Islam and the North American Dream

Having discussed the Islamic experience of the Muslim slaves from Africa, let us now treat the next phase in the North America encounter with the religion of Islam. This should shed some light on the institutionalisation of Islam in North America.

The first Muslim immigrants who came in search of the ‘North American Dream’ were from the Mediterranean region of the world. Following the construction of the Suez Canal, and in response to the political unrest developing within the Ottoman Empire, a small but growing number of Syrian and Lebanese Arabs began to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Some of these moved to West Africa, others to South America and yet others to the United States. At the beginning of this mass emigration, the great majority from the Ottoman Empire were Christian Arabs. But with the increase in the number of tales of Arab successes in the United States, many of the Muslims reluctantly sailed out of the Middle East for the New World. There is the story of the Lebanese Muslim who, after learning from the captain of the ship he was supposed to board for the United States that there were no mosques in America, quickly jumped off the boat. This hesitant Muslim was gradually replaced by the adventuresome Muslim who wanted to go to the United States in the hope of striking it rich quick and then returning home. Many of these men never went back home. Their fates resemble very much those of the latter-day Muslim immigrants who went to England in the 1950s and 1960s and decided to stay for good. For those who went to America, the decision to stay was occasioned by a new sense of freedom and the realisation of the American dream of acquiring wealth and property beyond their wildest expectations back home.

The Arab Muslim immigrants settled along the Eastern Seaboard and in the Midwestern parts of the United States. Indeed, the first mosques and Islamic centres in continental United States were built among the Arab settlers living in the Midwest.

Between the 1900s and the 1930s, the number of Muslim immigrants began to increase significantly. The Muslims of eastern and southern Europe, following the examples of their non-Muslim neigh­bours, began to emigrate to the United States in search of the American dream. These were the Albanian and Yugoslavian Muslims who were fleeing from the political situations in their countries. Many of these men and women settled in the Eastern Seaboard and the Midwest. Besides these two European Muslim communities, there were also those from the Soviet- dominated areas further to the north. Some of those from Poland have been traced by some writers to the descendants of Genghis Khan. They too settled in the New York/New Jersey area and carved a place for themselves in the biscuit industry. The immigrants from Ruthenia settled in New York (Brooklyn area) before branching out into the neighbouring areas. These Muslims organised themselves into the Mohammedan Society of America with headquarters in Brooklyn. An unpublished study done by a Slavic scholar in the United States traced their point of entry to the country to the turn of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century.

Another early group of Muslim immigrants who came in search of the North American Dream and later settled in the United States were the Muslims of Punjab in British India.

One other case which deserves wider attention is the claim of the late Shaykh Daoud Faisal and his wife Sister Khadija. This couple, who founded the Islamic Mission of America, played an important role in the early propagation of Sunni Islam. In a recent interview, Sister Khadija revealed her Pakistani roots by showing me photographic evidence of her early life. The offspring of a Pakistani Muslim and a black Caribbean mother, she settled in the United States, where she met and married her husband, who was himself the child of a Moroccan father and a Grenadian lady from the West Indies. All these meetings of Muslim immigrants were brought about by their common search for a new and better life in America.

In looking into the relationship between Islam and the North American Dream, one can therefore argue that the search for fortune and the realisation of their dreams motivated many of these early immigrants to plant the seed of their faith in North America. In order for these men and women to survive they embarked upon new careers and new ventures. Following the footsteps of many of the earlier immigrants to the United States, these Muslims, among other things, engaged in peddling wares in and out of the main cities of the Eastern Seaboard. Here the early career of the Prophet of Islam in trade and commerce provided an example to Muslims trying to earn their keep while simultaneously maintaining their faith in a foreign land. Many of these immigrants spoke little or no English at all, and their lives were centred around the small communities within which they lived. They travelled short and long distances selling the goods and merchandise they obtained from their fellow-countrymen or from big wholesalers bent on making fast profits from the services of these recently arrived foreigners. The pattern developed in the north-east and along the Eastern Seaboard (ranging in distance from Quincy, Massachusetts, to Bal­timore, Maryland, where the word Arab, with an emphasis on the A, is still used to describe a street vendor and a pedlar). American business historians tell us that foreign-born Americans dominate the field of small business. This is largely the case because it is the only arena where they can operate without dealing very intimately with the rest of society and suffering discrimination and prejudice at the hands of those who see their poor English and lack of familiarity with Americanisms as weaknesses and liabilities. Given these realities and owing to the fact that the Muslim immigrant who was serious about his faith had to pray five times daily at the appointed times for salat (prayer), one could see how peddling became attractive not only because it was something familiar to the Muslims from the East and the Old World, but also because it granted some leeway to these men and women trying to carve a social and economic niche for themselves in their adopted homeland.

The pattern of peddling which developed along the Eastern Seaboard was reproduced in the Midwest, an area which attracted the interest and attention of many of the early Muslim immigrants. There are several studies of Arab and other Muslim immigrants who migrated to that part of the United States. Some of these immigrants settled in rural areas where they could obtain land and practise farming; other moved into the urban areas where they took up peddling as an occupation; and some others started to hire themselves out to the emerging motor industry. As a result, there developed an Arab and Muslim neighbourhood along the streets near the auto plants in Highland Park and Hamtramch in Detroit, Michigan. At the beginning the Muslim segment of this predominantly Arab neighbour­hood was very small, but as time went on the number rose gradually. Letters describing the successful encounters of Arab Muslims with the American Dream and the comparative comfort of life in America started a chain migration. According to a Detroit Monthly study two years ago (see Further Reading), ‘Over time, almost entire villages were transplanted to the Detroit area. Most of the southern Lebanese here, for example, trace their roots back to two border villages, and there are organizations of Arabs who all come from particular towns, such as Beit Hanina and Ramallah in former Palestine.’