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

Peril and Possibility 2 9 1area. His brother, Husain, reportedly served as imam, or prayer leader. In1920, hundreds of Turkish Muslims from the Balkans and Anatolia establisheda Detroit chapter of the Red Crescent, the Muslim equivalent of the Red Cross,and purchased grave plots so that they could bury the community’s departedin accordance with Islamic law. Bektashi Muslims from Albania and Tu r k i s hm e v l a v is, the so-called whirling dervishes, also continued to practice their particularforms of Sufism in the Motor City. And the Detroit area was home tosome Shi’ite Muslims, as well.During this period, Muslim missionaries also began to appear in the UnitedStates. One of the most successful was Muhammad Sadiq, a member of the Ahmadiyya.The Ahmadiyya were established in the late 1800s in the Indian Punjab,where followers of a man named Ghulam Ahmad proclaimed him to be am u j a d d i d (renewer of religion), the Christian Messiah, and the Islamic Mahdi(a divinely guided figure who appears at the end-time). While many otherMuslims considered the followers of Ahmad heretics, they pressed ahead withtheir claims, becoming one of the most successful Muslim missionary groupsto non-Muslims in modern times. Known for mass distributing English translationsof the Qur’an, the Ahmadiyya established a center in Chicago, Illinois.Traveling around the country, head missionary Muhammad Sadiq praised Islamas a religion of peace and reason. He also targeted African Americans forconversion, promising that Islam offered them equality and freedom. He arguedthat Arabic was the original language of black people and said Islam hadbeen their religion, stolen from them during slavery. This message attractedhundreds, perhaps thousands, of African Americans to the movement. Andthe Ahmadiyya seemed to practice the equality that they preached. In 1920s St.Louis, Missouri, for example, African American P. Nathaniel Johnson, who becameShaikh Ahmad Din, led a local Ahmadiyya group that included immigrantMuslims, blacks, and whites.Some African Americans who joined the Ahmadiyya were almost certainlymigrants from the U.S. South. During the years between World War I andWorld War II, over a million and a half blacks moved from rural areas in theSouth to cities in the North. Those who came as part of this Great Migration,as U.S. historians have dubbed it, lived near and sometimes worked with Muslimimmigrants from the Middle East. As the conversion of African Americansto Ahmadiyya Islam shows, these black American migrants were now part of adynamic cultural environment where the ideas and culture of Asian immigrantswere beginning to have an impact on the formation of African Americanreligious culture, and vice versa.African American Muslims, however, were not simply borrowing ideas fromAsian immigrants. They were also creating their own forms of Islam. The firstto do so was Timothy Drew (1886–1929), a native of North Carolina who hadtraveled to New Jersey and later to Chicago as part of the Great Migration.