Encyclopedia of Islam

United States

  

693  J

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in the same behavior may bring shame on not 

only themselves but also their families.

African-American Muslims, although not sep-

arate from the immigrant and expatriate Muslim 

community, have a different history of entering 

Islam, and have evolved many new indigenous 

forms of Islam not found in the larger Muslim 

world. East and West African Muslims came to the 

New World (the Caribbean, South America, and 

North America) as slaves to the British, French, 

Spanish, and Dutch colonies from the 16th 

through the mid-19th centuries. After the Civil 

War (1860–65) most African Muslim ex-slaves 

in the United States returned to their countries 

of origin, although there is testimony from their 

descendants of settlement by African Muslims 

and their families in the coastal islands of Georgia 

and the Carolinas into the mid-20th century. The 

rise and growth of the African-American Mus-

lim community cannot be directly traced to the 

descendants of those African Muslims from the 

slave era except as an issue of awareness among 

modern African Americans of Islam as a religion 

of African origin offering an alternative to post-

slavery Christianity.

Although conversion to Islam among African 

Americans has been overwhelmingly to the Sunni 

tradition, new and sectarian communities have 

received far more public and media recognition 

since the civil rights era. One such sectarian group, 

the  a

hmadiyya

 Community, whose missionizing 

(

dawa

) efforts have been highly successful among 

African Americans, came to America early in the 

20th century. s

UFism

 has also had a strong, but as 

yet not fully charted history among African Ameri-

cans. The development of new African-American 

Muslim communities includes the Moorish Sci-

ence Temple, beginning in 1913 and led by Noble 

Drew Ali; the n

ation

 

oF

  i

slam

, beginning in the 

early 1930s and led by Elijah Muhammad, and two 

of the most recent coming out of New York, the 

Five Percent Nation of Gods and Earths, beginning 

in the 1960s as a youth off-shoot of the Nation of 

Islam and led by Clarence “Pudding” 13X, and 

the Ansaaru Allah Community, beginning in 1970 

and led by Isa Muhammad. All of these communi-

ties share a commitment to a black theology and 

strong apocalyptic tone, which set them apart from 

the mainstream of Islam in America and the world 

Muslim 

umma

.

The later history of the Nation of Islam reflects 

a growing trend toward adopting the Sunni tradi-

tion by the majority of African-American Mus-

lims. Warith Deen Muhammad (d. 2008), after the 

death of his father, Nation of Islam founder Elijah 

Muhammad, led the majority of the community 

toward the Sunni mainstream by directing them to 

learn Arabic, practice the five pillars, and join the 

world Sunni umma, renaming it first the World 

Community of al-Islam in the West and finally the 

American Muslim Mission. Relations between the 

African-American and immigrant/expatriate Mus-

Islamic Society of Salt Lake City, Utah

( J. Gordon Melton)

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