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.