A Brief History of the Afro-Islamic Presence in New York

Abstract

Over the past quarter of a century a pronounced immigrant continental African Muslim presence has manifested itself in New York City. Their roots can be traced back at least two centuries in the Empire State's major city, since at least the landing of the slave schooner Amistad in 1839. African American descendants of Muslim African captives during the Atlantic Slave Trade, like Henry Highland Garnett, lived in upstate New York and made great historical contributions there. Following the Civil War and after the Great Black Migration northward from numerous Southern cities, several Black American groups identifying themselves as Muslims established themselves in New York's Harlem, and other Northern cities with major Black populations. Collectively, they laid the foundation for the major Muslim presence today in what has been called “the Mecca of Black America.”

Keywords:

• African Muslims
• Amistad
• El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz
• Harlem Shura
• Imam Talib Abdur-Rashid
• Malcolm X
• Marcus Garvey
• Mosque of Islamic brotherhood
• Muslims in early New York
• Shaykh Daoud Faisal
• Sufi Abdul-Hamid

Notes

See Ibn Ishaq, The Life of Muhammad, translated by A. Guillaume (Lahore and Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1955); and S. A. Al-Mubarakapuri, Ar-Raheeq Al-Makhtum (The Sealed Nectar) (Riyadh: Dar-us-Salam Publications, 1996). Ethiopia is the oldest Christian nation on earth, but its current Muslim population is some 38–42 percent of its total populace. Furthermore, its Falasha Jews have their own history dating back to the Prophet-King Solomon (known in Islamic tradition as Sulaiman, peace be upon him) and Makeda, the Queen of Sheba (referred to in the same tradition as Bilqis) and their son Menelik. Likewise, the Ethiopic Waraa Imamate of that nation is the oldest indigenous Muslim religious order on the African continent.

See Ivan Van Sertima, They Came Before Columbus (New York: Random House, 1976); Leo Wiener, Africa and the Discovery of America, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: Innes & Sons, 1920–1922); and Abdullah H. Quick, Deeper Roots (London: Taha, 1996).

Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

Ira Berlin Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap of Harvard University Press, 1998).

Edward Ball, Edward, Slaves in the Family (New York: Ballantine, 1999).

The Amistad, 40 U.S. 518 (1841), United States, Appellants vs. The Libellants and Claimants of the Schooner Amistad.

Ibid.

James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York: Knopf, 1930).

Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory & The Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

James Grossman, “Measuring the Great Migration,” 2002 lecture.

W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, (1899) 1995).

Darlene C. Hine, “Black Migration to the Urban Midwest: The Gender Dimension, 1915–1945,” in The Great Migration in Historical Perspectives ed. Joe W. Trotter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 2.

Mary W. Ovington, Half A Man: The Status of the Negro in New York City (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Scholarly Reprint Series, 2005).

I. Ba-Yunus and M. M. Siddiqui, A Report on Muslim Population in the United States of America (New York: Center for American Muslim Research and Information [CAMRI], 1998).

Amy Jacques Garvey, The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, or Africa for the Africans (Dover, Mass.: The Majority Press, 1925), 412.

Minutes of U.N.I.A. Convention, August 5, 1924.

Al-Hajj Daoud A. Faisal, Al-Islam, the True Faith, the Religion of Humanity, ed. Muhammad Abdullah Al-Ahari (Chicago: Magribine Press, 1998), 1–2.

Robert Dannin, Black Pilgrimage to Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 62.

Talib ‘Abdur-Rashid, Sufi Abdul-Hamid: Labor Movement Pioneer (New York: The Western Sunrise Press, 1979).

Claude McKay, Harlem: Negro Metropolis (New York: Dutton, 1940).

Cheryl L. Greenberg, Or Does It Explode? Black Harlem in the Great Depression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 121.

Ibid.; ‘Abdur-Rashid, Sufi Abdul-Hamid.