Islam in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives - Islamic Books ...

Peril and Possibility 2 8 9community. Ultimately, however, numerical estimates such as these have limitedvalue in understanding the various guises of Muslim American life. Intelling the story of Muslims in the United States, one cannot afford to excludethe voices of the comparatively smaller numbers of Iranian Americans, Bosnians,Turks, Afghanis, West Africans, Latinos, whites, and others who are membersof the Muslim community.U.S. Muslims are diverse not only in race or ethnicity but also in class, gende r, sexual orientation, linguistic group, national origin, and religious practice.Muslims in the United States adhere to a wide a variety of Sunni, Shi’ite,and Sufi religious practices. In addition, some Muslims practice forms of Islamthat many Muslims in other parts of the world would not recognize as “Islamic,”including, for example, Minister Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam.Muslims also use a wide variety of sacred spaces for their religious practices.The mosque, while vitally important, is not always the center of communal religiouspractices. Other sites include the home, the Sufi lodge, inner- c i t ystreets, schools, and even nightclubs (for Muslim rappers, for example).Muslim religious diversity cannot be explained merely by pointing out doctrinaldifferences; it requires knowledge of the history of Muslim communitiesin America—a history that is as old as the New World itself. Most of theMuslims who first came to the Americas were West African slaves. Although itis difficult to estimate the number of slaves who were Muslim, some scholarsbelieve as many as 10–20 percent of all slaves brought to the Americas practicedsome form of Islam. It makes sense that at least some slaves would havebeen Muslims, since the number of Muslim converts in West Africa grew rapidlyduring the time of the slave trade. Some of these Muslims were urbaneand literate merchants, travelers, and marabouts, or mystics. Some had memorizedthe Arabic Qur’an by heart. In the Americas, these persons maintainedtheir Arabic literacy by reading Arabic New Testaments given to them byChristian missionaries and by purchasing expensive supplies of paper to practicetheir writing. Among Muslims from the Yoruba region of West Africa inBahia, Brazil, Arabic was used as a secret language in planning revolts duringthe first half of the 1800s.How many black Muslims continued to practice Islam in British NorthAmerica and the United States, however, is difficult to know. In general, historianshave uncovered more evidence of Muslim practices in places whereslaves lived in isolated or predominately black areas, or where there were morefirst- or second-generation African Americans. For example, in the 1900s, oralhistorians collected tales of several Muslims who continued to practice someform of Islam on the islands off of the Georgia coast. Sahih Bilali of Saint SimonsIsland, for example, was known to have fasted. Bilali Mohamed ofSapelo Island used a Muslim prayer rug and wore a fez. And the names of Gullahchildren sometimes showed Muslim influence. In the 1830s, Omar ibn