Omar ibn Said – Image: Aeon
Faizel Patel – 09/12/2020
A historian and senior editor of the Aeon magazine says Muslims came to America a century before Protestants, and in great numbers.
Sam Haselby was speaking to Radio Islam on Monday about the history or America and also his book “The Origins of American Religious Nationalism”.
In an essay on the Muslims of early America, Haselby writes that that the first words to pass between Europeans and Americans (one-sided and confusing as they must have been) were in the sacred language of Islam.
Haselby questioned whether the history of the first Muslims were forgotten or just ignored.
“The answer really lies in how the dominance of the United States nationalism over historical writing and the domination of the institutions especially Harvard University and Yale University that the Puritans founded in writing the history of the United States.”
Haselby says Omar ibn Said’s autobiography, the only known extant autobiography of a slave written in Arabic in America is key to the findings.
“ibn Said’s biography provide a kind of testament, a sort of document that nobody could deny that there was a written document and we knew there was an Arabic speaking Muslim in early America.”
Haselby says he decided to write the essay about Muslims in America because he became frustrated with the universal perception and discussions presuming that Muslims were somehow new to America.
Listen to the interview with Sam Haselby
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