Many scholars cite Edward Said’s concepts of Orientalism and Othering that drew on West-East binaries that position the West as civilized and the East as barbaric. Such Othering is represented in various Western media through the association of Muslims and Islam with violence, fundamentalism, and terrorism. While such representations were being developed within public discourse through early mass media during the post–World War II period, such discriminatory and reductionist representations of Muslims were more clearly seen within the US media during the Iranian Hostage Crisis and Gulf War periods. Said effectively outlines the various ways in which news coverage presented Arabs and Muslims as an imagined Other, reduced to specters of “Islam”—a constructed idea of the religion as violently opposed to American rights, values, and democracy. There is no doubt that the largest shift in nuance in the public discourse and media representation of Muslims occurred after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, with hate speech, violence, racism, and fear toward Muslim communities increasing across North America. The main discourses on the Muslim communities in North America continued to be Orientalist in nature but more obviously racialized regardless of the varied geographical regions and ethnic heterogeneity of the peoples that make up these various Muslim groups. As a result, Islam itself was racialized and generally used as a pretext to oppress Muslims. Other major themes that emerge from the news coverage of Islam in North America include Islam as being oppressive, and the gendered representations of Muslims, especially veiled women as needing to be rescued.
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News Coverage of Islam and Muslims in North America
Ahmed Al-Rawi
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Islam in the Caribbean
Ken Chitwood
It is difficult to speak of “Islam in the Caribbean” in any unified sense. Because the story of Islam and Muslims in the Caribbean is characterized by both a long, multifaceted history and modern miscellany, there is no past or present uniformity in progeny, perspectives, or practices. Nonetheless, the classification offers a geographically focused and categorically complex frame of reference to consider often overlooked aspects in the region and of global Islam. Stretching from the long 16th century to the present day, the narrative of Islam and Muslims in and of the Caribbean is one of colonial power and cosmopolitanization, contested history and concurrent heterogeneity, global connectedness, and local complexity.
Across the region, Muslim experience is significantly linked to the complex nexus of relationships and interactions between peoples and powers in the wider Atlantic world since the 16th century. Yet, because the Anglophone, Dutch, Hispanophone, and Francophone Caribbeans are each marked by colonial lineages and created certain networks by which Islam and Muslims arrived in the region, there are multiple assemblages that mark and make up the various socialities in the region. Thus, their stories are sufficiently diverse to warrant distinct recognition and treatment. At the same time, and thanks to this shared Atlantic world, there are shared themes and common concerns that can be identified across the Caribbean, including but not limited to: diaspora dynamics, migration, minoritization, transregional networks, debates over hybridity and purity, religious diversification, notions of space and place, class issues, questions of indigeneity, and the interstices of race and religion in colonial and postcolonial perspectives.
In addition, there have also been enough interactions at, across, and between the various “Caribbeans” to justify—indeed, necessitate—comparing them and putting them into conversation with one another. Aliyah Khan, in her literary study of the significance, influence, and changeability of Muslims in the Anglophone Caribbean, emphasized both the need to decenter the U.S. in the study of Islam in the Americas and further globalize the study of global Islam by putting different regions into comparative perspective (e.g., the Anglophone Caribbean and the Hispanophone Caribbean). This requires putting connected, yet seemingly disparate, contexts such as Trinidad and Puerto Rico, Suriname and Haiti, the Bahamas and Cuba into comparative conversation. The result of such juxtapositions is not only a richer appreciation of the constitutive aspects of Caribbean history and contemporary culture but a more extensive and entangled understanding of global Islam’s constituent communities and representative sites.
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Ecology in Islam
Rosemary Hancock
Starting in the late 1960s, a small number of Muslim scholars turned their attention to how the Islamic scriptures and intellectual tradition might help Muslims understand and respond to climate change and environmental crisis. In building this Islamic approach to ecology, these scholars undertook close analysis of the Qur’an, the Sunnah (the collected traditions of the Prophet Muhammad), centuries of Islamic law, and the writings of Sufi mystics and scholars in order to construct Islamic environmental theologies and law. This Islamic ecology remained on the margins of mainstream Islamic discourse for decades, but the participation of Muslims in environmental movements is growing and with it, the need for an Islamic ecology. In developing environmental theologies, Muslim scholars focus upon the relationship of God to the natural world, positing that as God’s creation, the natural world is a sign through which humanity can experience God. Although the natural world is “made useful” to humanity, humans do not have absolute dominion over creation. Rather, humanity is Khalifah—God’s representative or steward on earth. The development of Islamic environmental law from within the shari’ah tradition is arguably just as—if not more—important as articulating an Islamic environmental theology. Some Muslim environmentalists argue for the revival of Islamic land management institutions and look to the many regulations regarding agriculture and water management found in shari’ah as avenues for implementing Islamic environmental law.
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Islamic Bioethics: Secular Bioethics in Muslim Countries
Anke Iman Bouzenita
Bioethical discourse in Western and Islamic societies needs to be viewed against the background of their different historical perspectives and the role secularism has played in their respective development. While the Islamic experience generally saw science and technology evolving out of the Islamic way of life with medical ethics embedded in, and not hindered by, the injunctions of Islamic law, the Western (European) experience emphasizes the a priori need for secularization so as to initiate scientific development. Secularism therefore seems ingrained in Western approaches to science. Against this background, Western bioethics tends to insist on a secular imprint on bioethics. Bioethicists in Muslim-majority countries and in Muslim-minority communities elsewhere work with different historical and cultural experiences. Islam and its sources are still considered to be an important reference framework in Muslim countries and among Muslim populations. The communication of bioethical standards to various recipients therefore requires Islamic justification for legitimacy and acceptance.
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Islamic Bioethics: Abortion
Gilla K. Shapiro and Jonathan K. Crane
Religion plays a significant role in the bioethical decisions of abortion, which is the procedure for terminating a pregnancy before the fetus reaches viability. The bioethical discussion of abortion in Islam has great significance for health policy, significantly affecting how women seek out abortions and the rates of unsafe abortions and national maternal mortality. Guiding texts of Islamic religious authority, the Quran and the Sunnah, do not directly address abortion, but the Quran does include the prohibition of infanticide and mistreatment of unwanted children. It details how abortions are justified on varying grounds, such as the endangerment of the woman’s life.
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Islamic Bioethics: Agency
Mustansir Mir
In Islamic bioethics, the issue of moral agency arises in connection with decisions that a human being is supposed to be able to make in certain medical and health-related situations. Islamic treatments of bioethical issues usually draw on the juristic decisions, rulings, and opinions that make up the classical Islamic legal-ethical tradition called Sharī‘a. However, tradition is largely premodern and needs to become sensitized to modern issues and problems. Tradition can provide religious, moral, and legal guidance and direction, with the Qur’ān and the Prophet’s Sunna as the chief sources of a bioethical system.
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Mosques in the United States and Canada
Ihsan Bagby
Mosques refer to the Muslim house of worship, signifying the gathering place for Muslims to fulfill their obligation of communal prayer. Mosques in the United States and Canada are distinct from mosques in Muslim-majority countries in two different ways. Mosques in the United States and Canada are congregations, which means that the mosque is run by a group of participants; in Muslim-majority countries, mosques are controlled by the state of wealthy patrons. Second, mosques in the United States and Canada are a place of worship and a center of various community activities; in Muslim-majority countries, the mosque is often simply a place of worship. The first era in the history of mosques in North America was from 1890 to 1964. Starting in the 1920s, mosques were established in the United States and Canada by Muslim immigrants. Owing to the relatively small number of Muslim immigrants, few mosques were founded before the 1960s. African Americans started becoming Muslim in the 1920s and started establishing mosques in the 1930s. The number of their mosques was also few. The second era is from 1965 to 2023. This period marks the tremendous increase in the number of Muslim immigrants and African American converts to Islam, and as a consequence, the number of mosques has risen significantly. In 2020, there were 2,769 mosques as compared with 498 in 1984. Mosques in 2020 were healthy: they were growing in number, participants, and activities. Mosques were also very much involved in American society and therefore did not evince a position of isolation and deep hostility to American society. In fact, studies show that mosques are a conduit for Muslims to become more civically engaged. However, the perceived disconnect between young adults and women constitutes a danger to the future of mosques in North America.
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Islamic Colleges and Universities in North America
Andrea L. Stanton
The emergence of Islamic religiously affiliated higher education institutions connects to a much longer history of primarily religiously affiliated higher education in the United States and Canada—with religiously affiliated institutions comprising the majority of higher education institutions for most of the past three centuries. Islamic institutions joined a more recent wave that started in the 1970s with a small number of Buddhist universities. For North American Muslims, the move toward establishing higher education institutions took three sometimes overlapping paths: the first focused on providing undergraduate and graduate degrees, the second focused on providing training for Muslim religious education professionals, and the third for future or early 21st-century religious professionals. (A fourth thread runs through these others: most institutions offer some opportunity for community members to take courses or pursue programs for the purpose of deepening their personal piety.) These three paths have often diverged with respect to pursuing state or regional academic accreditation, although that diminished since the 2010s.
Islamic colleges and universities in North America are an internally diverse group, in terms of whether they seek academic accreditation, whether they offer full degrees or certifications/certificates, whether they offer residential, commuter, or online learning experiences, whether they envision graduates working as religious professionals or in other fields, and in the range of religious orientations they offer, within a largely Sunni identity. In addition, many of these institutions, including the most well known, Zaytuna College, have evolved in different directions since their founding, showing their dynamism as individual institutions and as a broader group. As the needs, interests, and outlooks of Muslim communities in the United States and Canada continue to shift, and as higher education in both countries continues to develop, these institutions will likely continue to do the same.
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Human Body in Islamic Art
Wendy M. K. Shaw
Not central to worship in Islam, representation of the human body has occurred in many forms in Islamic societies: on walls, fabrics, sculptures, and paintings in manuscripts about diverse subjects, including astronomy, history, fables, mythology, medicine, religion, and poetry. Schematically incorporated within narrative or symbolic scenes in most early examples, ruler portraits led to more individualized portraiture even before the adoption of European norms of figural depiction. Not limited by visual verisimilitude, representation of the human form can also be found in lettering, through metonymic representation, and through spatial and sensual modes of embodiment that continue to inform some contemporary art.
The relationship between the human body and Islamic art invites two interpretive frameworks. Reflecting the importance of the human body in the European artistic tradition, the first emphasizes figural representation in Islamic visual traditions. Reflecting the distinct role of the body in Islam, the second treats the body as a sensory agent enhancing the capacities of the body in Islamic thought. The vast historical, geographic, and ethnographic range of Islamic cultures further complicates the consideration of the human body in Islamic arts, as each locus of Islamic culture coexists within a multitude of representational and experiential norms reflecting multireligious and multiethnic environments. The role of the body in the arts shifts again with the modernist universalization of European artistic norms and bodily practices, which have been globally met with assimilation as well as resistance.
Among the distinct aspects of representing the body in the Islamic world are representations of the human body in the first centuries of Islam, as Islam gained hegemony in regions with diverse religions and ethnic populations. The use of human forms in multiple media is another aspect, as is the emergence of representational restrictions. Additionally, the human body was represented in manuscript painting under the large empires that consolidated much of Islamic culture following the 13th-century Mongol conquests of western Asia. The transition to modern oil-on-canvas representation marks another shift in representations of the body. The mutual representation of body and object that is enabled through Islamic thought has also accommodated and enhanced the sensory role of the body in recognition of the divine.
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Islam and Art: An Overview
Wendy Shaw
Modern terms like “religion” and “art” offer limited access to the ways in which nonverbal human creativity in the Islamic world engages the “way of life” indicated by the Arabic word din, often translated as religion. Islam emerged within existing paradigms of creativity and perception in the late antique world. Part of this inheritance was a Platonic and Judaic concern with the potentially misleading power to make images, often misinterpreted in the modern world as an “image prohibition.” Rather, the image function extended beyond replication of visual reality, including direct recognition of the Divine as manifest in the material and cultural world. Music, geometry, writing, poetry, painting, devotional space, gardens and intermedial practices engage people with the “way of life” imbued with awareness of the Divine. Rather than externally representing religious ideas, creativity fosters the subjective capacity to recognize the Divine. Flexible enough to transcend the conventions of time and place over the millennium and a half since the inception of Islam, these modes of engagement persist in forms that also communicate through the expressive practices of contemporary art. To consider religion and art in Islam means to think about how each of these categories perpetually embodies, resists, and recreates the others.
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Asian American Religions
Tony Carnes
Asian American religions have dramatically increased their presence in the United States. Partly, this is a function of the increasing population of Asian Americans since 1965.
Asian American is a name given to the United States residents who trace their ancestry back to the area of Asia from Pakistan in the west to the Pacific islands east of the Asian landmass. There are over 18 million Asian Americans in the United States (about 6 percent of the national population), and Asians are immigrating to the country at rates that far exceed those for any other group.
Other names have been taken, given, or forced upon Asian Americans. Such terms as “Chinese or Japanese imperial subjects” heightened a unity of political and religious obedience to a divine emperor. “Oriental” started as a French idealization of the Confucian state before descending to the level of being an epithet for backwardness.
Immigrants come with nationalities like Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, and so forth that often intervene into religious discourses (see an example of this process in the Chinese American experience as described by Fenggang Yang (Chinese Christians in America. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999). In the 1970s the name Asian American was popularized by West Coast intellectuals in order to gather forces at the barricades of political and racial movements. Some scholars like Michael Omi and Howard Winant (Racial Formation in the United States. From the 1960s to the 1990s. New York: Routledge, 1994) claimed “Asian American” as a racialized reality, which was the result of racial conflicts innate to American society. Others saw the identity as an ethnic claim to assimilation into American cultural reality.
Asian immigrants and their progeny find ways to balance out the religious, national, ethnic, racial, and other identities from their homeland, new nation, and religion. “Asian American” has also become a common-sense meaning that was institutionalized by the U.S. census. But one should remember that many layers of names sit upon Asian American houses of worship as so many barnacles telling tales of ancestral honors, woes, and self-reflections.
Over three-quarters of Asian Americans profess a religious faith. About a quarter say that they are “religious nones,” that is, either having no particular religious faith or identifying as agnostic or atheist. About half of the “nones” actually have religious beliefs and ethics and practice them as an intrinsic part of Asian American culture, not as something that is “religious.”
Two-thirds of religious Asian Americans are Christians. This is not surprising when we take into account the rapid growth of Christianity in the non-European world. Asian Americans are contributing to the “de-Europeanization” of American Christianity and signal the increasingly religious direction of the 21st century.
Other Asian American religions include Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Sikhism, Jainism, Zoroasterism, new Japanese religions, and many more.
The history of Asian American religions involves a dynamic interplay of the United States and Asia, global politics, democratic revolutions, persecution in Asia, racism in the United States, Supreme Court cases, and religious innovation.
The largest Asian American groups, those with 1–4 million people each, trace their ancestry back to Japan, China, Philippines, Vietnam, India, and Korea. Seven smaller groups have over 100,000 people each: Bangladeshis, Burmese, Cambodians, Hmong, Laotians, Pakistanis, and Thais. And there are many more smaller groups.
The diverse ethnic and national origins of Asian Americans means that their religions have a kaleidoscope of religious styles and cultures.
Article
Conversions to Islam in Mexico
Camila Pastor
Conversion to Islam in Mexico has accelerated in the early 21st century, thanks to both increased migration from Muslim-majority countries and the expanding global, regional, and local networks among Islamic religious communities. Despite there being no mosques in the country until the 1980s, official figures from Mexican censuses show the number of Muslims doubling between 2000 and 2010 and again in 2020. Though many communities were built in urban centers, outreach and proselytizing activities have extended into rural regions as well and have included Shia and Sufi as well as Sunni groups. Thus, the establishment of Muslim communities in Mexico has become a transnational phenomenon, with implications for the wider diaspora. This is demonstrated through an exploration of the historiography and ethnography of Islam and by drawing from data collected during the Ethnographic Census of Muslims in Mexico (2011–2014) and using interviews with converts, migrants, and diplomatic personnel to identify some of the core characteristics and consequences of Mexican Islam as convert Islam.
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Theology in Translation: Latin American and Iranian Efforts
Ángel Horacio Molina and Luis Alberto Vittor
“Turkish” migrants , in fact Ottoman Arab who entered the American continent with identity documents issued by the Ottoman authorities and traveled with their languages or dialects, arrived at the end of the 19th century and in the first decades of the 20th century. However, the migratory wave extended almost until the middle of the 20th century after going through a complex political, social, and cultural process that substantially modified various aspects of the migrants’ lives. Their religious lives were progressively hampered in terms of ritual practice because their faith of origin was in the minority with no adequate spaces for collective prayer. They encountered the increasingly pressing need to translate their Islamic sources, on the one hand because of the gradual loss of the Arabic language in some communities and on the other because of the need to maintain it—not only through translation but also by teaching the language in mosques and community centers. The arrival of Iranian migrants to different destinations in Latin America starting in the 1980s enriched this process of translation and dissemination of Islamic texts (Arabic and Persian) in Latin America.
The Muslim diaspora was the first group who, for various reasons, left their homeland while maintaining a close relationship with their language and culture of origin, and later, Muslim converts devoted themselves to the task of translating (inversely, directly, and indirectly) the Islamic theological texts from Arabic to Spanish or Portuguese. The very possibility of translation is a type of migration—a transfer that modifies a source language into a target language. One’s own language is poured into a foreign language. Translating is the disposition of language from the “I” that leads the reader to meet the “you” of otherness. This migratory process is also the inner journey made by the Latin American convert to the Islamic faith: their effort to first learn a language that is not their own in order to translate it into their own in the act of translating. Translation is a form of migration that has become an essential tool for mediation, conversion, knowledge, and dissemination. Both Muslim Arabs and converts devoted themselves to this task: for Muslim Arabs because of the progressive loss in the use of the language of their ancestors, and for converts, out of a pious duty to learn Arabic, the language in which the Qur’an was revealed in the Scripture that guides their new faith and to benefit those who do not know the language.
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Sufi Communities in Secular Mexico
Lucía Cirianni Salazar
The emergence of an organized presence of Sufi communities in Mexico dates to the last two decades of the 20th century. Sufis constitute a part of Mexico’s minority Muslim community. Their groups are mostly made of Mexican and other Latin American converts who follow the leadership of Western sheikhs, who themselves converted to Islam and were initiated into Sufi orders as adults. These characteristics shape many of the particularities of Mexican Sufi communities and their relationship to the Sufi orders from which they originated.
The oldest and most established Sufi community in Mexico is the Nur Ashki Jerrahi order, an offshoot of the Turkish Halveti-Jerrahi order. The second community of Sufi Muslims to have been established in Mexico is the Murabitun community, a branch of the Murabitun World Movement that settled in the southern state of Chiapas in 1995. Apart from these two larger communities, other Sufi orders have representatives in Mexico who guide smaller groups of followers. Some Sufi groups in Mexico have combined traditional gatherings with commercial activities, especially in the form of workshops and alternative therapeutic services that are advertised as being based on Sufi concepts and ritual practices. These groups have also offered intellectual approaches to Sufism, such as reading circles and seminars.
By considering groups whose Sufi dimension has been overlooked, either because they are secular communities or because they are organizations focused on social transformation with little or no mystical emphasis, scholars can query the conventional Western construal of Sufism as Islamic mysticism.
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The Construction of Muslim Families, Interfaith Marriage, and Religious Education in Mexico
Ruth Jatziri García Linares
Fieldwork conducted in the Islamic Center of the North (Centro Islámico del Norte, or CIN) in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, between 2015 and 2017, yielded several findings. First, it examined the reasons for women’s conversion to Islam; second, it looked at the ways these women and their husbands raise their children under Islamic religious precepts. Thus, the author seeks to shed light on how this conversion and child-rearing take place within both Muslim and interfaith homes, dividing her discussion into three parts. The first contextualizes the women and men who make up these families and households and also discusses the Muslim community settled in Monterrey, of which they are members. The second provides an outline of interreligious and Islamic marriages, as well as what Islam has to say about marriage between Muslims and people of other religious faiths. The last section consists of a series of examples taken from interviews with Muslim women who are members of the CIN in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon. The narratives provide insight into how religious values are transmitted to children and young people, as well as the ways in which marriages initially considered interreligious sometimes become completely Islamic.
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The Alawis
Stephan Procházka
The ʿAlawis are adherents of an Islamic sect, the origin of which can be traced back to 9th-century Iraq. They are an offshoot of early Shiah Islam with ancient Iranian, Christian, and Gnostic influences. Outsiders often call them “Nusayri,” after the sect’s founder Ibn Nusayr. Practically all ʿAlawis are Arabs. Their total number is about four million, among which some 2.5 million reside in Syria, where they constitute roughly 12 percent of the population. Many ʿAlawi beliefs and rites are still kept secret by the community, being revealed only to initiate male members. One key element in their faith is the belief in a divine triad that has manifested itself to the ʿAlawi community in seven cycles. Other characteristics are an extraordinary veneration for Muhammad’s son-in-law ʿAli, the belief in the transmigration of the soul, and a very large number of holy shrines, which are frequent in all regions settled by ʿAlawis. Because of the esoteric nature of the ʿAlawi religion and the scarcity of authentic written sources, many details of their creed are subjects of vigorous public and scholarly discussion.
For many centuries, the ʿAlawis were an economically weak, socially marginalized, and persecuted group whose heartland was western Syria. The public rise of the community began with the establishment of the French mandate over Syria after World War I and reached its zenith when the ʿAlawi Hafiz al-Assad became president of Syria in 1971. Since then, the disproportionate political and economic influence of the ʿAlawis in Syria has fueled confessional conflicts with the Sunni majority, which culminated in the civil war that began in 2011.
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Islamic Feminist Movement in North America
Meena Sharify-Funk
Within the past several decades in North America, an Islamic feminist movement has developed. This movement has influenced the intellectual landscape of Muslim communities through activism and scholarship. This article first examines the development of different types of feminisms found in Muslim societies. The typology of different feminisms provides a foundation for understanding the emergence of “Islamic feminism” as a movement that is connected to the rereading and reinterpretation of Islamic canonical sources from a woman’s perspective. After clarifying the usage of key terms, this article then compares and analyzes the thought and activism of three generations of Islamic feminists in North America.
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Shari’a Tribunals in North America
James T. Richardson and Bryan S. Turner
Some North American societies, especially Canada and the United States, are experiencing increasing numbers of Muslim citizens, and those communities have grown and become more integrated into the two societies. Predictably, they have sought the right to practice their faith in ways similar to how other minority religions are treated within the relatively open societies in which they reside. However, tragic events such as the destruction of the World Trade Center has led to considerable animus toward Muslims within the two societies, thus impeding efforts to seek more acceptance of Islamic practices, such as when settling domestic disputes involving divorce, child custody, and inheritance. Controversies have erupted in both the United States and Canada over efforts to allow arbitration in the area of domestic affairs for Muslims. A number of scholars have addressed this topic, often using previously accepted treatments of Jewish minorities as a model. The pros and cons of such an approach have been presented, leading to the conclusion from many of those scholars that allowing, within certain limits, recognition of Muslim practices within the domestic relations area would be beneficial both to the societies at large and to the Muslim citizens residing within them.
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American Muslim Comedy
Samah Selina Choudhury
That Muslims are both consumers and practitioners of comedy may run counter to the otherwise ubiquitous notion that Islam, seemingly above all other religious traditions, is devoid of humor. Yet comedy, especially its staged performance version known as stand-up, is an occupation readily taken up by a number of Muslim comedians during the 21st century in North America. Muslim comedians are also South Asian comedians, Arab comedians, Iranian comedians, or Black comedians, among others, and the naming of their comedy explicitly as “Muslim” can be traced to how openly they speak of their common experiences of being subject to anti-Muslim hostility as a racialized act of violence. This racialization of Islam relies on “looking” Muslim: phenotypic features like dark hair, skin, and beards that simultaneously sweep up others that may share these attributes and make them targets of institutional and interpersonal violences. This common refrain can be seen especially in the material of comedians from the Allah Made Me Funny and Axis of Evil tours during the early 2000s, while later comedians like Hasan Minhaj, Aziz Ansari, and Kumail Nanjiani describe similar experiences in added terms of a racialized solidarity with other minoritized communities of color in the United States. These later comedians of the 2010s and their brand of politically oriented comedy have been upheld by dominant arts industries as examples of American multiculturalism and diversity, coinciding with the large-scale and cross-sectional social justice efforts to support undocumented immigrants, Black Lives Matter, and the #MeToo movement. Far from being a mark of their non-belonging in North American society, this racialized association with Islam is platformed as emblematic of North American societies: their exceptional openness and unparalleled freedoms. At the same time, however, women and Black Muslim comedians are rarely bestowed a similar entrée of visibility as “Muslim” comedians due to the hegemonic racialized image of Muslims as terrifying “terrorists”—a distorted privilege accessible usually only to male comedians of South Asian or Middle Eastern heritage.
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Jefferson, Thomas and Islam
Denise A. Spellberg
Thomas Jefferson (b. 1743–d. 1826), author of the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the Virginia Statue for Religious Freedom (1786), governor of Virginia (1779–1781), commissioner and US minister to France (1784–1789), first secretary of state (1790–1793), vice president (1797–1801), and two-term president (1801–1809), is famed in Americans history in each of these capacities. Less well known remains Jefferson’s lifelong interest in Islam and his personal contacts with its practitioners. This aspect of his public life and intellectual thought deserves to be included in standard histories of the United States as a unique window into ideas about religion and race during the nation’s founding era. A complex figure, Jefferson’s views of Islam and Muslims reflect his uniquely expansive views of religious freedom as well as his enduring engagement with issues of race and slavery.
Jefferson’s intellectual curiosity about Islam predates the founding of the United States. His early views of Muslims and their faith would be shaped first by transatlantic British scholarly publications as well as English diplomatic precedents with the Muslim kingdoms of North Africa and the Ottoman Empire. Books Jefferson ordered while a colonist in Virginia established the foundation for this bibliophile’s lifelong pursuit of knowledge about Islam and the Middle East. His direct encounters with Muslim officials resulted from Jefferson’s diplomatic and presidential engagement with North African Muslim kingdoms.
As an American intellectual, Jefferson’s views of race and slavery ultimately intersected with his capacious, radical, but minority view that Muslims should theoretically be granted religious freedom and political equality in his new nation—at some future point. He did not invent this position but rather borrowed and extended earlier English precedents for the religious toleration of Muslims, which he applied to legal precedents in his native Virginia at the outset of American independence. However, these theories would be contradicted by his personal practice of the enslavement of Black West Africans. Among those who arrived in bondage in North America from West Africa, a significant minority were persons of Islamic heritage.
The author of the Declaration of Independence knew well that enslaved Blacks toiling in North America would never be defined as “created equal” before the law. Among the West African Muslims swept up in the slave trade from 1619 to 1808, some may have labored unrecognized for their faith on Jefferson’s plantations. Although there is no proof of this, Jefferson learned of the presence of two enslaved West African escapees, both seemingly literate in Arabic, at the end of his second term as president. His response to their predicament reveals innate contradictions at the heart of his views of Muslim religious freedom and future citizenship. Ultimately, Jefferson’s remarkably inclusive precedents for his nation’s ideals of religious pluralism, which included Muslims theoretically, would be vitiated by his competing views of race and slavery.
