Americans Do You Know a Muslim

WASHINGTON – 1 of the greatest stories rarely told well-nigh the long history of Muslim immigration to the United states of america stretching dorsum hundreds of years is actually being told nearly days by Amir Muhammad, the founder and chief curator of America'south Islamic Heritage Museum, a tiny establishment with a do-it-yourself collector'south vibe and a small-scale entrance fee that sits in an out-of-the-fashion corner of southeast Washington, D.C.

But, in an historic period of American political sectarianism when immigrant and minority-rights groups and U.S. lawmakers have blasted President Donald Trump's incendiary comments, not many people are paying attention to the story Muhammad is revealing virtually the Muslim experience.

"American Muslims haven't been great at explaining our side, at engaging with folks – you know? Not too many Americans come out here. We get some schools and international guests," said Muhammad, 64, in a contempo interview.

Every bit Muhammad spoke in one of the museum'due south small airless hallways, the lights kept flickering. Nearby, a smoke alarm chirped in need of batteries. Dusty glass displays featured Qurans from effectually the world. Outside, the run-down front entrance was framed by a sign in a blue font: America's Islamic Heritage Museum. Orange-yellow streaks of rust ran downwardly the face of information technology.

"Once, a French documentary crew stopped by," he added. "It's like that."

Vestiges of Islam

America's Islamic Heritage Museum started in 1996 as a traveling exhibition called Collections and Stories of American Muslims. Since moving, in 2011, to its location on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, the museum has introduced and entertained about 52,000 people with artifacts, documents and photographs that explore the contributions and legacies of American Muslims. Terminal year, near 8,000 people visited, a figure far from the more than thirty million visits made concluding year to the 19 museums, galleries and National Zoological Park that comprise the Smithsonian Establishment a few miles away.

"This area's kind of the hood of the hood," said Muhammad, using slang to depict an economically deprived surface area, and likewise to justify why some Americans may deliberately choose to give his museum a wide booth. Simply "from darkness comes light," he added, noting that the neighborhood was improving.

But in that location are other reasons, likewise.

"It was a struggle for a long time to even go American Muslims behind our thought," said Emad Al-Turk, referring to the International Museum of Muslim Cultures in Jackson, Mississippi, an establishment he co-founded near six months earlier the 9/11 attacks.

The International Museum of Muslim Cultures is perhaps less well known than America'due south Islamic Heritage Museum, partly considering it is located far from whatsoever major metropolis in a predominantly rural country. And its focus is on educating the public virtually Islamic history and culture and Muslim contributions to world civilisation, not merely America'due south.

"At the time, people were really scared about what was happening and how the relationship between American Muslims and not-Muslims was changing," Al-Turk said.

In "Al' America," his 2008 book about America's Arab and Islamic roots, the author and journalist Jonathan Curiel notes that since the 9/11 terrorist attacks it has been hard for some Americans to "see Arab and Muslim culture every bit anything other than terrorism and fundamentalism ... 'Arab' and 'Muslim' have go code words of alarm."

In that location has also been a tendency, Curiel believes, to reject any historical claims Arab and Muslim culture might have on American civilisation – to view information technology every bit "their" culture, not "ours."

And notwithstanding:

Did you lot know in that location are two towns in the U.s.a. called Mohammad? At that place's also a Palestine, in Texas, and an Aladdin, in Wyoming. There's been a U.S. post office in Mecca, Indiana, since 1888. In fact, from New Orleans to the Alamo, Moorish styles of architecture can be detected in buildings across the USA. Even the pointed arches that in one case stood at the base of the fallen World Trade Center towers in New York City mimicked Islamic geometric tradition. Dejection music may exist a uniquely American art form that originated in the Deep South – music ethnographers have established that many of its harmonies and note changes resemble Muslim prayers and other recitations, a result of the African slaves who came to the U.South. from Muslim areas on that continent.

Scholars of the Middle E say that at that place are many possible explanations for an apparent lack of interest in the U.s.'south Islamic heritage, not to the lowest degree that many Americans only don't know it exists.

"A lot of people might assume Muslim immigration started in 1965 when the U.S. had a period of immigration reform, others volition date it back to the 1979 Islamic revolution in Islamic republic of iran, nevertheless others to the 9/11 attacks, simply usually no one looks further back than the 1960s and certainly not beyond the 20th century for this history at the popular level," said Hussein Rashid, who teaches at Columbia University.

Some signal to the rhetoric of President Donald Trump as a more contempo reason for the famine of interest in Islam in America.

Not only has the president signed executive orders targeting immigration from some majority-Muslim countries, but Trump himself has oft negatively associated Islam and the Middle Eastward more generally with violence and cultural differences claimed to be anathema to American life and identity.

"Islam hates usa," Trump said on the campaign trail in 2016.

"Criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in," he tweeted on Oct. 22 subsequently ordering the military to be on alert for a caravan of migrants from Fundamental America attempting to enter the U.Due south. despite efforts to take them stopped at the edge.

"For Trump, at that place appears to a whole lot of people who are not fully American. Muslims aren't. Mexican-American communities aren't. Women. Blackness people," said Rashid.

But experts on Islam say at that place is a problem with Trump's Muslim narrative: Muslims take been coming to America since at to the lowest degree the 17th century, with anywhere from a third to a quarter of the enslaved Africans brought to the U.South. confronting their will likely Muslims.

There is also evidence that Muslims were on the ships that the Italian explorer, navigator and colonist Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic Ocean in the 15th century.

At that place are even reports of Chinese Muslims making it to American shores, in California, in the ninth century. They arrived as pirates or fleeing religious persecution.

"We have autobiographies, we accept oral histories, we have mosques, cemeteries, tombstones. We besides have a lot of conjectural show: For instance, the manner people are buried facing Mecca (Islam's holiest city, in Saudi arabia)," Rashid said.

Cornelia Walker Bailey, who died last yr anile 73, wrote in her memoir that children on Sapelo Island, Georgia, where she grew up, learned to say their prayers facing east toward Mecca in keeping with Muslim practice. Bailey, like many African-Americans from Sapelo Island, merits Bilali Muhammad, a Muslim scholar from West Africa who was brought to Georgia equally a teenage slave in the 18th century, every bit a distant relative.

A growing population

According to the Pew Research Centre, about three 1000000 Muslims alive in the U.Southward. This compares to approximately 5.6 million Jews and 240 million Christians, the two dominant religions. (About l one thousand thousand people are religiously unaffiliated.) But by 2050, Pew Research Eye estimates, there volition exist at least 8 million Muslims living in the U.S. while the Jewish population volition remain fairly brackish, at about v.3 meg.

Federal hate-criminal offence information published by the FBI show that in 2017 more than than half of religious hate crimes in America targeted Jews while nearly a quarter targeted Muslims.

American Muslim groups raised thousands of dollars for the Pittsburgh synagogue victims and also offered Jews help with protection and other services they might need.

Clearing was one of the topics that were at the forefront of voters' minds as they went to the polls with record-level enthusiasm to vote in the U.South. midterm elections.

More:Detest crimes in USA surge in 2017 with big jump in anti-Semitic attacks, FBI says

More:What other nations practice when security threats are everywhere

Yet if the American Jewish and Christian experiences are well documented in countless journals, enquiry institutes, museum collections, in business, and in popular culture and amusement, the American Muslim experience mostly appears to sit outside the broader narrative of stories Americans tell themselves about their history, co-ordinate to religious scholars such equally Lior Sternfeld, who specializes in Jewish studies.

"Muslim-Americans were a much smaller and more than marginalized customs, just information technology's changing," said Sternfeld, who teaches at Penn State University.

Muhammad, of America'due south Islamic Heritage Museum, wants to do something virtually this.

He spends his spare time traveling around the USA searching for Islam'south forgotten roots in a land where they were never fully remembered in the first place.

He has collected gravestones all over the South dating to the 1800s with Islamic names written on them in Arabic. He has 200-year-old census records and wills and testaments from virtually every U.South. region that show vestiges of Islamic clearing.

He besides has the robe of the first U.Due south. Muslim guess, the uniform of the first Muslim U.S. Regular army chaplain and a wall filled with photos of contemporary American Muslim newsmakers, and sports stars from Muhammad Ali to Sam Khalifa, the only Muslim player in the history of Major League Baseball.

In all, his collection consists of a few chiliad examples of American Islamia.

"Not even American Muslims always know this stuff exists," he said.

Hani Bawardi, a professor at the Eye for Arab American Studies at the University of Michigan in Dearborn, outside Detroit, said the story of Islam in America "awaits digging." He said no good scholarship exists on the subject, partly because "no i traced sufficiently the archival testify on enslaved Muslims. Every time we retrieve nosotros know the location of the oldest mosque an older one is discovered," he said. "I can't even point you to a good study in that location. But Muslims were represented in very remote areas."

Sill, Muhammad Fraser-Rahim, a historian of Islam who spent more than a decade equally a counterterrorism adviser, including at the Department for Homeland Security, said that at a time when Trump appears to exist questioning whether Islam is compatible with American life, there is an appetite for more than awareness of its place in the American story.

"Quite frankly, a lot of American Muslims are non that conversant in their own history. We're a pretty diverse grouping: Economics, course, resources, access. There are and so many things that divide American Muslims rather than necessarily uniting them. And I can give you enough of examples of Muslims in corporate America with the proper noun 'Mohammad' who accept gone by the proper noun 'Mo' considering they haven't been all that comfortable with being Muslim in a public space," he said. "Now, people are thinking that they might demand to be a bit more vocal in this current (political) context."

American Muslims are raising their profiles and speaking out in unlike ways.

Quondam Michigan state lawmaker Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, Minnesota'due south beginning Somali-American legislator, become the first Muslim women elected to Congress in the midterm elections this calendar month. (Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., became, in 2006, the start Muslim to be elected to the lawmaking body.)

And at least 145 American Muslims, virtually all of them Democrats, ran for state or national public office this twelvemonth, co-ordinate to Jetpac, a Boston-based organization that works to increment American Muslim pedagogy and civic date.

Of these, 110 were get-go-time candidates who represent an unprecedented rise for a various Muslim customs that is typically underrepresented in American politics.

"For almost two years people accept been witnessing the direction our land is going in" and they don't like it, said Abdullah Hammoud, who is serving his start term in the Michigan House of Representatives. "I don't call back Donald Trump is something new. He's just unveiled what was behind the drapery. They feel empowered to speak vitriol."

 Away from politics, Moses the Comic – real name Musa Sulaiman, 33, from Philadelphia – has embarked on a "Super Muslim Comedy Bout" to break downward negative barriers and narratives surrounding Muslims in the The states.

"It's near going into public places and subverting the stereotypes by making people express mirth," he said. "Art and entertainment tin can combat ideologies of racism and bigotry. Not all black men only become Muslim in prison, something we are constantly told," he said.

And Mona Haydar, 30, from Michigan, which has the largest Muslim population in the Us, is a poet-turned-rapper who has written a song chosen "Hijabi (Wrap My Hijab)."

The video has been watched v million times on YouTube. Haydar told USA TODAY in Detroit last month that the song was about "normalizing Muslim-American women."

Normalizing Islam is something Muhammad, of the museum, also strives for.

When United states TODAY visited with him in early September he kept getting interrupted every few minutes by a group of schoolhouse kids, ranging in age from 6 to xvi, loudly knocking on the museum'southward front entrance. Because there was no ane else in the building, Muhammad had locked the front entrance to conduct his tour, but these kids were hither to collect snacks as office of an after schoolhouse program the museum runs for neighborhood children.

Muhammad said that while a few of the kids from time to time might express interest in the museum and its exhibits, which he was grateful for because there was "nobody else, literally nobody else" to share this history with them, they by and large came for the snacks.

Reporting for this story was made possible by the Washington-based East-West Eye, a nonprofit system that promotes better relations among the The states, Asia, and the Pacific.

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Source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/11/16/islam-america-muslims-religion-president-trump-american/1736878002/

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