EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION

Abstract

The arrival of Islam in the United States of America has been dated
back to the coming of slaves from Africa. During this unfortunate trade
in human cargo from the African mainland many Muslim men and
women came to these shores. Some of these men and women were more
visible than others; some were more literate in Arabic than the others:
and some were better remembered by their generations than the others.
Despite these multiple differences between the Muslim slaves and
their brethren from various parts of the African continent, the fact still
remains that their Islam and their self-confidence did not save them from
the oppressive chains of slave masters. The religion of Islam survived
only during the lifetime of individual believers who tried desperately to
maintain their Islamic way of life. Among the Muslims who came in ante
bellum times in America one can include Yorro Mahmud (erroneously
anglicised as Yarrow Mamout), Ayub Ibn Sulayman Diallo (known to
Anglo-Saxons as Job ben Solomon), Abdul Rahman (known as Abdul
Rahahman in the Western sources) and countless others whose Islamic
ritual practices were prevented from surfacing in public.
Besides these Muslim slaves of the ante bellum America, there were
others who came to these shores without the handicap of slavery. They
came from Southern Europe, the Middle East and the Indian
Subcontinent. These Muslims were immigrants to America at the end of
the Nineteenth Century and the beginning of the Twentieth Century.
Motivated by the desire to come to a land of opportunity and strike it rich,
many of these men and women later found out that the United States of
America was destined to be their permanent homeland. In the search for
identity and cultural security in their new environment, these Muslim
immigrants began to consolidate their cultural resources by, building
mosques and organising national and local groups for the purpose of
social welfare and solidarity. These developments among the Muslims
contributed to the emergence of various cultural and religious bodies
among the American Muslims. In the drive for self-preservation and ...