American Muslim Heritage: Five Centuries of Muslim Life in America
T.O. Shanavas, New Age Islam
27 January 2026
Abstract
The presence of Muslims in the United States predates the nation’s founding and extends far beyond modern immigration narratives. This article argues that American Muslim heritage is deeply rooted in the forced migration of West African Muslims and their indispensable contributions to exploration, agriculture, engineering, architecture, law, diplomacy, and moral discourse. From the sixteenth-century Moroccan explorer Mustafa Azemmouri to enslaved Muslim agronomists, cattle herders, builders, and scholars, Muslim knowledge profoundly shaped early American development. Drawing on historical chronicles, economic records, slave narratives, and diplomatic correspondence, this study challenges the enduring myth that enslaved Africans were culturally primitive and demonstrates that Muslim intellectual capital was foundational to American prosperity—though systematically erased from the historical record.
I. Mustafa Azemmouri and the Earliest Muslim Presence in America
One of the earliest known Muslims to set foot on what is now United States soil was Mustafa Azemmouri, known in Spanish records as Estebanico. Born in Morocco, Azemmouri was enslaved by Portuguese traders, sold in Spain, and forced to join the ill-fated Narváez expedition. In 1528, the expedition landed in present-day western Florida.¹ Unlike most of his European companions, Azemmouri survived years of shipwreck, starvation, and hostile terrain. He later emerged as an indispensable member of the expedition, traversing vast regions of what are now Arizona and New Mexico.² Contemporary accounts describe him as a gifted linguist, a master of sign language, a healer trusted by Indigenous communities, and a man skilled in navigation and the use of the astrolabe.³ His presence alone disrupts conventional timelines of American exploration, demonstrating that Muslims were present in North America nearly a century before permanent English settlement.
II. West Africa, Islam, and the Slave Trade
The majority of enslaved Africans transported to the Americas originated from West Africa—a region that, by the late medieval period, had undergone extensive Islamization. Understanding American Muslim heritage therefore requires engagement with the intellectual and institutional history of West Africa itself.
Mosques as Centers of Knowledge
In much of the contemporary Muslim world, mosques primarily function as spaces for ritual prayer and as intellectual echo chambers where inherited interpretations are repeated without sustained critical engagement. This represents a sharp departure from the mosque’s original civilizational role. In the premodern Muslim world, mosques were the nerve centers of intellectual life—universities in the fullest sense. Within mosque complexes, scholars debated theology, jurisprudence, philosophy, logic, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and the natural sciences. Fundamental cosmological questions—such as whether the universe was created in time or eternal—were openly contested.⁴ Instruction took place in open teaching circles (ḥalaqāt), where students were encouraged to question, challenge and refine ideas. Advanced students—what might today be called graduate scholars—then carried this knowledge across Africa, the Mediterranean, and beyond.
These mosque-based institutions created what has been described as “a civilization of international encyclopedic magnitude.” Harvard historian George Sarton famously observed that medieval Muslim civilization achieved a level of encyclopedic knowledge unmatched in its time, noting that: “Briefest enumeration of the Arabic contributions to knowledge would be too long to be inserted here…The creation of a new civilization of international and encyclopaedic magnitude within less than two centuries is something that we describe, but cannot explain…Indeed the superiority of Muslim culture, say in the eleventh century, was so great that we can understand their intellectual pride. It is easy to imagine their doctors speaking of western barbarians almost in the same spirit as ours do of the ‘Orientals.’ If there had been some ferocious eugenists among the Moslems the might have suggested some means breeding out all the western Christians and Greeks because of their hopeless backwardness.” 5
Timbuktu and Sankoré University in Colonial Times
One of the most striking embodiments of this tradition was the Sankoré Mosque and other mosques in Timbuktu. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Sankoré functioned as a fully developed university supported by charitable endowments. Thousands of students studied there, and its scholars attracted audiences from across North and West Africa.⁶ As documented in Tārīkh al-Sudān and modern scholarship by Ousmane Kane and Nehemia Levtzion, Timbuktu housed libraries, produced original scholarship, and operated within a vast transregional intellectual network.⁷ These institutions flourished centuries before any comparable centers of higher learning existed in colonial North America.
There were many other mosques across West Africa that functioned in similar ways as centers of higher learning. West Africa was therefore not “uncivilized” in the colonial era; it possessed highly developed educational institutions and scholarly networks that long predated—and in many cases surpassed—what existed in colonial North America.
III. Who Were the Enslaved Africans?
The transatlantic slave trade forcibly relocated not only agricultural laborers but also scholars, engineers, jurists, veterinarians, and pastoral experts from Muslim West Africa. Evidence from slave narratives, court records, and archival documents confirms the presence of enslaved Muslim intellectuals and learned elites in the Americas. Prominent examples include Ayuba Suleiman Diallo (Job ben Solomon), who came from a distinguished family of Islamic scholars in Senegambia, and Ibrahim Abd al-Rahman, a Fulbe nobleman and Islamic scholar from Futa Jallon (Guinea), captured in 1788—whose portrait is preserved in the Library of Congress.⁸ Drawing on demographic and cultural analysis, Michael A. Gomez estimates that approximately 50–55 percent of enslaved West Africans were Muslims, reflecting the religious composition of major source regions such as Senegambia and Futa Jallon.⁹ This figure may be conservative. As Daniel C. Littlefield and other historians note, colonial planters in the rice-producing Lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia deliberately preferred captives from Gambia, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Guinea, and the broader Rice Coast due to their expertise in irrigation, dike construction, tidal rice cultivation, swamp ecology, cattle herding, and water management.¹⁰ Crucially, these regions—apart from Liberia—were overwhelmingly Muslim: The Gambia (~97%), Senegal (~95–97%), Guinea (~85%), and Sierra Leone (~77–78%), compared with Liberia (~12–13%). This demographic reality strengthens the likelihood that the proportion of Muslims among enslaved West Africans, particularly those assigned to plantation economies and cattle herding may have exceeded 55 percent during key periods.
IV. Agriculture, Rice Technology, and Early American Wealth
Between 1500 and 1800, agriculture formed the backbone of the American economy. European settlers, however, lacked expertise in tropical agriculture, irrigation engineering, and animal husbandry. These deficiencies were remedied through the forced labor and technical knowledge of West Africans. Rice Cultivation and Hydraulic Engineering Enslaved Africans introduced advanced rice-growing systems, including tidal rice fields, earthen dikes, and wooden rice trunks—hydraulic valves that regulated freshwater flow while preventing saltwater intrusion.¹⁰ These systems required sophisticated understanding of fluid dynamics, soil chemistry, and lunar tidal cycles. By the mid-eighteenth century, rice exports from South Carolina exceeded sixty million pounds annually, accounting for more than half of the colony’s export value and generating immense wealth.¹¹ Comparable hydraulic technologies had long existed across the Muslim world, as documented by Thomas Glick’s study of irrigation in medieval Valencia.¹²
V. Architecture, Veterinary Science, and Tabby Construction
In Georgia and Florida, many colonial structures were built using tabby—a durable composite of lime from burned oyster shells, sand, water, and ash. Scholars have traced tabby construction techniques to North and West African architectural traditions.¹³ On Sapelo Island, the enslaved Muslim Bilali Muhammad supervised construction using these methods yet received no legal recognition or credit for his expertise.¹⁴
VI. Cattle Herding and Animal Medicine
Pastoral societies of Muslim West Africa—including Tuareg-influenced regions linked to Timbuktu’s early history—possessed centuries of experience in cattle herding and veterinary science. Enslaved Africans were therefore deliberately selected for work as cowboys, cattle drivers, horse trainers, and dairy workers in South Carolina and Louisiana.¹⁵ Despite these contributions, an 1858 ruling by the U.S. Patent Office barred enslaved individuals from holding patents, ensuring that African intellectual property entered American development without attribution.¹⁶
VII. Muslims and the Founding of the United States
Muslims were not absent from early American political imagination. According to “The Papers of George Washington, Confederation Series, Vol. 1, p. 232,” “If they are good workmen, they may be of Asia, Africa, or Europe. They may be Mahometans [Muslims], Jews or Christians of any Sect, or they may be Atheists.” There were two Muslim women at Mount Vernon of George Washington named Fathimier and Little Fathimier. Fathima. being the daughter of Prophet Muhammed (pbuh). is popular name among Muslims. Thomas Jefferson, in explaining Virginia’s statute for religious freedom, explicitly affirmed protections for “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan [Muslim].”¹⁷ During the North Carolina ratifying convention, James Iredell acknowledged that Muslims could hold public office under the Constitution.¹⁸ Morocco became the first country to recognize the United States, maintaining diplomatic correspondence with George Washington. Jefferson later hosted an ifṭār dinner at the White House in 1808 for a Tunisian envoy, reflecting early American engagement with the Muslim world.¹⁹
VIII. Islam and the Abolition of Slavery
The Lincoln administration sought guidance from Tunisia, Muslim country, which abolished slavery in 1846—nearly two decades before the United States. The archives of Diplomatic correspondence records with the heading, “Papers presented to 39th Congress by President Lincoln,” has the reply the enquiry by Lincoln Administration on slavery. It states that the Tunisian ruler Ahmed Bey framing abolition as a moral imperative rooted in justice: “" Ahmed Bay Concluded: “It is my belief also that …There can be no permanent prosperity [for a nation] without justice, and justice results from freedom…since God has permitted you to enjoy full personal liberty and to manage your civil and political affairs yourselves, …it would not tarnish the luster of your crown to grant freedom to your slaves, … such civil rights are not to be denied to the humblest and meanest of your citizens.”²⁰
VIII. American Muslims in the Twenty-First Century
Today, American Muslims continue to shape national life. According to the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, Muslims donate approximately $4.3 billion annually to charitable causes, with average household giving exceeding national norms.²¹ Muslims are disproportionately represented among physicians and dentists and contribute significantly to U.S. patent activity. American Muslims have also been recognized at the highest levels of scientific achievement, including Nobel Prizes awarded to Ahmed Zewail, Aziz Sancar, Moungi Bawendi, and Omar Yaghi.
Conclusion
Muslim presence in America predates the nation itself. More than half of enslaved West Africans were Muslims—educated, skilled, and embedded in sophisticated intellectual traditions. Their knowledge absorbed into America and generated early American wealth, shaped its infrastructure, and informed its moral discourse. Though their names were systematically erased, their legacy remains embedded in the foundations of the United States. American Muslim heritage is not peripheral to American history. It is constitutive of it.
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FOOTNOTES
1. Andrés Reséndez, A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 34–36.
2. Ibid., 112–145.
3. Ibid., 178–181.
4. George Makdisi, The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981).
5. George Sarton, The History of Science and the New Humanism (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1956), 87–90.
6. Nehemia Levtzion, Ancient Ghana and Mali (London: Methuen, 1973), 137–145.
7. Al-Saʿdī, Tārīkh al-Sudān, trans. John O. Hunwick (London: Routledge, 2000); Ousmane Kane, Beyond Timbuktu: An Intellectual History of Muslim West Africa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).
8. Allan D. Austin, African Muslims in Antebellum America: A Sourcebook (New York: Routledge, 1997).
9. Michael A. Gomez, Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 62–70.
10. Daniel C. Littlefield, Rice and Slaves: Ethnicity and the Slave Trade in Colonial South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981).
11. Ibid., 89–95.
12. Thomas F. Glick, Irrigation and Society in Medieval Valencia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).
13. Littlefield, Rice and Slaves, 142–148.
14. Gomez, Black Crescent, 151–155.
15. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992).
16. U.S. Patent Office, Annual Report of the Commissioner of Patents for the Year 1858 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1859).
17. Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1892), 1:66.
18. James Iredell, speech at the North Carolina Ratifying Convention, July 30, 1788.
19. White House Historical Association, “Thomas Jefferson’s Ramadan Dinner,” 2009.
20. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1865, pt. 3, doc. 318.
21. Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, Amplifying Muslim American Generosity (2024).
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