SMOKERS' CORNER: AMERICAN MUSLIMS AND THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY.

While watching TV footage of the recent 'race riots' in the US, I actually recognised one of the many African-American protesters being arrested. The footage was from a protest in Washington DC and the person I recognised was one Ahmad M. Farooq. I had met him in the summer of 2018 in DC when he approached me after a talk I had delivered at the International Forum for Democratic Studies, where I was stationed as a Research Fellow.

After the talk, Ahmad invited me for coffee at his home. All I knew about him was that he lived in Virginia and was a retired college professor. A week later, while visiting the area for something entirely different, I decided to visit Ahmad. We met at a bar just behind his office and had lunch there. Ahmad told me he had read my first book.

But more interesting was what he told me next. According to him, his ancestors were some of the first Muslims to come to the US, over 500 years ago! This wasn't some fancy talk. In her 1998 book, Servants of Allah, American historian Sylviane A. Diouf writes that among the first batches of African slaves brought to the US by Europeans in the early 17th century, were many Muslims. But according to historian Sam Haselby, a former faculty member of the American University of Beirut, there was, in fact, Muslim presence in the US even before European Puritans set up their first colony in the region in 1607.

In an essay for the May, 2019 issue of Aeon, Haselby writes that Muslims regularly arrived in the Americas with Spanish expeditions in the 15th and 16th centuries, sometimes as slaves and sometimes even as advisers. A majority of them were from Granada, a Muslim stronghold in Europe, before it was overthrown by the Spanish in the 15th century.

According to Diouf, the majority of African slaves brought to the US, especially during the cotton boom in the 18th and 19th centuries, followed traditional African religions and many were also Muslim. Both Diouf and Henselby write that a large number of them converted (or were converted) to Christianity, and those who didn't, managed to remain Muslim, but in a highly clandestine manner. According to the Encyclopaedia of American Religious History, there were no mosques in the US till 1921.

The history of South Asian Muslims in the United States is shorter than that of African Muslims, but the community has been transformed with greater migrations and the rise of multiculturalism

Ahmad told me that his ancestors belonged to what is present...

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