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Hugh Fitzgerald: A Tale of Two Museums (Part Two)

Apr 8, 2019 10:00 am By Hugh Fitzgerald

The second museum discussed in this article is in Jackson, Mississippi. This grandly-titled and tiny “International Museum of Muslim Cultures” is less than twenty years old.

“It was a struggle for a long time to even get American Muslims behind our idea,” said Emad Al-Turk, referring to the International Museum of Muslim Cultures in Jackson, Mississippi, an institution he co-founded about six months before the 9/11 attacks.

The International Museum of Muslim Cultures is perhaps less well known than America’s Islamic Heritage Museum, partly because it is located far from any major city in a predominantly rural state. And its focus is on educating the public about Islamic history and culture and Muslim contributions to world civilization, not just America’s.

“At the time, people were really scared about what was happening and how the relationship between American Muslims and non-Muslims was changing,” said Al-Turk.

In Al- America, his 2008 book about America’s Arab and Islamic roots, the writer and journalist Jonathan Curiel notes that since the 9/11 terrorist attacks it has been difficult for some Americans to “see Arab and Muslim culture as anything other than terrorism and fundamentalism … ‘Arab’ and ‘Muslim’ have become code words of alarm.”

“There has also been a tendency, Curiel believes, to reject any historical claims Arab and Muslim culture might have on American culture — to view it as “their” culture, not “ours.”

And yet:

Did you know there are two towns in the United States called Mohammad? There’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 once stood at the base of the fallen World Trade Center towers in New York City mimicked Islamic geometric tradition. Blues music may be 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.S. from Muslim areas on that continent.

This paragraph makes far too much of these toponyms. American settlers often chose names out of an atlas, a gazetteer, a history book. They would sometimes choose something exotic, just for that reason. There are towns in Indiana called Chile, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, Angola and Zulu. They were not founded by anybody from those nations, nor were there any Zulus in Indiana. There are at least twenty Moscows in the United States, none of them founded by Russians, or by people connected to, or wishing to honor, Russia. There are a Mars and a Moon in Pennsylvania, but no extraterrestrials were involved in their naming. That there are two towns called “Mohammed” and that there has been a post office in Mecca, Indiana since 1888, tells us nothing about the presence of Muslims, or interest in, or respect for, Islam. They only tell us that some people found “Mohammed” and  “Mecca” suitably unusual as placenames, for those who had had their fill of Smithtons and Brownsvilles.

Scholars of the Middle East say that there are many possible explanations for an apparent lack of interest in the USA’s Islamic heritage, not least that many Americans simply don’t know it exists.

The best (and most obvious) explanation for this “lack of interest” is that there is hardly anything to this claim of America’s “Islamic heritage.” There is no evidence, it has to be repeated, that any Muslims accompanied Columbus. No evidence exists for the claim that between one-third and one-fourth of the slaves in America were Muslims. Sylviane Diouf has made an even more preposterous and equally unsubstantiated claim. Between 2.5 and 3 million Muslims, she estimates, were sold into slavery in the Americas; they were “probably more numerous in the Americas than any other group among the arriving Africans.” Where does this come from? No data is supplied, no source is cited. Others have repeated, but no one else has corroborated, her amazing claim. She simply makes it up, and, protects herself by use of the word “probably” (“probably more numerous”), and hopes her readers will accept it. No doubt some will. When it comes to making large claims for Islam’s presence in America, historical rectitude goes by the board.

“A lot of people might assume Muslim immigration started in 1965 when the U.S. had a period of immigration reform, others will date it back to the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, yet others to the 9/11 attacks, but usually no one looks farther 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.

It is Hussein Rashid who shows casual contempt for American non-Muslims, to whom he ascribes such ignorance. It is he who is making an assumption, that Americans think Muslim immigration started in 1965, or in 1979, or even in 9/11. Why does he think this? Where is the data to support this claim of such ignorance? Was there a poll in which  Americans were asked when they thought Muslims arrived in America? Nothing of the sort. Hussein Rashid wants us to take on faith his claim about our own surpassing ignorance. Here’s my own counter-claim: it is he, Hussein Rashid, who is ignorant about what Americans know about the Muslim presence in this country.

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Filed Under: Featured, Hugh Fitzgerald, War is deceit Tagged With: International Museum of Muslim Cultures


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Comments

  1. Beneath the Veil of Consciousness says

    Apr 8, 2019 at 10:44 am

    Can’t wait to see their photo exhibit featuring images of brutalized women, decapitated bodies, and deformed children due to generations of Islamic inbreeding

  2. perceptor1 says

    Apr 8, 2019 at 11:32 am

    A highly knowledgeable former sheikh, Sam Solomon revealed that “Taqiyya permeates almost all the activities and dealings of Muslims with non-Muslim societies…”

    This museum and its curator Emad Al-Turk are perfect examples of Islamic deceptiveness and pettifoggery.

    This great expense is probably a complete waste of money, since most people will be wise enough to see through the patronizing falsehoods and dismiss most of the museum as disinformative propaganda and moreover this museum will actually harm relations with the community by making Muslims look dishonest. If the shoe fits, wear it, Mr. al Turk. Your propaganda exercise will convince no one.

    Americans are starting to realize that Muslim DECEIVE us through the use of SEVERAL TECHNIQUES …

    There are SIX DIFFERENT WAYS of deception that are permissible in Islam:

    1•Taqiyya (Shia) or Muda’rat (Sunni): tactical deceit for the purposes of spreading Islam.
    2•Kitman: deceit by omission.
    3•Tawriya: deceit by deliberate ambiguity.
    4•Taysir: deceit through facilitation (not observing all the tenets of Sharia by ‘making things easier’).
    5•Darura: deceit through necessity (to engage in something “Haram” or forbidden such as drinking alcohol to exploit non-Muslims).
    6•Muruna: ‘flexibility’ or temporary suspension of Sharia to make Muslim migrants appear ‘moderate’ and blend in until Muslims are numerically strong enough to enforce Sharia.

    Muslims imitate Allah ‘THE BEST OF DECEIVERS’.
    Allahu khayru l-makireena – Koran. 3:54; cf. 8:30

    • gravenimage says

      Apr 8, 2019 at 9:22 pm

      +1

    • Ned Kelly says

      Apr 9, 2019 at 9:20 pm

      I found the same thing happening in NZ, when I visited a tiny museum, in a rural town. The Maori propoganda against the white settlers was shocking. NOT what I was taught at school 60 yrs ago. Our whole history has been changed by radicals. I walked out in anger + said so on my feedback online.

  3. Wellington says

    Apr 8, 2019 at 11:47 am

    If only the entire Muslim presence in America was what existed before 1965. Hell, I’d settle for the extent that existed before 9/11.

    The only real good that can come from Muslims in America is the exposure America provides to freedom, including freedom of thought, so that many Muslims do the only sensible thing and leave Islam altogether. I feel infinitely more comfortable with ex-Muslims in America than with Muslims in the USA, a nation the Islamic mind-set would have prevented from being founded in the first place.

    • gravenimage says

      Apr 8, 2019 at 9:22 pm

      So true.

  4. jarmanray says

    Apr 8, 2019 at 12:56 pm

    Regarding cities and towns named after places of antiquity, take Smyrna, Georgia. I bet you can’t find ten people in the city who even know from where the name was derived nor can it be found on a modern map of Turkey as Smyrna in now Izmir, Turkey. How many people in Philadelphia know where the original was, for like many cities in America, the person who named the place certainly did not originate from Jordan. For someone to infer that there were people of muslim heritage that named a place Muhammad because of a name for a city or location is worse than fantasy.

  5. gravenimage says

    Apr 8, 2019 at 9:16 pm

    Hugh Fitzgerald: A Tale of Two Museums (Part Two)
    ………………

    Yes–this citing of town names is especially absurd. Towns were often named quickly as they expanded along railroad lines in the US–sometimes they were named by the railroads themselves. There were often towns named for all sorts of exotic cities–this had nothing to do with Islam at all.

    Likewise, in San Francisco there is a “Persia” street–flanked by “France” and “Russia” streets. Obviously Persia–Iran–being majority-Muslim had nothing to do with the naming of this street.

    Even more absurd, “Islamorado” in Florida is often cited as being named for Islam–but it is not. It is “Isla Morado”, or “Purple Island” in Spanish.

  6. Mark Spahn (West Seneca, NY) says

    Apr 8, 2019 at 10:39 pm

    “Even the pointed arches that once stood at the base of the fallen World Trade Center towers in New York City mimicked Islamic geometric tradition.”
    Yeah, they’re all over the country:
    https://img.huffingtonpost.com/asset/589de19c250000b54d0b836b.jpeg?cache=jKwGjVjall&ops=1910_1000

    • gravenimage says

      Apr 9, 2019 at 9:48 pm

      Ha ha

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