“What you don’t know about America’s Islamic heritage” is what USA Today purports to tell us in a feature story published some time ago that remains relevant as one example of a growing chorus.
One of the greatest stories rarely told about the long history of Muslim immigration to the United States stretching back hundreds of years is actually being told most days by Amir Muhammad, the founder and chief curator of America’s Islamic Heritage Museum, a tiny institution with a do-it-yourself collector’s vibe and a modest entrance fee that sits in an out of the way corner of southeast Washington, D.C.
But, in an age 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 about 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 recent interview.
As Muhammad spoke in one of the museum’s small airless hallways, the lights kept flickering. Nearby, a smoke alarm chirped in need of batteries. Dusty glass displays featured Korans from around the world. Outside, the run-down front entrance was framed by a sign in a blue font: America’s Islamic Heritage Museum. Orangey-yellow streaks of rust ran down the face of it.
“Once, a French documentary crew stopped by,” he added. “It’s like that.”
Small airless hallways, flickering lights, a smoke alarm that needs batteries, “dusty glass displays” of “Korans from around the world.” A sign outside this tiny place, rust-streaked in orangey-yellow. A general air of inattention and decay. Once a French film crew stopped by. Sounds as if they didn’t do any filming. Still, for Amir Muhammad, it’s a living: he’s the founder, and the sole employee, who sets his own salary, solicits donations, and can only be fired by himself.
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 current location on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, the museum, according to its website, has introduced and entertained about 18,000 people with artifacts, documents and photographs that explore and reveal the contributions and legacies of American Muslims. That’s about 2,600 visitors per year, a figure far from the more than 30 million visits made last year to the 19 museums, galleries and National Zoological Park that comprise the Smithsonian Institution four miles away.
If this Islamic Heritage Museum has 2,600 visitors each year, that’s about 8 people a day. Is this “museum” which has exactly one employee, who just happens to also have been the provider of its unprepossessing exhibits (what do Qur’ans from different lands have to do with America’s Islamic heritage?), and also the collector and keeper of the entrance fees to the museum, as well as the beneficiary of any grants this “non-profit” enterprise might receive, really to be taken seriously?
“This area’s kind of the hood of the hood,” said Muhammad, using slang to describe an economically deprived area, and also to justify why some Americans may deliberately choose to give his museum a wide berth.
Could it be that this down-at-heels vest-pocket museum is simply not very impressive? Could it be that the story of America’s “Islamic Heritage” on display is neither broad nor deep, and that much of the museum’s offerings consist of thousands of photographs of sports and movie stars, and posters with potted biographies of the same handful of Muslim slaves who are unfailingly trotted out by propagandists eager to show that “Islam has always been part of America’s story” — Omar ibn Said, Ibrahim abd al-Rahman, Ayyub bin Sulayman, Bilal Muhammad, and Yarrow Mamout?
Then there are the claims made by Amir Muhammad, in his museum’s exhibits, for the presence of Islam in America even before the arrival of Muslim slaves. These claims, made about Muslims accompanying Columbus on his voyages, do not stand up to inspection, as we shall see. Similarly, there are claims about the “respect” the Founding Fathers supposedly felt for Islam. Thomas Jefferson bought a Qur’an, but it was not out of any putative respect for Islam. Jefferson was simply a man of wide-ranging learning. We have, in fact, evidence that Jefferson was not fond of Islam. He gave testimony to Congress about what the Tripolitanian emissary, with whom he, and John Adams, had been negotiating in London, told him was the reason for the attacks by North African corsairs — the “Barbary pirates” — on American ships. Here is what Jefferson reported as the envoy’s answer:
He said that the attacks by the North Africans were “founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise.”
Amir Muhammad mentions his continuing to find more evidence for early American mosques. but what that evidence is remains unknown, and to date neither Amir Muhammad, nor anyone else, has yet shown that any mosque was built in this country prior to that one-room structure put up in Ross, North Dakota, in 1929.
Buraq says
Time for someone open a ‘Future Muslim Museum’ that displays maps of Islamic conquest since the 7th Century, suicide vests, FGM, Jew-hatred, and a whole lot more. Roll up, roll up, the past is the future and the future’s the past!
gravenimage says
+1
Diane Harvey says
“Since moving, in 2011, to its current location on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue, the museum . . .”
“Martin Luther King stood for nonviolence,” says comedian Chris Rock in his live 1996 HBO special Bring the Pain. “Now what’s Martin Luther King? A street. And I don’t give a f**k where you are in America, if you on Martin Luther King Boulevard, there’s some violence going down.”
Seems an appropriate street location for Islam.
m. says
surely there is a record of the brave rop-people who fought at the alamo in Texas? taqiyya-bama said they have always been in the “warp & woof” of America.
K WAGNER says
It needs to be in an outhouse/latrine along with Obama’s library…!!!!
Billy Chickens says
Last spring I stopped by Williamsburg’s Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum filled with beautiful American folk art of the past. But the FIRST piece of art we saw was a BUST OF A MUSLIM, ELIJAH MUHAMMAD, placed in front of the first exhibit as one enters. The bust is not folk art of the past, but current folk art signifying a bow to political correctness and Islam.
http://emuseum.history.org/view/objects/asitem/classification@39/4/title-asc;jsessionid=129BE6132F0BA62AE61F112F1E8F69D9?t:state:flow=895646c8-de88-4f81-95de-bc4ce3d94daf
antonia says
That’s totally nuts, Billy. American Leftards are as stupid as chickens.
Billy Chickens says
Chickens?
antonia says
Americans learned all they needed to know when Tripoli’s Barbary JIHAD-Pirates started ENSLAVING AMERICAN SAILORS and then seizing American ships.
Islam’s goal is to rob Americans and enslave them. That’s the real context that this museum will not tell.
gravenimage says
True.
William A Carr says
Museum about US Muslims, who else? Clear a museum of taqqyah
William A Carr says
Sorry left out ‘run by a Muslim’ after Museum about US Muselims,
Jimmie Green says
The Moslems were not enslaving American ships, they enslaved English ships headed to the continent called America, which the Mediterranean was a buffer zone for the Aboriginal American Empire of Mo’o. The Moorish philosophers were keepers of the secrets about America. Being that we had traded goods with them since BC. They were not called Africans, but Barbary tribes. They attacked the English, cause they didn’t want to pay tribute. It’s more complicated than that, not enough room to tell about the malanated kingdoms & why we did what we did. But since you don’t know the whole truth, it’s time for the real world history of the Aboriginal people!
Wellington says
Fact and fiction to this day blend as easily for Muslims as medicine and magic did in antiquity.
Geoffrey de Brito says
For those few unaware, it’s known as “historical revisionism”. In this case Muslim propaganda designed to cover up ‘soft’ jihad and hijrah, “migratory jihad”. Islamic infiltration of American college and university departments, in which the meme that Islam is a “Religion of Peace” is relentlessly promoted is an example of soft jihad.
gravenimage says
Spot on.
roberta says
The indigenous Americans were muslim, and the Pilgrims were crusaders.
Give it time…….
gravenimage says
Actually, there *are* Muslims who claim that Native Americans were Muslim, and that there are ruins of Mosques in America built by Indians. It is all bs, of course.
Carolyne says
Well, the Mormons claim that the Garden of Eden was in Missouri and there’s no evidence of that either.
windrush48 says
Roberta …. remember what P.T. Barnum said?
gravenimage says
Hugh Fitzgerald: A Tale of Two Museums (Part One)
American Muslims haven’t been great at explaining our side
…………………………
Unfortunately, “their side” involves the oppression and murder of Americans. I think Muslims have “explained” this all too well by their actions in the past twenty years…
Here is the American Islamic Heritage Museum’s sad website:
http://www.aihmuseum.org/
windrush48 says
“American Muslims haven’t been great at explaining our side, at engaging with folks — ”
Likely because any “good muslim” would not associate with a filthy kafir.
Jefferson may have had a copy of the koran …. so do I ….. I still understand (or maybe because I have read it) that the only way for islam and the rest of the world to “co-exist” is for all muslims to be removed from the rest of the world.
“He who refuses to learn from history if bound to repeat it”
owensgate says
All I want to know about islam is how to destroy it.