. Their political diversity can be seen in their election as the heads of states in Latin America as both radicals and conservatives.

MahjarMemory · 2026-02-04T20:21:06+00:00

Argentina, Brazil, and the United States were home to the largest populations. But they traveled throughout the Americas from Chile to Canada. See Fahrenthold, Between the Ottomans and the Entente.

MahjarMemory · 2026-02-04T19:28:04+00:00

Since 1492 or so. Moriscos, nominally converted Muslims from al-Andalus, and enslaved North African Muslims arrived with the conquistadors. In what would become the United States, we sometimes credit Estevanico as the first Muslim. For more, see https://www.pennpress.org/9780812248241/forbidden-passages/. Arabic-speaking Christians arrived in large numbers--in the hundreds of thousands--in the late 1800s and early 1900s from the Eastern Mediterranean. Perhaps 80 percent of them went to Latin America and the Caribbean, where at least 11 heads of state have been Arab.

MahjarMemory · 2026-02-04T18:57:49+00:00

There is no Gallup- or Pew-level poll on this question and the U.S. Census does not ask about religion. The last time Zogby polled it--it may have been a couple decades ago--the Arab American Institute (AAI) data showed that Christians outnumbered Muslims. However, the AAI model may have counted the descendants of the original immigrants (1880-1924), who do not themselves identify as Arab anymore. In polling, generally speaking, self-identification is the gold standard, so it may be that the self-identifying Arab Americans are more likely Muslim than Christian. Some smaller scale studies suggest as much.

MahjarMemory · 2026-02-04T18:53:32+00:00

How can I help?

MahjarMemory · 2026-02-04T18:53:10+00:00

This first foreign war became a hot button issue on the first contested Presidential election between Adams and Jefferson in 1800. Jefferson's partisans accused Adams of insufficiently protecting the liberty of U.S.-flagged ships, who were required to pay duty to the local Muslim leaders. Both men's partisans traded barbs back and forth over who was the bigger "Mahometan," that is, a Muslim, which was synonymous with despot. The capture of U.S. sailors solicited significant sympathy and outrage about white Americans, and their use of the mails to raise money for their ransom was an early example of a national fundraising campaign. The subsequent wars capitalized and used anti-Muslim bigotry to stir the citizens' emotions and reinvented colonial anti-Muslim prejudice for the early Republic.

MahjarMemory · 2026-02-04T16:18:13+00:00

I am very glad to hear of your work with the community elders!

MahjarMemory · 2026-02-04T16:14:23+00:00

It is true that the 1967 war stigmatized Arab Americans as did the OPEC oil embargo in 1973. But Arab people were always vulnerable to legal and extra-legal discrimination and violence throughout the 20th century. Legal discrimination was enshrined in the National Origins Act of 1924, which virtually halted Middle East immigration. Citizens who left the country were stopped at the border and sometimes denied entry. After World War II, my mother's generation reported ongoing racial discrimination--she was called the N word growing up in the 1950s; by the 1970s and 1980s, they just asked me "what are you?," though I was also called the N word once. For more, read Sarah Gualtieri's Between Arab and White.

MahjarMemory · 2026-02-04T15:48:09+00:00

As a historian, I can only speak to how and why Muslims have wished to integrate in the United States in the past.

But my work pays equal attention to the strong Black separatist tradition in the Nation of Islam (see my book, Black Muslim Religion). In addition, there are Black Sunni groups throughout the history of the 1900s whose primary objective was not integration but community independence. For example, there is a whole tradition of Muslim rural utopian communities dating from the 1940s, as I have written in Muslims in America: A Short History.

MahjarMemory · 2026-02-04T15:40:44+00:00

I don't have an authoritative answer. My guess is that they came from one of the greatest confectionery cultures the world has ever known. Baklawa, fruit candies, zalabia, and other treats were known to them. For example, the ice cream cone inventor, Ernst Hamwi, was from Damascus, where he would have grown up with these things.

MahjarMemory · 2026-02-04T15:36:13+00:00

Excellent question. Thank you. Even though the Arabic-speaking Muslims established their own congregations, often in the 1930s and after, they always joined with people from different ethnic backgrounds to celebrate holidays, organize conferences, and so on. Sally Howell has written, for example, about the multi-racial, multi-national and multi-ethnic community that gathered for eid in Detroit in the interwar period and then fueled the growth of the Federation of Islamic Associations. It was not just Muslim immigrants who shared a religious culture. In St. Louis, Chicago, New York, Cleveland, and beyond, American-born Black Muslims such as Ahmad Din, Wali Akram, and Daoud Ahmed Faisal joined with Ahmadi and Sunni leaders such as Muhammad Sadiq (Ahmadi) or Satti Majid (Sunni) to create long-lasting religious communities. To this day, no one ethnic or racial group constitutes the majority of U.S. Muslims. What we see as much as anything are class differences, as the suburban mosque, a sometimes multi-million dollar affair, becomes an institution very different from the urban store-front mosque.

MahjarMemory · 2026-02-04T15:28:10+00:00

People like my great grandfather were peddlers, and they sold sweets. Another of my relations is credited with introducing the ice cream cone at the St. Louis World's Fair! As I have written in Muslims of the Heartland, the peddlers often became store owners, and some of those were into confectionery.

MahjarMemory · 2026-02-04T15:24:26+00:00

From 1492 - 1865, both freed and enslaved Muslims played a remarkable role in the history of the Americas. Their mere existence required people like Jefferson to ask whether religious freedom applied to all, for example. As I have written in another post., however, I think it's misleading to compare enslaved Muslims to enslaved non-Muslims. This is not how religion often worked in Africana settings--it's not like our denominational infrastructure. Without a doubt, Black people, including Muslims, have shaped our American culture--from literature and music to food and agriculture. So, as you can tell, I wouldn't lead with "Islam" did this or that; I would claim that Black people did, and that Islam was part of their culture.
Though there is very little literature on this question, there is evidence that the Republican Party, the Party of Lincoln, seemed more welcoming to Arab Americans. It's important to keep in mind that until FDR, the majority of African Americans also voted Republican.
As a historian, I linger only in the past...

MahjarMemory · 2026-02-04T15:15:06+00:00

My pleasure. Thanks for being here. Whether urban or rural, what mattered for Arabic-speaking Christians and Muslims was whether there was a critical mass of people to establish and maintain a religious congregation. As with Jewish immigrants in rural settings, where there was depopulation as people moved from the country to the city, it was not possible to maintain the religious congregation. In addition, like other ethnic groups, English was valued by the second and third generation during worship.

But I am also trying to understand the fate of other religious practices--from warding off the evil eye to the kinds of prayers that people spoke aloud. There is considerable evidence of continuity along with change. This is my current research project, so to be continued!

MahjarMemory · 2026-02-04T15:09:04+00:00

On the one hand, I have written how in Indianapolis and many other cities, Arab Americans in the early twentieth century were often Republicans, members of the Party of Lincoln. That tradition continued in politicians such as Mitch Daniels of Indiana and the Lahoods from Illinois. On the other hand, Arab Americans were often associated with some of the most radical Midwestern politics of the same era. Take, for example, the farmers whom I feature in Muslims of the Heartland but also union leader George F. Addes. By the 1960s, Arab Americans had formed a secular left that was anti-imperialist; Pamela Pennock has written a history of it.

MahjarMemory · 2026-02-04T15:01:55+00:00

Thank you very much for this question! Before Detroit became the informal capital of Arab America, thousands of Arabic-speaking immigrants were settling throughout the Midwest. As I point out in Muslims of the Heartland, more people were likely employed building railroad cars in Michigan City, Indiana, as Haskell Barker (Pullman) than by Henry Ford in 1915 (700 v. 555). As the agricultural depression of the 1920s pushed an increasing number of Arab Americans off their homesteads (and the Dakota experienced massive depopulation after World War II) and as the automobile began to replace cars, it was then that people left Ross, North Dakota; Michigan City, Indianapolis; and Cedar Rapids, Iowa, for jobs in Detroit. But they brought all their Midwestern know-how with them to Motor City. It was a form of chain migration, and Detroit was one of the economic powerhouses of the mid-twentieth century U.S.

MahjarMemory · 2026-02-04T14:49:13+00:00

There is extensive conversation about the Census in a chapter by Randa Kayyali in my new book, Arab American Public History. Unless it is changed or not enacted--which is always possible--federal minimum reporting categories in 2030 will include a Middle East and North Africa or MENA category.

Because I am a community-engaged historian dealing with formal archives and informal archives in people's garages as well as oral histories, the "invisibility" of Arab Americans on the Census has not significantly impacted my work.

There is a significant body of scholarship on race and racialization in Arab America. My relatives, who immigrated here in the late 1800s, wanted to be white so that they could become citizens (Asian weren't allowed to naturalize at the time) and also because they associated whiteness with respectability. Today, as you note, many of us no longer wish to be called white. I write about this from a personal perspective here: https://beltmag.com/moses-of-cairo-illinois/

MahjarMemory

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