Encyclopedia of Islam

African Americans, Islam among

The first African American Muslims were slaves 

captured in West Africa in the 1700s and brought 

to the American colonies. The few accounts of 

them from the early decades of the United States 

indicate that the Muslims formed somewhat of 

an elite in the slave community, that many 

were literate, and that they became known for 

their resistance to the conditions in which they 

found themselves. They also resisted attempts by 

Christians to convert. There remains, however, 

little evidence to connect Islam within the slave 

community with a new Islamic movement that 

developed among African Americans in the urban 

north in the 20th century.

A new phase for Islam among American blacks 

began in 1913, when Timothy Drew (1886–1929) 

assumed the name Noble Drew Ali and founded 

the Moorish Science Temple of America. This 

organization can best be seen as an attempt to 

adapt Muslim themes to the struggle of African 

Americans for a place of dignity and equality in 

American life. From his personal research, he 

concluded that American blacks were descendants 

of the Moors and that their true homeland was 

m

orocco

. He suggested that in the founding of 

the United States, the nationality, freedom, and 

religion of African Americans had been taken from 

them. Not having access to an English translation 

of the q

Uran

, he adapted a Spiritualist text, the 

Aquarian Gospel of Jesus Christ, by Levi Dowling, 

and issued it as the movement’s Quran.

The Moorish Science Temple spread among 

African Americans through the 1930s but declined 

in the decades after World War II. The thrust it 

began, however, was picked up by a second orga-

nization, the n

ation

 

oF

 i

slam

, dated to 1930, and 

the activity of a mysterious man known as Wallace 

Fard Muhammad. He continued Noble Drew Ali’s 

emphasis on African Americans having an African 

origin and developed an elaborate myth of the 

primal origin of black people. Leadership of the 

movement was soon assumed by Elijah Muham-

mad (1897–1975), who steered it through some 

controversial years to great success in the 1960s, 

coinciding with the heyday of the Civil Rights 

movement.

As the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation 

of Islam were spreading, the a

hmadiyya

 movement 

in Islam sent representatives from India to begin 

proselytizing. Their greatest success proved to be 

among black Americans, who for a generation 

formed the largest community of African-Ameri-

can Muslims. Also competing for the attention of 

blacks attracted to Islam was a movement formed 

by Shaykh Daoud, who came from Bermuda in 

the 1920s.

The shape of the African-American Muslim 

community began a dramatic transformation in 

the 1970s. Following the change in U.S. immi-

gration regulations in 1965, a number of Indo-