Yet if the American Jewish and Christian experiences are well documented in countless journals, research institutes, museum collections, in business, and in popular culture and entertainment, the American Muslim experience mostly appears to sit outside the broader narrative of stories Americans tell themselves about their history, according to religious scholars such as Lior Sternfeld, who specializes in Jewish Studies.
“Muslim-Americans were a much smaller and more marginalized community, but it’s changing,” said Sternfeld, who teaches at Penn State University.
Muhammad, of America’s Islamic Heritage Museum, wants to do something about this.
He spends his spare time traveling around the USA searching for Islam’s forgotten roots in a country 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 two-hundred-year-old census records and wills and testaments from virtually every U.S. region that show vestiges of Islamic immigration.
We still need to know the number, and the dates (how many are from the 1800s?), of these gravestones “with Islamic names written on them,” that Amir Muhammad claims to have located. Did he find 500, or 50, or 5, such headstones in all of his searches across the country? And how many — 200, or 20, or 2 — that dated from the 1800s? We also need to have photographs of these gravestones posted online, clearly showing what Amir Muhammad claims to be Arabic script. It is possible that what he takes to be such script are merely decorative elements, that could be misunderstood by non-Arabic speakers. And even in some cases where Arabic script on a gravestone can be identified as such, was the dead person a Muslim or, quite possibly, a Christian Arab? For there were hardly any Muslim Arabs who arrived in the 1800s, while Christian Arabs began coming in noticeable numbers the 1880s, fleeing Muslim persecution and their dhimmi status. Christian Arab immigrants continued to outnumber Muslim Arab immigrants until the late 1960s. So Arabic writing, where found on gravestones, does not necessarily implicate Islam.
He also has the robe of the first U.S. Muslim judge, the uniform of the first Muslim U.S. 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.
From this description, Amir Muhammad’s collection appears be an unsystematic amateurish olla-podrida, consisting of this and that: here the first U.S.Muslim judge’s robes, over there a Muslim army chaplain’s uniform, and apparently lots of photos of Muslim “newsmakers” and “sports stars.” One photograph is of Sam Khalifa, the only Muslim player in Major League Baseball. But I suspect there is no mention of Sam Khalifa’s father Rashad, a much more important figure in the history of Muslims in America. Rashad Khalifa worked at the mosque in Tucson, and claimed that he was a messenger of God but not a prophet, and that the archangel Gabriel “most assertively” told him that chapter 36, verse 3, of the Quran, “specifically” referred to him. Khalifa also claimed that the Quran contains a mathematical structure based on the number 19. Starting in 1968, Khalifa used computers to analyze the frequency of letters and words in the Quran, with his first book on the topic appearing in1973. But while he was clearly bizarre, it was not his bizarreries, but his moderate interpretation of Islam that led to his being stabbed to death in1990, at the mosque, by Muslim fundamentalists connected to Al-Qaeda. He was thus the first American citizen to be murdered by Al-Qaeda. The story of Rashad Khalifa — his life, works, and death — would make for a fascinating exhibit.
In all, his [Amir Muhammad’s] collection consists of a few thousand examples of American Islamia.
“Not even American Muslims always know this stuff exists,” he said.
Hani Bawardi, a professor at the Center for Arab American Studies at the University of Michigan in Dearborn, outside Detroit, said the story of Islam in America “awaits excavation.” He said no good scholarship exists on the subject, partly because “no one traced sufficiently the archival evidence on enslaved Muslims. Every time we think we know the location of the oldest mosque an older one is discovered,” he said.”I can’t even point you to a good study there. But Muslims were represented in very remote areas.”
Hari Bawardi wishes us to believe that because there is scant evidence for Islam’s presence in America before the 20th century, that this must mean that the real “story” still “awaits excavation.” But Muslims have been engaged in a full-court press, trying to push back the dates of the Muslim presence in America, and to find evidence of the “Islamic influence” in American life. The alternative and obvious conclusion is that there is not much of a story to excavate. As for the slim archival evidence “on enslaved Muslims,” we have seen a mini-industry grow up in the last two decades of “scholars” making wild claims about the the number of Muslims among the slaves, from those who claim that between one-third and one-fourth of slaves were Muslims — a figure plucked from the air — to “Dr.” Mroueh, who asserts, without any evidence, that Muslims formed the largest group of slaves in the Americas.
Niemoller says
This kind of garbage history reminds me of “pyramidology” in the Balkans and the alleged ancient Celtic carvings in North America.
William A Carr says
They are using the standard absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, know to archaelogists and scientists. However the history of the USA is well know having been written in the ‘age of enlightenment
by learned people. Trying to establish the presence of Muslims in USA is like planting seeds in infertile soil,
or in other words making stuff up like Von Daniken’s ancient astronauts
Niemoller says
The sad, mentally deranged desire Islamists have to be victims first is what they use to trick themselves into believing as a pretext to wage mass murdering jihad against non-muslims. They’ve done it for 1400 years. It’s the formula of all intolerant self-serving megalomaniac bigots throughout history.
mortimer says
Amir Muhammad’s collection was apparently put together in order to elude disinterested principles of rigorous scholarship and with an agenda of pettifogging…of ‘bullshitting’ honest people who are looking for answers.
Professor Harold Frankfurt wrote of Amir Mohammed’s methodology in his treatise ‘On Bullshit’:
“However studiously and conscientiously the bullshitter proceeds, it remains true that he is also trying to get away with something. There is surely in his work, as in the work of the slovenly craftsman, some kind of laxity which resists or eludes the demands of a disinterested and austere discipline. The pertinent mode of laxity cannot be equated, evidently, with simple carelessness or inattention to detail.”
Bullshitting, as Frankfurt notes, is not exactly lying, and bullshit remains bullshit whether it’s true or false. The difference lies in the bullshitter’s complete disregard for whether what he’s saying corresponds to facts in the physical world: he “does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.”
Amir Mohammed’s methodology is based on three authorized Islamic techniques of deception: taqiyya, kitman and tawriyya.
Taqiyya is deliberately hiding the truth or outright lying. Kitman is deceit by omission. Tawriya is deceit by deliberate ambiguity.
In scholarship, using such PT Barnum methodologies could be career-ending.
b.a. freeman says
In scholarship, using such PT Barnum methodologies could be career-ending.
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in STEM-type fields, yes; in “women’s studies,” “black studies,” “islamic studies,” and the like, however, they are the epitome of “good scholarship.”
+1
gravenimage says
Hugh Fitzgerald: A Tale of Two Museums (Part Six)
……………..
Sounds like a whole lot of nothing…