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The history of the modern American nation, based on a Protestant narrative that denies other groups any recognition of their role in the creation of the modern United States, is often presented by fusing all of American history as a war between Protestants, Catholics, and then white Americans and Indians, whom the article below tells us were slave masters on sugar plantations, and that they too enslaved Africans like and in coordination with whites. The most serious aspect of all this, however, is that these slaves were predominantly Muslims, deprived of their freedom, the freedom to practice their rites, and in some cases by force and deprived of any affiliation to Islam or Arabism. They were educated, doctors and princes in their home countries.

The following article deals with the story of this conversion and deletion, through three tales of three prominent Muslim figures, whose lives were upended overnight and turned under duress into things they did not at the height of European enslavement.

Article Text

The first words to cross between Europeans and Americans (as biased and puzzling as it may seem) came from Islam's sacred language. Christopher Columbus hoped to sail to Asia, preparing to communicate with its majestic entourage by turning to one of the greatest languages of Eurasian trade. So when Columbus's interpreter, who was an Andalusian Sephard, addressed Taino in the Caribbean, he did so using Arabic. Not only is the language of Islam, but the religion itself probably arrived in America in 1492 CE, 20 years before Martin Luther installed his thesis on the door of the Reformation, beginning the Protestant Reformation.

Christopher Columbus (social media)

The Moors, African and Arab Muslims, conquered most of the Iberian Peninsula in 711 CE, establishing an Islamic culture that lasted nearly eight centuries. At the beginning of 1492 AD, the Spanish kings Ferdinand and Isabella concluded the Reconquista with the defeat of the last Muslim kingdom, the Kingdom of Granada. By the end of that century, the Inquisition, which began a century earlier, had forced some 300,00 to 800,00 Muslims (and at least 70,000 Jews) to convert to Christianity. Spanish Catholics usually suspected those Moriscos or converts of Islam (or Judaism) secretly, and the Inquisition prosecuted them. Some of them had almost certainly sailed in Columbus' crew, carrying Islam in their minds and hearts.

Eight centuries of Muslim rule left Spain with a solid cultural legacy, illustrated in obvious and sometimes surprising ways during the Spanish conquest of America. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, historian of Hernán Cortez's conquest of Central America, admired the costumes of American dancers:

"They were beautiful in their own style, and they looked like Mauryan women."

Spaniards used the word mezquita (mosque) to refer to Native American religious sites. Traveling through the Anahuac (what is now Texas and Mexico), Cortez reported seeing more than 400 mosques.

Islam served as a kind of outline or algorithm for the Spaniards in the "New World". By meeting people and things that were very new to them, the Spaniards turned to Islam to try to understand what they were seeing, what was happening. The name "California" may even have some Arabic origin. In 1535, the Spaniards coined the name with a quote from The Deeds of the Spaniards (1510), a romantic novel filled with Conquistadoris (discoverers). The novel follows a rich island – California – ruled by the Amazons and their queen Calavia. The novel was published in Seville, a city that spent four centuries as part of the Umayyad Caliphate (Khalifa, Calavia, California).

The discoverers were offering Native Americans the opportunity to convert to Christianity and submit to Spanish rule, otherwise they would have to take responsibility for all the "deaths and losses" caused.

Throughout the Western Hemisphere, wherever the new lands they set foot on or the natives they encountered, the discoverers recited the "condition", a flowery judicial declaration. In essence, it was a proclamation of a new phase of society: offering Native Americans the opportunity to convert to Christianity and submit to Spanish rule, otherwise they would have to take responsibility for all the "deaths and losses" caused. The official and public declaration of the intention of conquest, including an offer to non-believers to surrender and become believers, is the first official condition of jihad in Islam. After centuries of wars with Muslims, the Spanish adopted the practice, Christianized it, called it "requiermento," and introduced it to America. The Christians of Iberia may have thought that Islam was a sin, or a demonization, but they also knew it well. If they thought it was weird, it must have been a very familiar kind of weirdness.

By 1503 CE, we know that the Muslims themselves, from West Africa, had set foot in the New World. That year, the royal governor of Central America wrote to Isabella asking her to reduce the numbers imported from them. They were, he noted, "a scandal for the Indians." They were, as he put it, often "fleeing from their owners." On New Year's morning in 1522, the first slave uprising broke out in the New World, when 20 Mesoamerican slaves revolted on sugar plantations and began killing Spaniards. The revolutionaries, as the Governor had pointed out, were mostly Wolofians, the Senegalese Gambian people, many of whom had converted to Islam since the eleventh century. Muslims were more likely to be literate: an ability rarely seen as a preference by farm owners. In the five decades following the Mesoamerican slave revolt, Spain issued five decrees banning the importation of Muslim slaves.

Muslims set foot in America more than a century before the Virginia Company founded the Jamestown colony in 1607. More than a century before the Puritans founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630. Muslims in America lived not only before Protestants, but before Protestantism itself existed. After Catholicism, Islam was the second most widespread monotheistic religion on both continents.

Native Americans (social media)

The widespread misconception, even among educated people, that Islam and Muslims are new additions to America tells us important things about how American history is written. Specifically, it shows how historians have justified and generalized the emergence of the modern nation-state. One way to celebrate the United States of America was to limit the diversity and scope of cosmopolitanism, or diversity and coexistence among individuals, during the first 300 years of European existence.

The writing of American history was dominated by puritan institutions. It may not be true, as historian (and southerner) Yu has complained. Me. Phillips more than a hundred years ago, to say that Boston wrote the history of the United States of America, and that it wrote it so much wrong. But in terms of the history of religions in America, the consequences of the dominance of the leading Puritan institutions in Boston (Harvard University) and New Haven (Yale University) have been dire. This "Puritan influence" on the vision and understanding of religions in early America (and the origins of the United States) leads to a de facto distortion: as if we were handing over the political history of twentieth-century Europe to the Trotskyists.

Let us think of history as the depth and diffusion of human experience, just as it happened. History makes the world, or place and individuals, what they are. On the contrary, let us think of the past as those pieces and snippets of history chosen by a society in order to establish itself, to assert its prevailing forms of government, institutions and ethics.

Forgetting America's early Muslims is, then, more than a mystery. Its consequences have a direct impact on the very essence of political affiliation today. Nations are not shrines or treasures for the dead and things. It is an organic membership of the door, that just as it is being constructed, it must be constantly reconstructed, otherwise it will weaken and die. The Aflo-Protestant monopoly on the history of religion in the United States obscured half a millennium of Muslim presence in America and made it difficult to find clear answers to important questions about who belonged to who, who was American, by what standard, and to whom the decision was.

What should "America" or "American" mean? Through her program "America Early, Vast," Omohondru, a leading think tank on early American history, points to one possible answer: Both "early America" and "American" are big, loose terms, but not to the point of being nearly meaningless.

Historically, they can be best understood as a massive collision, the intermingling and conquest of peoples and civilizations, (and animals and microbes) between Europe and Africa and between the peoples and societies of the Western Hemisphere, from the Great Caribbean to Canada, beginning in 1492 AD. From 1492 to at least 1800, America was simply defined as the Great, or Early, Vast America.

Muslims were part of Great America from the beginning, including those parts that became known as the United States. In 1527 CE, Mustafa Zemmouri, an Arab Muslim from the Moroccan coast, arrived in Florida as a slave in a destroyed Spanish expedition led by Panfilo de Narvez. Against all odds, Zemmouri survived and established a life for himself, traveling from the Gulf of Mexico coasts to parts of what is now the southwestern United States, as well as Central America. He struggled as an indigenous slave before establishing himself as a well-respected physician.

In 1542, Cabeza de Vaca, one of four survivors aboard the Narvez expedition, published his first European book, later known as Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America, which he dedicated to North America. De Vaca spoke about the disasters that befell explorers and the eight years that survivors spent wandering across North and Central America. Acknowledging that Zemmouri was irreplaceable, he said:

"He was the Negro who addressed them all the time."

"Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America" (social media)

This "them" belongs to the indigenous people, and it was Zemmouri's ingenuity with the indigenous languages that saved their souls and, after a while, allowed them a degree of prosperity.

Zemmouri saw more of the present-day United States, with its lands and people, than any of the country's "founding fathers" — more than any group of them combined. Leila Alami captures all this and more in her seminal novel The Moor's Account (2014), which traces Zemmouri's journey during his childhood in Morocco, his enslavement in Spain, and his mysterious end in the American Southwest. If there is anything that can be said to be the best version of American pioneers or the spirit of the horizon, or something of the resonant experience of adapting and reinventing that can stamp a nation or a people, it will be difficult to find someone who represents these things better than Mustafa Zemmouri did.

Between 1675 and 1700 AD, the beginnings of the Chesapeake agricultural community enabled local slave masters to bring more than 6000,1668 Africans to Virginia and Maryland. This boom in trade prompted an important change in American life. In 1700, Chesapeake white servants outnumbered black slaves by five to one. By 1700, however, the ratio had reversed. Over the first four decades of the eighteenth century, more Africans came to the Chesapeake. Between 1710 and 8000, growing agricultural wealth led to the importation of another 2000,<> Africans. Then, by the thirties of the eighteenth century, at least <>,<> more slaves had come to Chesapeake. The American Chesapeake was transforming from a slave society (and most societies in human history have acquired slaves) to a slave society, which is stranger than usual. In a slave society, slavery is the pillar of economic life while the slave-master relationship is a model of a social relationship, followed by the rest.

Among the first generations of Africans brought to North America, it spread to work in adjacent fields and sleep under the roofs of their owners. As historian Ira Berlin notes in his 1998 book Many Thousands Gone, they were overwhelmed by a yearning to convert to Christianity. Hoping that this will help them secure some social status. In the case of West Africans who were brought in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to work as slaves in Virginia, Maryland, and Carolinets, they came either from different parts of Africa, or from the West Indies, compared to previous "charter" generations. They were much more likely to be Muslims, and far less likely to descend from a mixed race. Christian missionaries and farmers in the eighteenth century complained that the "farmer generation" of slaves showed little interest in Christianity. Missionaries and farmers criticized what they saw as the practice of "pagan rituals" by some slaves, which enabled Islam, to some extent, to remain on the plantations of the American slave community.

"Many thousands gone" (social media)

Similarly, between 1719 and 1731, the French took advantage of the West African Civil War to enslave thousands, bringing 6000,1776 Africans directly to Louisiana. Most came from Fota Toro, an area near the Senegal River that diverges what are now Senegal and Mauritania. Islam entered Futa Toro in the eleventh century. Since then, it has been known for its many intellectuals, militant armies, and religious governments, including the Imamate of Futa Toro, a theocracy established between 1861 and <> CE. The African conflicts between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries on the Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) and Hausa (mostly Nigeria today) reverberated in America. In the first, the Ashanti defeated the alliance of African Muslims. In the end, the jihadists eventually won but in the process lost many of their sons to the slave trade and the West.

Ayoub Suleiman Diallo is one of the most famous Muslims in North America of the eighteenth century. He was a Fulani, a West African Muslim community. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, many Fulani were enslaved by European merchants and sent to be sold in America. Diallo was born in Bondo, a region around the rivers of Senegal and Gambia, under an Islamic theocracy. He was captured by a British slave trader in 1731 and ended up being sold to a slave owner in Maryland. An evangelical expedition was able to distinguish Diallo's writing in Arabic and offered him wine to test his Islam. Later, a British lawyer who had written Diallo's statement of his enslavement and move to Maryland gave his first name to "Job" and his second name to "Ben Solomon." In this way, Job Solomon became "Job ben Solomon".

In this way, the experience of enslavement and crossing into America "Ankala" witnessed many Arabic names, as Quranic names became something familiar in the Gospel of King James. Moses became Moses, Abraham became Abraham, Job became Gob, David became David, Solomon became Solomon, and so on. Toni Morrison drew on the history of Islamic naming practices in America in her 1977 novel Song of Solomon. The title of the novel is derived from a folkloric song that carries with it clues to the history of the protagonist, Milkman Dead, and his family. The fourth sentence of the song begins:

"Solomon and Reina, Bilali, Shalot/Yaruba, Medina, as well as Mahmet"

  • سولومون: سليمان
  • بلالي: بلال
  • شالوت: جالوت
  • محمت: محمد

هذه الأسماء جاءت من المسلمين الأفارقة الذين استُعبدوا في فيرجينيا، وماريلاند، وكنتاكي، والكارولينيتين وفي أماكن أخرى من أمريكا. لقد كانت "أغنية سولومون"، بكلمات أخرى، (ولعلّها كانت في أول الأمر) أغنية سليمان.

رواية "أغنية سولومون" (song of solomon) (مواقع التواصل)

كانت إعادة تسمية العبيد (أحيانًا بصفاتٍ احتقاريّة أو تهريجيّة) أداةً مهمّة للسلطات الزراعية، ونادرًا ما تم إغفالها. غير أن الأسماء العربية، على امتداد أمريكا الشمالية، حُفظت كجزء من السِّجل التاريخي. فسجلّات المحاكم في لويزيانا للقرنين الثامن عشر والتاسع عشر تُظهر إجراءات ترتبط بالمنصور، شومان، عماد، فاطمة، ياسين، موسى، بكري، معمري وآخرين. بينما تفصّل سجلات المحاكم من القرن التاسع عشر في جورجيا إجراءات قانونيّة تتضمن سليم، بلال، فاطمة، إسماعيل، عليق، موسى وآخرين. وقضى نيوبل باكيت، عالم اجتماع من القرن العشرين، حياته يجمع مادة إثنوغرافيّة حول الحياة الثقافية للأميركيين الأفارقة. وفي كتابه "أسماء سوداء في أمريكا: أصول واستخدامات" (Black Names in America: Origins and Usage) يوثّق باكيت أكثر من 150 اسمًا عربيا شائعًا في أوساط أولئك المنحدرين من أصل إفريقي في الجنوب الأمريكي. في بعض الأحيان كان يُمكن أن يحمل الفرد الواحد اسما إنجيليا أو "اسم عبد" لغايات رسميّة، مع انتصار الاسم العربي في الممارسة [اليومية].

من الصّعب معرفة مدى استمرار أسماء عربية ترتبط بممارسة دينيّة أو هويّة مستمرّتين، لكن حدوث انقطاع كلّي يبدو أمرًا مستبعدًا. حيث يقول إعلان بصحيفة من جورجيا يعود لعام 1791 للميلاد حول عبدٍ هارب، على سبيل المثال:

"حارس زنجي جديد، يُدعى جفراي … أو إبراهيم".

بالنظر إلى السيطرة المحكمة التي مارسها ملّاك العبيد في التسمية، فلا بُدَّ من أنه كان هناك العديد ممَّن يُدعون جفراي والذين كانوا في الحقيقة "إبراهيم"، والعديد من النِّسوة اللائي دُعين "ميسي" وكُنَّ في الحقيقة "معصومة"، وهلمجرًّا.

كان لورينزو داو تيرنر، باحث من منتصف القرن العشرين في لغة الغالا (وهي لغة محكيّة كريوليّة في منطقة "سي آيلاندز" على الساحل الجنوبي الشَّرقي الأميركي) قد وثَّق "نحو 150 اسمًا ذات أصول عربية" كانت شائعة نسبيًا في منطقة سي آيلاندز وحدها. وهي تتضمن أكبر، علي، أمينة، حامد، والعديد من الأسماء الأخرى. وفي مزارع تعود إلى بداية القرن التَّاسع عشر في الكارولينيتين، كان مصطفى اسمًا رائجا. الأسماء العربية لا تجعل المرء مسلمًا بالضرورة، على الأقل ليس في المغرب أو بلاد الشام، حيث العرب مسيحيّون ويهودٌ أيضا. لكنّه كان انتشار الإسلام الذي جلب الأسماء العربيّة إلى غرب إفريقيا. لذا فقد كان هؤلاء الأفارقة أو الأفارقة الأميركيين من أمينة وأكبر، أو على الأقل آباءهم أو أجدادهم، من المسلمين بصورة شبه مؤكّدة.

لورينزو داو تيرنر (مواقع التواصل)

انطلاقا من خوفها، حاولت السلطات الإسبانيّة حظر العبيد المسلمين من مستوطناتها الأميركيّة المبكّرة. أما في مجتمع العبيد الأنجلو أمريكي الأكثر تماسكا وأمنًا في القرنين الثامن عشر والتاسع عشر، فقد كانوا محل تفضيل العديد من المزارعين. إنمَّا في الحالتين، كان الاستخلاص ذاته: لقد كان المسلمون متميّزين، فقد حازوا السلطة، ومارسوا التأثير. أحد المنشورات – "القواعد العمليّة للإدارة والمعالجة الطبيّة للعبيد الزنوج في مستعمرات السكّر" الصّادر عام 1813 للميلاد، والذي ركّز على جزر الهند الغربية – أشار بأن المسلمين "ممتازون في الاعتناء بالمواشي والخيول، وللخدمة الدَّاخليّة" لكن "لديهم القليل من المؤهلات للأشغال الأكثر خشونة في الحقول، ولهذا السبب لا ينبغي أبدًا استعمالهم". ويشير المؤلف بأنّه في تلك المزارع: "الكثيرُ منهم يتحادثون باستخدام اللغة العربية".

كان أحد ملاك العبيد في بداية القرن التاسع عشر في جورجيا والذي زعم بأنَّه يمّثل مقاربة متنوّرة للعبودية قد دعم فكرة تحويل "أساتذة الدّين المحمّدي" إلى "موجّهين، أو زنوج مؤثرين" في المزارع. زاعمًا بأنّهُم سيُبدون "النزاهة لأسيادهم". وقد استشهد هو وآخرون بحالات كان العبيد المسلمون فيها يصطفّون مع الأمريكيين، ضد البريطانيين، في حرب عام 1812.

Some Muslim slaves in nineteenth-century America themselves were slave owners, teachers or army officers in Africa. Ibrahim Abdul Rahman was a colonel in the army of his father, Ibrahim Shah of Syria, the ruling emir of Fota Gallon, today Guinea. In 1788, at the age of 26, Abd al-Rahman was captured in the war, bought by British merchants, and then transported to America. Abdulrahman spent about 40 years picking cotton in Natchez, Mississippi. Thomas Foster, its owner, called him "Prince".

Abdulrahman Ibrahim (Social Media)

In 1826, during an unexpected series of events, Abd al-Rahman gained the attention of the American Colonization Association (ACS). The association was organized with the aim of deporting people of African descent from the United States and "returning" them to Africa. Featuring many of the country's most prominent philanthropists and some of its most powerful politicians, the American Colonial Society blended forms of white nationalism with universal Christianity. For more than two years, the association put pressure on Foster, who eventually agreed to free Abdulrahman but refused to free his family. In an effort to raise money to buy his family's freedom, Abdulrahman went to the free cities of the northern United States, where he toured donation events and ceremonies—dressed in a Mori costume and writing [Sura] al-Fatiha, from the Qur'an on scraps of paper for donors (pushing them to believe that it was the Lord's prayer).

Abd al-Rahman was a Muslim who prayed as a Muslim. When he met with the leaders of the American Colonial Society, he told them that he was a Muslim. But Thomas Gallaudet, a prominent evangelical who studied at Yale University and was active in education, gave Rahman an Arabic copy of the Bible and asked him to pray with him. Later, hoping that he could move to Africa and get a meaningful job, Arthur Taban, a prominent American philanthropist, pressured Abd al-Rahman to become a Christian missionary and help him extend the influence of the Taban brothers' winning trading empire to Africa.

The African Repository and Colonial Journal described how Abd al-Rahman "would become the first pioneer of civilization to unenlightened Africa." They saw him planting "the cross of the Savior over the high mountains of Kong!". This, in short, is how the puritan effect works. First, Abd al-Rahman was stripped of his religion and defined himself. Second, influential institutions specializing in writing, record-keeping, publishing, and education (essential skills in turning history into the past) are beginning to act to distort it in their own way.

Details of Abdul Rahman's tale may be scarce. But his experience as an American Muslim facing an Anglo-Protestant monopoly bent on manufacturing a "Christian" country is not. Islam developed, in part, to reign over the enormous linguistic and cultural differences in Africa and Asia: Abd al-Rahman spoke six languages. Anglo-American evangelical Protestantism, on the contrary, is a newer and more narrow religion. It gained its strength in a limited area of the North Atlantic and in a dynamic relationship with both capitalism and nationalism. It aims not to transcend difference but to (as both Galodette and Taban were trying with Abdurrahman) to impose homogeneity.

How many people have shared with Abdulrahman his experience at its basic levels? How many Muslims were there in America between, if we say, 1500 and 1900 AD? How many of them were in North America? Sylvien Diouf is a brilliant historian. In what may be considered a conservative estimate, Diouf writes in Servants of Allah (1998):

"There were thousands of Muslims in America and that's probably not all we can say in terms of numbers and estimates."

Of the ten million or more enslaved Africans sent to the New World, more than 80 percent went to the Caribbean or Brazil. However, the numbers of Muslims who came to early America were far greater than the Bretons who came at the height of Puritan colonialism. The peak point of settlement, between 1620 and 1640 AD, saw the arrival of 21,000 peritones to North America. Perhaps 25% of these came as servants and it was difficult, by extension, to assume that they had Puritan feelings and opinions. By 1760, New England was home, at best, 70,000 parishioners (the Puritan Church of New England).

"Servants of God" (social media)

Despite these relatively small numbers, the Puritans succeeded in becoming a community of professors and educators of the nation. But in some ways, New England was also losing during the rise of the United States. It reached the peak of its economic and political influence in the eighteenth century. Despite its prominent role in the independence of the United States, it has never been a center of economic or political power in the British colonies of North America, nor in Great America or even in the United States as a whole.

Simply viewed as one of the many colonies of the New World, New England would, in obvious ways, be an anomaly. It was demographically unique (thanks to its settlement by families), religiously sectarian, politically anomalous, and economically dependent in the European perspective. Even the phrase "Puritan New England" can be misleading. It was the fish, timber and navigation trade—in particular, their trade with West Indian farms—not religion, that made life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in New England what it was. The Puritans were not necessarily applauded by the people of New England nor were their representatives. At the beginning of the seventeenth century in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, for example, a listener once interrupted a Puritanian priest:

"New England's commercial affairs are about cod, not God!"

But some of the same qualities that made the Puritans so alien allowed them to be adept at writing history. They were exceptionally adept at culture, education, text interpretation, and institution-building. These skills enabled them, in a way that distinguishes them from the rest of Americans, to address the challenges of dealing with what sociologist Roger Friedland has called the "problem of collective representation" in the modern world. Before the advent of modern nations, the history of peoples was genealogy. There is a group descended from a particular ancestor: Abraham or Aeneas, for example, and therefore the peoples were naturally connected to each other. But the exemplary model in the modern nation has presented a new problem. The nation is supposed to be one common people, sharing intrinsic and even inherited traits, not descended from a dynasty, queen or king.

By the end of the eighteenth century, almost no one knew how to represent this common community. But in North America, the Puritan model was the closest. They thought of themselves and even recorded themselves not as a common community, but as a chosen people, a people who do not share lineage with the Lord but follow the Lord. In order to fuse the history of a heterogeneous population into a crucible of national unity, this was by no means ideal. But it's something they had to do.

Puritan influence excluded many things, including the longstanding presence of Muslims and Islam in America, and some integrity and emotion in the special standards of the Puritan experience, apart from its contributions to U.S. national history. The dominance of the Puritan institutions gave colonial New England a major role. Over the course of two centuries, customs and traditions had changed dramatically, but nineteenth-century historians such as Francis Parkman and Henry Adams shared with their twentieth- and twenty-first-century successors Perry Miller, Bernard Bailin and Jill Lebor a commitment to America, and the national origins of the United States written by New England in the eighteenth century.

One of the most misguided features of Puritan history writing was its claim that the torch of religious freedom was an Anglo-Protestant commitment. In fact, Puritans and Anglo-Protestants in America have long antagonized and even persecuted those who are different from them in religions: Native Americans, Catholics, Jews, communists, gay groups, Muslims and, in some cases, specifically, other Protestants. None of John Winthrop, Cotton Mather or any part of the Puritan landowner class suffered actual religious persecution. Possessing power, similar to the Anglo-Protestants in America, is not entirely compatible with some of the foundations underlying claims of moral authority in Christianity. Nor is it wholly in tune with the idea of America as a land of religious freedom, as the champion of the underdog, Ton Payne, said in 1776.

Struggles over what could be an American nation and who belongs to it will continue. However, the possibilities remain open to a bouquet of important answers.

If there is any religious group that can represent the best version of religious freedom in America, it is that of Zemmouri and Abderrahman. They came to America in a state of pure repression, fighting for recognition and freedom of practice of their religion. Unlike Anglo-Protestants, Muslims in America objected to tyranny of others, including Native Americans.

The most enduring consequence of Puritan influence has been a sustained commitment to producing a past focused on how actions, usually portrayed as bold and principled, of Anglo-Protestants (often beginning in the New England Chesapeake) led to the United States, its government and institutions. America's history is not fundamentally an Anglo-Protestant tale, as much as it is not a history of the West more broadly. It may not be entirely clear what exactly that "West" is based on. But the most universal era of history that began with the European colonization of the western part of the Earth may make up much of it.

Although the West, in part, meant the Western of the Earth or North America, Muslims were part of its early societies. Struggles over what could be an American nation and who belongs to it will continue. However, the possibilities remain open to a range of important answers. Historically, Muslims have been as American as Anglo-Protestants as they were. In many ways, America's early Muslims are role models in America's honorable religious practice and ideals. Any statement or indication of the opposite, no matter how good its intentions, will be motivated by either deliberate chauvinism or latent chauvinism.

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  • Note: The use of the word conquest is a measurement on its English equivalent Conquer and does not mean employing Arabic here more than its linguistic dimension.
  • This report is translated by AEON and does not necessarily reflect Meydan's website.