Islam in America

The tremendous growth of Islam in 20th-century America—in which immigration, propagation, and conversions have made it the nation’s third-largest (perhaps second-largest) religion—is a powerful indicator of the expansion of American religion beyond Judeo-Christian tradition.

Having spread across the Near and Middle East, eastward to India and the East Indies, westward to Spain, Portugal, and northern and western Africa, southward into east Africa, and northward into southeastern Europe, Islam came to North America in the 16th and 17th centuries with Spanish colonizers and the African slave trade. (Fifteen to 20 percent of African-American slaves were Muslim by some estimates.) Some white Americans began to show interest in Islam in the late 19th century, and Alexander Russell Webb (1846–1916), U.S. consul to the Philippines, founded a short-lived mosque (Muslim place of worship) in New York after converting in Manila in 1888.

The new immigration produced the first significant and enduring American Muslim communities. Relatively small numbers arrived in the late 19th century—mostly from Syria, Jordan, (what is now) Lebanon, Turkey, the Balkans, and Poland—and settled in the industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest. New York and Chicago became important population centers for them, but attraction to the automobile industry produced noteworthy communities in Michigan, including Detroit and Dearborn. Other significant communities appeared in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and—for eastern European Muslims—Buffalo, New York.

A much larger and more diverse influx occurred after World War Two, particularly after immigration laws were liberalized in 1965. Syrian and Lebanese immigrants were now joined by larger numbers of Indians and Pakistanis seeking economic opportunity, Albanians and Yugoslavs fleeing communism, Egyptians and Iranians fleeing political oppression, and Palestinians fleeing the new state of Israel. Students too arrived in large numbers from across North Africa, the Middle East, and south and Southeast Asia. Arabs remained the largest element in American Islam, but by the 1980s immigration had made south Asians a particularly substantial presence and, in combination with African-American conversions to Islam, swelled the number of mosques from about twenty in the early 1970s to more than 1,000 by the 1990s.

With expansion came national organization, growing interethnic unity, and a degree of Americanization. American Muslims founded the Federation of Islamic Associations in 1954, followed in 1981 by the Islamic Society of North America. And while traditional differences persist between Islam’s Sunni and Shi’ite sects, the American setting has minimized them. Muslim practice, too, has changed, with Sundays becoming increasingly important for community gatherings and the religious education of the young. Worship in Arabic remains mandatory and widespread, but sermons and informal prayer in English have helped promote community in the growing number of multiethnic mosques. Such organizations as the American Muslim Council and the Council of American Islamic Relations have promoted interaction between African-American and ethnic Arab Muslims.

Despite these changes, American Islam’s early geographic pattern remains. Immigrant Muslims and their descendants remain most heavily concentrated in the cities of the Northeast and Midwest and, outside those regions, in such urban areas as Houston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Other concentrated communities have formed in places climatically similar to countries of origin, as with Iranians and Arabs in Florida, Texas, Arizona, and southern California, or geographically convenient, as with Muslims from south Asia and the Pacific Basin in Honolulu, San Francisco, and Seattle.

Encompassing perhaps 8 million Americans and present in most sizable American towns, Islam has become a major American faith.