BackStory; Islam & the United States

This is backstory, I'm Ed Ayers. It's going to get worse and worse. You're going to have more world trade centers. It's going to get worse and worse folks. That's Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump, trying to justify his proposed ban on Muslims entering the United States. Trump's argument, widely condemned today, wouldn't have had much traction 200 years ago either. That's when America entered its first conflict in the Islamic world by going to war with Muslim pirates. Unlike today, religion wasn't even an issue. They're not going to war. I don't think in 1801 with Islam, because they don't actually know enough about Islam to go to war with Islam. Today on the show, they often overlooked history of Islam in America. We'll under the legacy of Muslim slaves and listen for Islamic influences on some of hip-hop's early innovators. Major funding for backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the University of Virginia,

the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is backstory with the American History Guys. Welcome to the show. I'm Brian Ballot. I'm Peter Onov. And I'm Ed Ayers. And we're going to start today near Fayetteville, North Carolina. It was there, back in 1810, that an escape slave held in a local jail attracted a flurry of attention. And what drew curiosity seekers were the strange and unknown characters he had written from right to left on the walls of his cell. I can't imagine the characters being very precise, but I can imagine that someone eventually was able to look at them and say, oh, this looks like Arabic. This is Ala Aureus, who is written about this man, Omar Ibn Said.

Omar knew Arabic, the language of Islam, because he had been an Islamic scholar in West Africa in the years before he was captured and enslaved. After his imprisonment in Fayetteville, Omar was returned to slavery and eventually sold to the prominent Owens family of North Carolina. In the following years, his fame as a slave literate in Arabic steadily grew, which is in part why a few decades later, he was allowed to write his life story. The life of Omar Ibn Said, written by himself, was published in 1831. So this is the only extant autobiography written in Arabic by a Muslim-American slave. Through it, we have access to both his original world that is the world he came from, West Africa, and an attempt to negotiate his situation in the US as a slave. Because Omar was still enslaved when he composed this narrative, it's perhaps not too surprising

that his account of life with the Owens is very critical. Nor does he seem unhappy about his apparent conversion to Christianity. But Araya says that what you see in that document isn't necessarily what it seems, either when it comes to religion or to his feelings about being owned. So one interesting thing about the narrative about his life, his autobiography, is that he opens it with a Quranic Surah. A Surah is a chapter of the Quran. The Surah's central idea is that God is the one who has the power and the ownership of all things and persons. And opening your slave narrative as it were, with a text that says that God is the only one who has ownership of all things, seems to me it could not be just an accidental feature of his autobiography. But a choice that has an organic connection to his possession as a slave, right? In other words, he is using the Surah

to kind of negate the very possibility that one man can own another man. In his autobiography, Omar describes how he was taken from the region of current day synagogue and quote, sold into the hands of a Christian man. In this, Omar was far from alone. As many as 15%, maybe more of the half million African slaves who were brought to British North America were Muslim. But within a generation or two, Islam had faded away in America. And that says Arayis is what makes this unique document so important. Omar's autobiography is not the full story, but it is a clear example of the fact that Islam and America did not just meet on September 11th, 2001, and that they had a lengthy, complex, and more interesting relationship than that.

That lengthy, complex, and interesting history is what we'll be exploring for the rest of the hour today. How has Islam figured in American history before 9-11 and the Islamic State? And what hasn't meant to be a Muslim here in generations past? We've got stories about African Americans rediscovering Islam in the early 20th century and the very different forms of religious practice brought by Muslim immigrants a few decades later. But first, let's return to the story of the Muslims who were enslaved and sent to America. These Muslims were especially vulnerable to capture in West Africa. And that's because they were often on the move. They journeyed to Mecca on the Hajj. They trafficked goods between cities as traders. Scholars, like Omar Ibn Said, traveled to study and teach at institutions far from their home.

And as we heard in Said's story, many of these people were highly literate. Being able to read the Qur'an was and is a central part of Muslim religious practice. And this helps explain why Islam was snuffed out so quickly in the Americas. Omar was the exception for most slaves reading and writing were prohibited. Literacy was a double-edged sword. Absolutely. It was a strength and a weakness as well. This is Sivian Duf, a historian who has written extensively about this first influx of Muslims to America. You know the fact that a religion that is very dependent on the written world, on having the Qur'an and being able to read it, going to school, and having teachers, all of that, of course, was not conducive to the passing on of the religion to children and grandchildren. So the children and grandchildren of Muslim slaves didn't seem able to carry on their forefathers' religion

even if they were aware of it. Do you say there's evidence of that tradition that remains? What were those traces and where do you find them? You know, I read in the WPA interviews, recorded interviews by former slaves. They were talking about their parents and grandparents who had been Muslims in the sea islands. I mean, the women were actually making little rice cakes and they were giving them to the children. I found a song from the, you know, which was not at least until the 1940s talking about those rice cakes. And, you know, I was with they were, the children were happy with those. And what was fascinating is that the women were saying Saraka when they were giving those cakes. And people kind of understood that Saraka was kind of an African word for rice cakes. And it was not.

It was very clearly the Arabic word Saraka, which means free will offering. And so we were here in the American South, this continuation of an Islamic practice and that continued on the plantations here. Another thing that also can be attributed to the Muslim influence is in music. The blues, which is a very, very particular kind of music that really is, you know, quintessential American music. And there is one particular piece, which is recorded by Alan Lomax in Opinit Entry in Mississippi in the 1930s really sounds exactly like the call to prayer. Oh, Lord, I woke up this morning and I was feeling pain.

Oh, babe, I was feeling pain. You know, when you listen to a call to prayer recording in West Africa, the similarity is absolutely extraordinary. In the United States, contrary to the rest of the Americas, Muslims had a better chance of preserving the thinking styles because starting in 1740, drumming was forbidden in the United States. You know, that had been a revolt in South Carolina in 1739. Right.

And people had been called to the revolt by drums. And after that, you know, the decision was passed against drumming. So while people, you know, from Central Africa rely essentially on drums, West Africa Muslims did not. So they could keep on, you know, maintain their kind of singing, which is actually mostly, you know, recitations of the Quran and other things while the others could not. And that really kind of gave rise to that particular type of music that is found only in the United States. So be undue of directs the Lapidus Center for the historical analysis of transatlantic slavery in New York. She's the author of Servants of Allah, African Muslims enslaved in the Americas. Earlier in this segment, we heard from Allah Arayus, a professor at Hofstra University.

He contributed to the book, a Muslim-American slave, the life of Omar Ibn Sayyid. Hello, hello, my son. We're going to turn now to America's first major encounter with the Islamic world on the international stage. On October 11th, 1784, the American ship Betsy and her nine-man crew were captured by Moroccan sailors. The schooner was the first of many US vessels that would be taken by the four Barbary states with Morocco. These included three provinces of the Ottoman Empire, Algeria, Tunis, and Tripoli. The brand-new United States had inherited an old problem. Barbary leaders demanded that foreign ships pay tribute to guarantee safe passage to the Mediterranean. And if countries failed to pony up, well, then things got messy. Barbary corsairs held foreign cruise hostage

for exorbitant ransoms, and sometimes sold them into slavery. All of which posed a problem for Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, both of whom were diplomats in Europe at the time. Adams's solution is it's better to pay the money and be done with it like the British do, like the French do, like the Spanish do, et cetera. This is his story in Frank Cogliano. Jefferson says, no, no, this is a point of principle and the point of principle is very important, because if we give ground on this, we'll end up paying forever, it'll cost us more in the long run to pay tribute than it would to wage war. But in the 1790s, during the Federalist era, the United States does negotiate a series of treaties with the Barbary powers. And they basically grit their teeth and pay tribute and enjoy fairly lucrative trade in the Mediterranean. One of those treaties was the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli, which fell apart as soon as Jefferson became president four years later. He refused to pay any more tribute and in response, Tripoli declared war. It was actually another negotiating tactic, but Jefferson took the declaration at face value. Just a few months into his presidency,

the US was at war with the Barbary states. It was America's first conflict in the Islamic world. Since 2001, there's been a spade of scholarship and publications and online commentary presenting the Barbary War and the first Barbary Wars as the first wars on terror. As though we get the antecedents to our contemporary conflicts there. I just don't think that's the case. I think, although religion is an element of these conflicts. As far as the Barbary states are concerned, this is a financial transaction. They're seeking to raise money and revenue, and this is how they do it. They're essentially taxing people, ships that pass by their coast. And for the United States, it's not a conflict of religion. As the 1796 treaty with Tripoli stipulates, and that was negotiated on behalf of John Adams. The United States was not founded as a Christian country, and it has no conflict with Islam. And I think that characterizes most

of what's going on in this period. This is about trade. This is about power. And I can quote from that treaty ratified by the Senate as the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility of Muslim. It is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries. And it suggests, though, that Tripoli might have thought that there was a religious element, and that's why that explicit declaration that religion is not important was made. Yes, that's true. I mean, when Jefferson and Adams held negotiations with the Tripoli ambassador in London in 1786, this issue came up. They asked, they said, basically, what's your problem with us? Why are you doing this? Yeah, exactly. And the Tripoli ambassador used religion in part to justify that and said, well, yeah,

our profit commands this. And so to some extent, the 1796 treaty is a deliberate repudiation of that. And I think that this is important because both as a statement of fact, but also it's an aspirational statement. It's seeking to separate the United States from the traditional diplomacy and state craft of Europe and the old world, which, of course, was characterized by conflicts between Islam and Christianity. And the United States is attempting to distance itself from that. As far as the ambassador himself is concerned, I think it's an interesting moment because he is using Islam to justify going to war with the United States and opening up these negotiations. But to some extent, he's doing an answer to the question he's asked, and he's perfectly willing to set aside his religious belief, especially if he's given a sizable enough gift from Adams and Jefferson to negotiate peace. So it seems to me it's more of a justification than anything. But the conflict between the two

isn't really over religion. Well, let's look a little bit further. The show is about Americans and Islam and focus on the founders, people like Jefferson, and what their religious views were, and why they would have been less likely, perhaps than modern policy makers, to emphasize religion in their view of foreign policy. It's a moment when revealed Christianity is not that important to the founding generation. I just don't believe it is, and as a consequence, I think if we're talking about Jefferson and the way the other founders saw Islam, I think they're curious about Islam. I think they have some understanding of Islam, and as we know, Jefferson owned a copy of the Qur'an. Exactly. But they're not going to war. I don't think in 1801 with Islam, because they don't actually know enough about Islam to go to war with Islam. They saw it as an alien faith. I don't think they saw it as a threatening faith, and I think that's the important distinction. In part, because for men like Adams and Jefferson,

religion was something one could believe. There were benefits to be derived in terms of the kind of values one could learn from religious teaching, but it wasn't necessarily something that one should engage in wars over. Jefferson believed the old world had been drenched in blood because of religious intolerance. Right. What's the big deal for you about the Barbary Wars? It's clear you don't think that the religious dimension is important. What is important? Well, I think what's really important there is what it tells us about Jefferson. We don't have Jefferson, the quasi-Pasifist who hates war here. We have a Jefferson who's very comfortable using force and using deadly force to advance American interests. We don't have Jefferson who's worried about strict construction of the Constitution as we all learned in school. He's willing to go to war without consulting Congress in the first instance. So there are interesting precedents there in terms of the kinds of issues we debate today about presidential power and war powers and so on.

So it reveals much to us about Jefferson. I don't think it reveals as much as some would suggest about a clash of civilizations. How would you summarize your critique of the deployment of that trope or that idea, a clash of civilizations, in modern discussions of American engagement in the Middle East and North Africa? Well, I just don't think it's very helpful because the trope is often deployed to justify contemporary conflicts. And the implication is that we've always been doing this. We've been in this clash of civilizations for more than two sanctuaries, and it will continue presumably for the next two sanctuaries. Yes, we're involved in prolonged conflict. Yes, we have been involved in conflicts in the Islamic world previously in our history. But the context really does matter. I just don't think we can find the roots of our contemporary conflicts in what happened in North Africa. I think it's far more useful as far as what it tells us

about how the United States makes foreign policy and makes decisions and presidents make decisions about the use of force than it is about a war with Islam. I'll war with Islam. Frank Agliano is a historian at the University of Edinburgh. He's the author of Emperor of Liberty, Thomas Jefferson's Foreign Policy. I noticed that Frank mentioned Jefferson's Quran in passing. I'll tell you the first time that I heard about Jefferson owning a Quran. It was when Congressman Keith Ellison from Minnesota, Ellison was first Muslim member of Congress, took his oath on that very Quran. Peter, how did Jefferson end up with a copy of the Quran in the first place? Well, Jefferson had everything in print that he could get. I think that's important to keep in mind. That is the enlightenment impulse for universal knowledge.

So what does that mean? What does the Quran in his library signify? Well, it signifies that for Jefferson, it's all grist for the mill. It's all part of his effort to understand human nature. In a way, he thinks that religion is false consciousness, Christianity as much as anything else. He's the deist. He believes in natural religion. But the superstitions, the beliefs of peoples, these are all understandable. We have to see past them. That's what enlightenment is all about. So the result of this is notion of universal human nature. That means that we have to acknowledge the integrity of each human being and a right to be wrong. So in a way for people in Jefferson's time, and Jefferson himself joined on the teachings of John Locke and in his writings on religious toleration, to emphasize the most outlandish, the most unlikely. That's what it means.

That's what it means. And you know, it's not just Thomas Jefferson. In the battle for religious freedom in Virginia, it was devout Baptists looking to overthrow the established church and have freedom of worship. They explicitly included Muslims in their account of who should be embraced by this idea of religious freedom. So it's kind of damning with faith, praise. We are so capacious that we will even include Muslims. Is that the caveat? Yeah. Nobody would have anticipated that a congressman from Minnesota, which didn't exist, of course, was going to swear on this current and to proclaim that that scripture from another faith tradition was equal to the Christian scripture. That was so remote. What's different about our ideas today, I think, and this is crucial, is we begin with the idea that we need in this pluralistic society to embrace people

who are different and to acknowledge their sameness. For Jefferson, none of that matters. What matters is this universal principle of natural rights. Jefferson believes in the homogeneity of universal principles. What he's saying essentially is, it doesn't matter what you believe. Now we know it does matter what you believe. It's central to people's identity. And somehow we have to accommodate that. Now you've probably heard how, in the mid-20th century, Islam became important again for African-Americans. The most influential people in the world have ever been in the world. Earlier in the show, we heard about the prevalence of Islam among African slaves in the new world and the traces the religion and culture left behind. Now you've probably heard how, in the mid-20th century, the most influential black Muslim group, the nation of Islam, preached that instead of focusing on integration,

black people should work within their own communities to empower themselves. Under such leaders as Elijah Muhammad and the charismatic Malcolm X, the nation of Islam inspired followers to reclaim the past tied not to slavery but to what they called a superior culture and higher civilization with North African roots, when they felt slavery had tried to erase. By the 1960s, the nation of Islam was the wealthiest organization in African-American history. This is historian Richard Turner. They accumulated that wealth by selling newspapers, buying real estate, establishing small businesses, grocery stores, and restaurants, and major American cities. It turns out this model wasn't new. The nation of Islam owed a lot of its economic practices as well as its religious and cultural principles to an earlier organization called the Morish Science Temple. And to its founder, who went by the name Noble Drew Ali.

Ali was born in North Carolina in 1886 and was one of the more than one million African-Americans who left the South for cities in the North in the 19 teens and 20s. Ali set up his temple in Newark, but later moved it to Chicago where the group became an influential voting block in local elections. Its followers worshiped one god and called him Allah. They read from the circle seven Quran, a version that Ali himself compiled from different sources. The men dressed in fezes or turbines, and the women in wrong dresses, and sometimes hijabs. They prayed on Fridays and followed Muslim dietary rules. By the 1920s, the group had upwards of 30,000 followers. I asked Turner to tell me about Ali and about the philosophy of the Morish Science Temple. He claimed to be a prophet of Islam for African-Americans. And this is one of the reasons why Noble Drew Ali is very important because he is the first major figure in U.S. history

who signals the reemergence of Islam in the United States after reconstruction. What did the word science mean? Take us back a hundred years and explain to me. I get the Morish. I'm Jewish. I get temple. What did science mean? You know, that's a hard one to unpack. But my thinking on this is that he was attempting to look at the history of people of African descent in the United States through an objective scientific lens. Rather than Drew, you know, the non-scientific lens of institutional racism because Noble Drew Ali believed that racial categories were not essential categories that they were socially and politically constructed categories. Ahead of his time in that regard. He was way ahead of this time in that regard. He truly believed that people of African descent

who had been enslaved in the Americas should not call themselves Negro or colored. That instead they should claim a connection to a nation. And for Noble Drew Ali, the important nation was Morocco where there had been a great ancient Islamic civilization. Why would 30,000 or so African Americans need to embrace something as foreign seeming as the Morish science temple? First of all, they made a critical decision that Christians were involved in the thousands of lynchings and burnings of black people at the state that were taking place throughout the South and the Midwest in the early 20th century. You know, they were moving away from that racist element of Christianity, of course, which had also supported enslavement. And I think as people moved to the north and the Midwest

and some people were moving to California or also they were open to new religious messages and political messages because they felt they were free. And some of this made sense to people because we do know that there were African Americans who remembered Muslims who were a part of their family heritage from the period of enslavement. They remembered ancestors who prayed from, you know, at sunrise on a map every day and who fasted at particular times of the year and wore veils. And so there were these memories of Islam. Did Noble Drew Ali have in mind the melting pot model that some Americans held dear? Was he looking at the way, let's say, Italians and Poles and Jews were being treated and noting

that they were nationalities in many instances? Was this a conscious move on his part to kind of Trump race and hope that his followers would be treated like some of these white ethnicities? I think that may have been one of his motivations. Noble Drew Ali was trying to claim respectability for African Americans by getting rid of the stereotypes of people of African descent by getting rid of the Mami and the Jezebel, the Sambo, the Picconini, the brutal stereotypes of African Americans that were invented to oppress people and then reclaiming a whole different history and looking to the Islamic world for inspiration, for peoplehood and nationhood and pride.

Well, thank you for joining us today on backstory. My pleasure. Richard Brent Turner is a professor of religious history at the University of Iowa. One Friday in 1976, a group of men broke into a mosque in Dearborn, Michigan. They didn't want to vandalize it. All they wanted to do was pray. For the mosque members, it was a regular work day. But Friday is a holy day in Islam and these men, recent immigrants from Yemen and Palestine, were shocked that the mosque was closed. It was the opening salvo and a struggle to control not only the building, but how Islam there would be practiced. The mosque in Dearborn was called the Dix, that's Dix Mosque, and was one of just a couple in the area. It had been built in the 1930s

by Lebanese immigrants, who came to work at the local Ford factory. Like many Muslim communities in Michigan, the Dearborn congregation had developed a religious practice, well, that was pretty different from the Islam practice than other parts of the world. So you can understand why the newcomers were confounded. Nabil Abraham grew up attending the Dix Mosque in the 1950s and 60s, and he's written about the struggle there. Nabil, welcome to backstory. Glad to be here. Now, before we get into this struggle that you've written about in the Dix Mosque of the 1970s, why don't you give our listeners a look into what it was like attending the mosque when you were a kid? Well, it was really an evolving mosque. I didn't realize it at the time, but we were really like a Protestant church. Nobody wore a headscarf, you know, instead of Friday prayers, which is the thing that Muslims do around the world. We had Sunday prayers, we had Sunday school.

The basement floor, you might say. That was where all the socializing occurred. There were weddings there, and I remember them. And these were Palestinian weddings. These were people for my father's village, and there would be a fellow with a sword that always caught my attention. Here's a sword comes out of nowhere, and he's brandishing it. And doing, you know, like a Zorba, the Greek dance. There would be a lot of sweat, people moving, and gyrating, and dancing. But did you have any sense that that was unusual, or you might be violating the religious mores of other worshipers? Oh, no, no. To us, it seemed normal, because we didn't have, as a community, we didn't have any other places. And it was the center of life for a small group of mostly Lebanese, and some Palestinian, and a few other miscellaneous Muslims. The mosque was accommodating itself to life in America,

and had been doing so for a while. There was a women's auxiliary. That seemed to be a little bit more modern or progressive. And did those women have much of a say in the mosque? They did, because they were raising funds, and they were pushing for Arabic language instruction, religious instruction, and they were the ones that I found out later through my research, were the ones who were, you know, saying, hey, we're losing our young people to outmarriages who are moving away, who aren't keeping in the community. But the whole time, as I understand it, even before the new immigrants came in the 70s, they're these older directors kind of working in the background, and they already had a lot of issues with those more progressive women. Is that right? Yes. Now, they were the old men. The old men had a hand in building the mosque and steering it. And they were right-wing, or let's put it crusty, okay? But the guys who were coming in from Yemen, the new immigrants,

were looking at the whole picture and saying, this is not authentic. In the old country where we just came from, mosques didn't look like this. They were open on Fridays. A lot of men they're praying. And what's with the women running around without head scarfs? What's with them raising their voices and dictating policy or attempting to? What's with these parties going on? And the old men were looking at these new guys and saying, well, we can use them to block the women and put them back into place. So this new blood comes in and it in some ways serves the purposes of these older times? How does that work out? Well, it worked out very badly for them. And they were told that by the women. They said, you know, you think these guys are your allies? They're going to have your lunch in the future. And they said, well, you know, we're in charge

and we have the legal documents, etc. But they had one, let's call it weakness, they had elections. So was there one key election where the new guys took over? Yes, there was. What happened is they outvoted the old timers, took over the board, and took possession of the bank account of the mosque and they started making policy. And they brought in a man or a sheikh from Yemen, a real hard rigid fellow, a puritanical guy. And the first thing that guy did is told the women that you are, you're not welcome here doing what you used to do. You're going to use a side entrance. Wow. We're going to put up a curtain that's going to be gender segregation and you're not going to raise your voices in here. Well, it didn't take very long for the women to feel, you know, this was not, they weren't welcome. That's when they went and started their own group and the old men were followed them eventually

and they started the new. Why did those old men follow the women that they had just tried to get rid of? They realized that they would have to sit in the back bench, so to speak, or leave. And eventually they left and joined with the women to form a... Women treat them when they arrive with their tail between their legs. They humiliated them. They said, we told you so. This is an important point. The women put together this new Islamic center. They put up the money because their purse, their treasury, remained in their hands, whereas the men came panellists. They made a falsity embargo and lost. What's the scene today in Dearborn? What is the nature of the Islamic community if you could make a big generalization? Well, there's an enormous diversity first off to answer part of that question. What has happened has been this enormous mushrooming

of mosques, banquet halls, schools, Arabic parochial schools, Muslim schools, with this enormous influx of more Yemenis, more Iraqis who weren't present at that time, more Lebanese. In the suburbs, you would find, among the Pakistani professional class of Arabs, say Syrians, Palestinians, you will find less traditional Islam. Although, I mean, they may start shouting, no, no, we are traditional too. I don't want to say yes. We love when people write into our website. Well, there's an enormous diversity. So today, Muslims in Islam are part of the norm. And people who don't agree with the philosophical line, think we could go to another mosque. And how is that different, Nibbio, than the standard story of religion throughout American history of congregations,

fighting over differences of practice, and finally, part of the congregation is sent packing. They've formed their own church in this case, and I'm talking about Protestant 19th century. And, you know, eventually, there's just this proliferation of churches. You really hit the nail on the head. It's part of that trend. It is the Americanization of Islam and America. They're following in the same steps, virtually, as the Christian churches, and you could probably add the Judaic institutions. Well, Nibbio, I want to thank you for joining us on backstory. My pleasure. Nibbio Abraham is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Henry Ford Community College in Dearborn. Peter Edd, when I listened to that last piece,

it strikes me as a story of progress. Dearborn scene, diversification, the emergence of different mosques, it sounds very much like the story of Christianity and Judaism in America. But, of course, on the other hand, you've got profiling of Muslim Americans after 9-11, and, of course, the events of recent weeks where Donald Trump called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States. So, look, we've got 18th and 19th century guys around here to tell us about the long history. Yeah. Is this a longstanding pattern in the way Americans deal with religion? Yeah, absolutely. That is the American story. And I'll give you one example. We like to think that white Protestants, they get a pass, don't they, a bill of religious freedom, but take the Quakers of Pennsylvania in the American Revolution. This was not only an accepted group, it was the dominant group.

It was the Quaker province. Yet, because of their testimony against war, and because of their loyalty to their king, King George III, that is, they were good British subjects, as all Americans were supposedly before the American Revolution, then they were tainted. There was a suspicion. And because there was a war. Yeah, there's a war. And so, this wasn't just vague sentiments. You know, don't trust Quakers, or if they don't swear, and they just affirm, kick them out the door. No, they were sent to a kind of internment in Western Virginia, Pennsylvania, out of harm's way. You know, and at the same time, Peter, and Brian, you had the story running backwards. The statute of religious freedom in Virginia is generally created to protect people that we now think of as being the dominant religious festival. Who was that? Southern Baptist. They were in charge, too, but they are now. They were in jails, where they were. So, in the late 18th century, Baptists were jailed for threatening

the established political order. But then, in the same revolution in which the Quakers are pushed aside, the Baptists are embraced because they need them in order to defeat the British. So, there you have a case of suddenly an ostracized group becoming a mainstream group that today is the most mainstream of all. So, it runs in different directions. You were talking both of you about the way that external relations can suddenly switch things. Yeah. You want to think about a group that seemed to have it made, who really kind of figured out the American story, and that was winning in every way. You might think about German Americans. Yeah, absolutely. Until it comes to be 1915. And, suddenly, World War One comes out. They're ostracized. So, are we struck by the fact that there is always the threat that Peter is talking about, or that there's always this possibility of inclusion that you're talking about, Brian? I tend to be an optimist on these kinds of things. Ed, I think of the progress that American Catholics had made, especially on the patriotic front. I do think there are rough moments,

but we tend to overcome them. I think the point is, Brian, in times of crisis, existential crisis, when the very survival of the nation seems to be hanging in the balance, then there's a lot of pressure against multiple allegiances and loyalties and identities. You got to be an American first. And that claim that everything has to give way to your patriotic identification with this country is one that can be and has been turned against many different groups. And I think the answer to that and the thing we're talking about here is two ideas of what America is all about. If you can't be the person who has multiple identities who can't pursue your own happiness, can't worship your own God, then is this America? So guys, it strikes me that sort of the greatest strength of the United States, it's multiplicity. A moment of crisis is tested to see if it's actually going to become

one of our greatest weaknesses. And I think the point is that any group could be identified as a potential threat. Nobody's safe from that. I think that's the story we get in looking back in American history. Every group is vulnerable and I recurred to the case of the Quakers. You'd think that they'd be comfortable and wealthy and prosperous. It was their colony, Pennsylvania, Penn's Woods, yet the world changed during the American Revolution while our world's constantly changing and who knows what groups will be vulnerable to this kind of criticism, this kind of attack, this kind of threat in the future. Music Throughout much of the 20th century, the story of Islam in America has been a story of two main constituencies. On the one hand, they're the immigrants

and their children who we heard about in the last story. But there are also the African-American Muslims, identified with groups like the Nation of Islam, and before that, the Mourish Science Temple. Our next story concerns the sometimes tense relationship between the two communities and the ways in which hip-hop culture open up a space for them to co-exist. Backstory producer Kelly Jones is going to take it from here. Everybody over there! Everybody over here! This is Africa Bombado, one of the founding DJs of hip-hop culture with funk legend James Brown in 1984. Peace, unity, love, and heaven from! Like lots of his peers, Bombado was raised on funk. He also grew up hearing household debates about afro-centrism, black politics, and the Nation of Islam. Bombado would blend those sonic and political influences and create the universal Zulu Nation, a movement designed to combat street violence by diverting gangs

time and energy into socially conscious hip-hop. The universal Zulu Nation wasn't explicitly Muslim, but its desire to create a positive, afro-centric culture was inspired by the black Muslim organizations that Bombado was hearing about at home. So, hip-hop is emerging but at that very same time in these very same communities, you have a vibrant and active African-American Muslim communities. So, hip-hop is born in that energy. This is Suat Abdul Kabir, an anthropologist who studies the intersections of Islam in hip-hop. She says that these Islamic influences only grew stronger over the next few years. And points out that by 1988, public enemy was explicitly referencing Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan on tracks like, don't believe the hype. In the 90s, arguably, hip-hop's golden age

references to Islam as a positive force in the black community were everywhere. From Wutain clans, ice cube, to Arabian Raqim, like him, Shabaz, poor righteous teachers the tribe called quest most theft, Taliban quality. I mean, in some of these people are Muslim, some of them aren't, but all of them have references to Islamic tradition in their music. All of them have references to this kind of black Muslim ethic around community empowerment and self-determination and alleviating suffering. Busta Rhymes, the Fuji's, a tribe called quest. They all came together in 1996 for Rumble in the Jungle. It's a song that invokes the 5% Nation, a Nation of Islam offshoot steeped in numerology. With references to former Nation of Islam member Malcolm X, and references to Muhammad, the prophet, and the boxer. Or take Sunni artist Yacht, Yacht, Yacht,

Yacht, Yacht, Yacht, Yacht, Yacht, Yacht, Yacht, Yacht, Yacht, Yacht, Yacht, Yacht, Yacht, Yacht, Yacht, Yacht, Yacht, Yacht, Yacht, Yacht, Yacht, Yacht, Yacht, Yacht, Yacht, Yacht, Yacht, Yacht, Yacht, Yacht, Yacht, Muslims. One pretty easy way to fit in is to define yourself by what you're not. Suad says, for Arab and South Asian immigrants to America, that means defining yourself as not black. This, of course, for Muslim immigrants is the challenge, right? Because when you first come to the country, you find there are Muslims who are here, and the Muslims that are here are the very people you're

that you've been implicitly taught you should stay away from, right? And it becomes a source of tension, right? In the American Muslim community, you have people who are sort of like, you know, no, like hell, no, right? We're not doing this hip-hop stuff. This is not a slump, right? On the other hand, there are many American Muslims, most of them young, who aren't black, but who do embrace hip-hop culture. Hip-hop speaks to them because it references familiar beliefs about the world. So Lauren Hill on her first solo album, The Miss Education, right? She has a song called That Thing, right? And she's like, um, saying you're a Muslim, a Christian sleeping with the gin. So gin is an Arabic term, right? That's for, um, well, I don't know what we call them, English, like little devils, I suppose? I'm not sure what you call them, right? Now, if you're like 13 or 14 or 15, 16, 17, whatever, you're young, you're American Muslim. And this is playing on the radio, right? Because when, when Miss

Education came out, like Lauren Hill, she, this is on the radio. This is like top 40, right? Well, that really has a profound effect on who you see yourself to be. Because if it's on the radio, it's cool. And so if someone is talking about what you know, what your mother's talking about, you know, at home, and it's on the radio, then that's cool and you're cool too. But it's not just about passive listening, says Huad. She's noticed that a lot of young Muslims in Chicago, many of whom aren't black, are also energized by hip-hop culture to get actively involved. So they weren't just sort of consuming the music passively, you know, sort of in their bedrooms, you know, writing down lyrics and buying new sneakers, they were also sort of like doing sort of marches or, you know, sort of trying to organize young people on the south side of Chicago, right? To sort of alleviate or to sort of deal with the realities of what black life is to. And it's the relationship between Islam and hip-hop that gives Muslim communities in Chicago common ground. It's common ground that extends beyond race or ethnicity. It really challenges this idea that the

only way you can really be sort of quote unquote authentically Muslim is if you're sort of doing things the way people do elsewhere. So whatever they do someplace else, that's Islam. You should do it that way. And if you don't do like that, it's not authentic. And what is Islam and hip-hop, like their relationships, it really challenges that because it says, well, no, right? Because we're Muslim. We've been doing this for a while. We have the same kind of like moral priorities. We're interested in the same sorts of things. And we're doing it as Muslims. And we're doing it not based on practices elsewhere. We're based on a tradition that's been established and developed here in the United States. Like I don't think there's another site that does that like hip-hop does for Muslims in the United States. That story was produced by Kelly Jones with help from Suad Abdul Kabir in

anthropologist at Purdue University. That's going to do it for today. We'll be waiting for you online. Leave us a comment to let us know what you thought of today. Show what backstory and radio.org. And while you're there, take a moment to weigh in on our upcoming shows. We're working on episodes about the history of passing, trial-watching, and different states in the spotlight. We're also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter at backstory radio. Whatever you do, don't be a stranger. Today's episode of backstory was produced by Tony Field, Nina Ernest, Andrew Parsons, Kelly Jones, and Robert Armingall. Our staff also includes Bridget McArthie

and Emily Gattick. Our digital producer is Juliana Dority and Jamal Milner is her engineer. We had helped from Kole L. High and Emily Charnock. Special thanks this week to David Sukhanat and Timothy Marr. Major support for backstory is provided by the anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Additional funding is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment. And by history channel, history made every day. Brian Ballot is professor of history at the University of Virginia. Peter Oneth is professor of history emeritus at UVA and senior research fellow at Monticello. At heirs is professor of the humanities and president emeritus at the University of Richmond. Backstory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the

Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Backstory is distributed by PRX, the public radio exchange.