As America turns 250, historians point to the Muslims who helped build it

By MNTV Staff Writer

As the United States marks the 250th anniversary of its independence this Fourth of July, historians are urging a wider view of the nation’s past — one that begins not with recent immigration but more than 500 years ago, and that runs through American exploration, scholarship, music, the military, the courts and civic life.

Muslims, they say, have been part of the American story since before the English founded Jamestown, and their contributions are woven into the country’s culture, economy, legal traditions and communities.

Before Jamestown

One of the earliest documented Muslims to reach North America arrived nearly a century before the Pilgrims.

Estevanico — also known as Esteban de Dorantes — was born around 1500 in Azemmour, on the Moroccan coast, and raised Muslim before he was enslaved and, like others pressed into Spanish service, baptized a Christian.

As one of only four survivors of the disastrous Narváez expedition, he spent the years after 1528 crossing what is now Texas, and in 1539 became the first person of African and North African origin to enter present-day Arizona and New Mexico.

Scholars such as anthropologist Hsain Ilahiane have highlighted his Moroccan Muslim roots, and his story is now widely cited to counter the idea that Muslims are newcomers to America.

Scholars in chains

The Muslim presence in North America grew, tragically, through the transatlantic slave trade.

Historians estimate that a significant share of the Africans trafficked to British America — by various accounts between 10 and 30 percent — were Muslims, many from West Africa’s centers of Islamic learning.

A number were highly educated, fluent in Arabic and trained in the Qur’an and Islamic law.

Their literacy often set them apart in colonial America.

Historians note that some runaway slave advertisements identified Muslim Africans simply as men who could write Arabic, while Arabic manuscripts produced by enslaved Muslims survive in American archives today.

At a time when literacy itself was relatively uncommon, many Muslim captives brought with them traditions of scholarship acquired in West Africa’s centers of Islamic learning.

Among them was Omar ibn Said, an Islamic scholar from Futa Toro, in present-day Senegal, who had studied for 25 years before he was captured and shipped to Charleston around 1807.

Enslaved in North Carolina for the rest of his life, he wrote, in 1831, what remains the only known autobiography composed in Arabic by an enslaved person in the United States.

He opened it with a chapter of the Qur’an on God’s sovereignty, and though his enslavers claimed him as a Christian convert, scholars who have retranslated his work — among them Carl Ernst and Mbaye Lo — believe he most likely remained a Muslim.

His manuscript is now held by the Library of Congress; a 2022 opera based on his life, Omar, won the Pulitzer Prize for Music.

Others helped physically build the young republic.

Yarrow Mamout, a Fulani Muslim brought from Guinea to Maryland around 1752, was enslaved for some 44 years before winning his freedom.

According to James H. Johnston, author of From Slave Ship to Harvard, Mamout first bought his son’s freedom, then acquired property in Georgetown, became a shareholder in the Columbia Bank and lent money to local merchants — all while praying openly and reading and writing Arabic.

His labor as a brickmaker was built into the walls of the new capital, and his 1819 portrait by Charles Willson Peale, believed to be the earliest known painting of an American Muslim, hangs today in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, once displayed among the Founders.

The Founders knew

The engagement reached the highest levels of the new government. In 1765, a 22-year-old law student named Thomas Jefferson bought an English translation of the Qur’an — 11 years before he drafted the Declaration of Independence.

University of Texas historian Denise Spellberg, author of Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an, has argued that Jefferson and other Founders used the rights of Muslims as a test of how far American religious liberty would extend.

The evidence sits in the founding record. When Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom — a direct precursor to the First Amendment — was debated, an effort to insert the name of Jesus Christ was voted down; Jefferson later wrote that this proved the law was meant to protect “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.”

George Washington, hiring workmen for Mount Vernon in 1784, wrote that they might be “Mahometans,” Jews, Christians or of no faith, so long as they were skilled.

And as president in 1805, Jefferson pushed a state dinner to sunset so a visiting Tunisian envoy could break his Ramadan fast — often cited as one of the first observances of Ramadan in the President’s house.

The connection shaped foreign policy at the Revolution’s most fragile moment. In 1777, Sultan Muhammad III of Morocco opened his ports to American ships, making Morocco, by the State Department’s account, the first nation whose head of state recognized American independence.

The resulting 1786 Treaty of Peace and Friendship has never been broken — the longest unbroken treaty relationship in U.S. history, predating the Constitution itself. More than two centuries later, in 2007, Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to Congress, took his ceremonial oath on Jefferson’s own copy of the Qur’an.

Sound, service and courts

Muslims also left a mark on American culture. Scholars including historian Sylviane Diouf, author of Servants of Allah, have noted striking resemblances between Qur’anic recitation and the Islamic call to prayer and the “field hollers” sung by enslaved Africans — musical roots that fed into the blues and, in turn, into jazz, now regarded as one of the country’s signature art forms.

Muslims have served in American conflicts from the Revolution onward; researchers have identified names suggesting Muslim heritage on Revolutionary War muster rolls, and today thousands of Muslim men and women serve in the armed forces, alongside growing numbers in Congress, statehouses, universities, hospitals and technology firms.

They have also helped expand constitutional freedoms.

In 1967, at the height of his career, Muhammad Ali — who had joined the Nation of Islam — refused induction during the Vietnam War, was convicted of draft evasion and stripped of his heavyweight title. In the 1971 case Clay v. United States, the Supreme Court unanimously overturned his conviction, 8-0.

The justices ruled on narrow procedural grounds rather than issuing a sweeping religious-liberty decision, but the case became a landmark in the law of conscientious objection and is widely cited in debates over religious freedom.

A community of givers

That tradition of civic engagement continues today.

Research by the Muslim Philanthropy Initiative at Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy estimates that American Muslims give roughly $4.3 billion to charity each year.

Though they make up only about 1 percent of the population, Muslim households were found to give an average of about $3,200 — more than the roughly $1,900 average for the general public — and, contrary to a common stereotype, some 85 percent of that giving stays inside the United States, supporting disaster relief, poverty and hunger programs, education, health care and civil rights.

The Pew Research Center has found that American Muslims are among the country’s youngest and most racially and ethnically diverse faith communities.

As the nation gathers for its Semiquincentennial, historians argue that its history is incomplete without the generations of Muslims who explored its frontiers, wrote in its margins, enriched its music, defended its freedoms in court, served in its wars and gave to its communities — helping build the United States from its earliest days.