American Muslim Revival
From the late 1800s to the early 1930s, the American Muslim population experienced an enormous revival. Across the country, immigrant Muslims were starting to gather and form local communities, small groups of white Christians were converting to Islam, and tens of thousands of African Americans were rediscovering and embracing the Muslim roots of their enslaved ancestors. These developments throughout the American Muslim landscape were not occurring in isolation. Major historical events and broad societal transformations were reshaping not just the United States, but the entire world, and these were playing an important role in fostering the many new changes occurring within the American Muslim community.
A Time of Transition
Historical Background
At the global level, industrialization, imperialism, and international wars were significantly transforming the lives of virtually every person on the Earth. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw rapid economic expansion through the emergence of the Second Industrial Revolution. The increasing use of railroads, electricity, and factories quickly accelerated the formation of modern industries and in the process transformed the fundamental ways people lived and worked. Often, this economic expansion was imposed upon nations through imperialism.
Western states, using their military, political, and financial power, forced many Asian, African, and South American countries to participate in subservient economic roles that would primarily benefit the Western nations. Whether it took place within the West or was imposed through imperialism, however, modern industrialization tended to severely disrupt traditional ways of life. Whole populations, when they were not outright displaced, were often forced to completely change their social, educational, and cultural structures, and tens of millions of people left their homelands in search of security and prosperity in other countries.
In the meantime, as countries competed for power and resources, tensions between nations increased, ultimately erupting as a global military conflict, the First World War (1914-1918). It has been estimated that the War led to the deaths of upwards of twenty million people and impacted nearly every country in the world.
As all of this was occurring on the global stage, the United States was undergoing its own transformations, many of which were connected to the broader changes taking place around the world. Immigration, for instance, grew tremendously.
Other transformations, though, were more localized to the US. Following the Civil War and the freeing of four million African Americans from bondage, as the national government attempted to restructure the country’s economic, political, and social systems to integrate the former enslaved as full citizens in an effort known as Reconstruction.
Reconstruction, however, is widely considered to have been a failure and instead Jim Crow, a system of overt unequal treatment of African Americans, became the new structure, reinforced through racially prejudiced laws and vigilante violence. More changes were on the horizon for African Americans, though. With over four million American men either being drafted into or volunteering for the armed forces during the First World War, Northern jobs needed filling, and African Americans, who overwhelmingly lived in the South, began moving northward in large numbers, in what is known as the Great Migration. It would be in the Northern cities where for the first time African Americans began encountering the immigrant Muslims and early converts, and it was there, too, where they began rediscovering Islam.
Key Figures
Timeline of Events
Timeline
1893
Alexander Russell Webb, a former American consul who had converted to Islam, establishes a mission to promote Islam in the United States. He speaks at that year’s World’s Fair.
1912
Latest likely date of arrival in the United States of Satti Majid, a Sudanese Muslim missionary.
1913
Noble Drew Ali is said to have established an Islamic organization for African Americans that is rumored to have been called the Canaanite Temple.
1914
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Marcus Garvey establishes the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), a black nationalist movement that would become highly influential throughout the Atlantic world and was responsible for endorsing Islam as a legitimate religion for African Americans.
1920
Mufti Muhammad Sadiq, a representative of the Ahmadiyya Muslim community, begins promoting Islam to Americans, quickly turning his focus mainly towards African Americans.
1912
Islam and Muslims are starting to be promoted regularly with the UNIA, particularly through the efforts of the writer Duse Mohamed Ali.
1923
Earliest publicly-verified date for the Canaanite Temple, which was being led at the time by one Abdul Hamid Suleiman.
1925
Noble Drew Ali establishes in Chicago the Moorish Temple of Science, which would soon change its name to the Moorish Science Temple of America (MSTA).
1927
The African Moslem Welfare Society of America, one of the first Sunni organizations with several African American members, is established in Pittsburgh by Satti Majid.
1929
Possible start of the Islamic promoting efforts of Sheikh Daoud Ahmed Faisal in New York.
1929
Noble Drew Ali dies and the MSTA breaks into several factions.
1930
Muhammad Ezaldeen, a former leader in the MSTA who recently embraced Sunni Islam, briefly attempts to establish a Muslim colony in Turkey before moving to Cairo where he begins to form a new Sunni movement for African Americans, what would later be known as the Addeynu Allahe Universal Arabic Association.
1930
Paul Nathaniel Johnson, an influential African American Ahmadi leader based in St. Louis, creates a new Islamic movement called the Fahamme Temple of Islam and Culture.
1930
W.D. Fard, also known as Fard Muhammad, establishes the Nation of Islam in Detroit.