My own sense, and that of few dozen other Americans with whom I have checked about when Muslims began arriving in numbers, though only anecdotal evidence, may be of interest. The consensus is that from the late 1800s to the beginning of World War I (when immigration from Ottoman lands nearly ended for the duration of that war), thousands of Muslims arrived, mainly from Turkey, Lebanon, and Syria. Many more Christians — in the tens of thousands — came from the same places, fleeing Muslim mistreatment. Muslim immigration did indeed then decrease almost to nothing. First, it decreased because of the Immigration Act of 1917, which barred “polygamists” and insisted on immigrants passing a literacy test. Second, Muslim immigration was essentially ended by the Immigration Act of 1924. That Act limited the number of immigrants allowed entry into the United States through a national origins quota. The quota limited the number of immigration visas to each national group to two percent of the total number of people of each nationality in the United States as of the 1890 national census. And even more important, the 1924 Act excluded immigrants from Asia. That meant immigrants from the Muslim Middle East were barred. How many immigrants from Egypt — 2% of those of Egyptian origin who were in the U.S. in 1890 — were admitted? There were certainly nowhere near 50,000 people from Egypt in the U.S. in 1890, so we can estimate that, at the very most, there were a few hundred people from Egypt who would have been allowed in annually. That quota would have been used up mainly by Coptic Christians, who were better educated than Egyptian Muslims, and given their mistreatment, much more motivated to emigrate. From the 1920s to the early 1950s, despite the 1924 Act, about 1,000 Arabs arrived in the U.S., annually, most of them Christians from Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt.
Hussein Rashid seems to think Americans are “ignorant’ to think that serious Muslim immigration to this country began only in 1965. But they were, in fact, correct. It was only in that year that the new immigration act was passed that removed the previous total ban on immigration from Asia.
Another possible recent reason for the dearth of interest in Islam in America: For the past two years, the Trump administration has made Islam a dirty word.
Not only has the president made opposition to immigration, particularly immigration from some Muslim-majority countries, a central plank of his first term in office. Trump himself has frequently negatively associated Islam and the Middle East more generally with violence and cultural differences claimed to be anathema to American life and identity.
It has to be repeated: the so-called “Muslim ban” by Trump applied to seven countries, two of which were non-Muslim (North Korea, Venezuela). Furthermore, 95% of the world’s total Muslim population remained unaffected by the ban. It applied only to countries that were unable or unwilling to supply information about their citizens to the American government for further vetting. It was a rational decision, not “bigotry,” based on considerations of national security.
“Islam hates us,” Trump said on the campaign trail in 2016.
Qur’an 2:191-193, 3:151, 4:89, 8:12, 8;60, 9:5, 9:29, 47:4, 98:6. ‘Nuff said?
“Criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in,” he tweeted on Oct. 22 after ordering the military to be on alert for a caravan of migrants from Central America attempting to enter the U.S. despite efforts to have them stopped at the border.
“For Trump, there appears to be a whole lot of people who are not fully American. Muslims aren’t. Mexican-American communities aren’t. Women. Black people,” said Rashid.
Hysterical hyperbole from Hussein Rashid. Where has Trump said any of those groups are “not fully American”? Please provide a single remark that he has made along those lines.
But experts on Islam say there is a problem with Trump’s Muslim narrative: Muslims have been coming to America since at least the 17th century, with anywhere from a third to a quarter of the enslaved Africans brought to the U.S. against their will likely Muslims.
“Experts on Islam say.” Which experts? Where has their “research” been peer-reviewed and published? Give us their names, their qualifications, and the papers they have written on the subject so we may read and judge them for ourselves. Have they somehow been able to collect data on the religious beliefs of slaves that has escaped everyone else? The Africans that European slavers bought on the coast of West Africa were mostly from areas where Islam had not yet fully penetrated. That doesn’t mean that no Muslims were sold as slaves in the Atlantic slave trade, just that their numbers must have been small. The slave traders themselves did not record Muslim slaves as being in their cargo. Furthermore, if between 1/3 an 1/4 of all the slaves had been Muslims, why did the slave-owners themselves never comment on the presence of these Muslims, beyond the same half-dozen names always trotted out? Why didn’t the non-Muslim fellow slaves leave records, either oral (by telling an overseer or a slaveowner) or written (for those who had learned to write), of these “Muslim” slaves among their fellows? I know of only one such report, about Bilal Muhammad and the claim that he served 80 Muslims as imam, on a plantation on Sapelo Island, Georgia. It is only in recent decades that extravagant claims — always without sources — about there being great numbers of Muslims among the slaves, have been made. And when Rashid claims that “from a third to a quarter” “of slaves were “likely” Muslims, what are we to make of that word “likely”? Doesn’t that word allow Rashid to make fantastical claims about the percentages of Muslim slaves and, if skeptics ask for evidence, he can defend himself by noting that “I only said it was ‘likely’”?
mortimer says
Americans are very sensitive to being conned and resentful when someone cons them as Hussein Rashid is doing. His propaganda exercise will backfire on him. Americans are simply likely to explode if they see it with one or two well chosen expletives.
I predict that almost no American visitors will come to this propaganda booth. Disneyland is just as fanciful as what Hussein Rashid is doing, but at least Disneyland is fun.
Michael Laudahn says
Not only M, also J: ‘Historians have suggested that Roosevelt desired to deflect attention and criticism from American policy that severely limited the quota of Jewish refugees admitted to the United States.’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89vian_Conference But knowing you, this one certainly won’t pass – where having propaganda here, coming in a cloak of science .)
Alarmed Pig Farmer says
Excellent essay, as usual. It’s informative to see the history of Moslem immigration into America. I recall that Obama publicly stated that most West Africans brought into the country as slaves were Moslem. But isn’t it true that Moslems were actively involved as slave traders at the source, selling pagan Africans into the boats?
gravenimage says
Yes–and Muslims enslaved other Muslims infrequently. There were probably a handful of Muslims who ended up here as slaves, but this was fairly rare. This statement from Obama is clearly quite false.
gravenimage says
Hugh Fitzgerald: A Tale of Two Museums (Part Three)
…………………..
Yes–the idea that America has been overrun with Muslims for centuries now is just hogwash. There were very few Muslims here prior to the influx of the last few decades.
dfhdnjdn says
It would be extremely helpful if, when doing a series, you number daily articles as 1/4 – 2/4 – 3/4 – 4/4 etc rather than just 1 – 2 – 3.
Then we know where the beginning and end are.
Thank you
Frank says
Learn about the trans-Atlantic vs. the 5x greater trans-Saharan slave trades in 10 minutes at I.Q. al-Rassooli’s Koran blogspot, Chapter-12.
rightrightright says
‘And when Rashid claims that “from a third to a quarter” “of slaves were “likely” Muslims …’
Moslems covering their backsides, as they were the most monstrous slavers we know about. Slavery is doctrinal as well as profitable for Moslems but they still want to play the victim.