美國的穆斯林歷史由來已久，從15世紀時，則已經參與反殖民戰役、反歧視與反政府非法監控的市民運動。
When I teach history related to
Islam or Muslims in the United States, I begin by asking students what names
they associate with these terms. The list is
consistent year after year: Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad, and Muhammad Ali.
All of these individuals have
affected U.S. history in significant ways. If we take a step back and look at
the messages these figures communicate about Muslims in U.S. history, we see a story dominated by men
and by the Nation of Islam. Although important,
focusing solely on these stories leaves us with a skewed view of Muslims in
U.S. history. Even these examples are a stretch. Most of my
students reference 9/11 as the first time they heard of Muslims.
Mainstream textbooks do little to
correct or supplement the biases that students learn from the media. These books distort the rich and complex place of Muslims
throughout U.S. history. For example, Malik El-Shabazz (consistently referred to first by the name Malcolm X rather
than the name he chose for himself before his assassination) is framed as the
militant, angry black man, the opposite of the Christian, nonviolent Martin
Luther King Jr. Muhammad Ali is another popular representative of Muslims in
U.S. history textbooks but is misrepresented through the
emphasis on his boxing career rather than his anti-racist activism
against the Vietnam War.
Muslims have been part of our story
from the beginning. For example, although U.S.
history textbooks wouldn't dare leave out the sanitized story of Christopher
Columbus, they fail to include the Muslim-led revolt against his son,
Diego, on Dec. 25, 1522. Armed with the machetes they used
to cut cane, these rebels, including enslaved West African
Muslims, succeeded in killing a number of colonial settlers
before the insurrection was quelled; of the 15 bodies recovered, nine were
Europeans.
As Michael Gomez explains in Black Crescent:
The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas, Muslims were among the first to resist
the colonialists. In fact, colonial authorities had
long seen these "Moors" as a threat. According to Sylviane Diouf,
author of Servants of
Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas, colonial
documents between the Crown and conquistadors describe enslaved Muslims as
"arrogant, disobedient, rebellious, and incorrigible." Diouf writes
that no fewer than five decrees were issued against these rebels in the first
50 years of colonization. Records from as early as 1503 confirm a request by
Nicholas de Ovando, the governor of Hispaniola, to Queen Isabella asking her to
restrict further shipment of enslaved Muslims because they were "a source
of scandal to the Indians, and some had fled their owners." It's essential that students know that resistance to colonial
domination has always been a part of our history -- and Muslims played a role
in this resistance from the earliest days.
U.S. history textbooks generally
present "slaves" as a monolithic group, absent
of history, culture, and scholarship. But stories of the
Muslim presence in the early United States give examples of the rich
multicultural diversity among enslaved Africans.
Although most of the first Muslims
in the United States were brought as slaves, some came as free men. Mohammed Ali b. Said, or
Nicholas Said, fought in the Civil War. He was born around 1833 in the Islamic state of Bornu near
Lake Chad. He was enslaved around 1849 and sold numerous times throughout the
Middle East, Russia, and Europe. He traveled to the United States as a free man
in 1860 and became a teacher in Detroit. Said joined the 55th Regiment of
Massachusetts Colored Volunteers and served in the Union Army until 1865.
Muslims are also part of the rich history of
resistance to Jim Crow. In the 1920s,
P. Nathaniel Johnson, who changed his name to Ahmad Din,
led a multiracial integrated mosque in St. Louis. The
Ahmadiyya Muslim community in the United States (followers of Mirza Ghulam
Ahmad, who began an Islamic renewal movement in India in 1889) vocally opposed
segregation, supported Marcus Garvey's UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement
Association), and included articles in their newspaper, The Moslem Sunrise,
criticizing U.S. racism.
Muslims also participated in union
activism. One of them was Nagi Daifallah, a Yemeni Muslim
farmworker murdered for his participation in the 1973 California grape strike. Nagi was an active member of the UFW
(United Farm Workers of America). On Aug. 15, Nagi joined a weeks-long strike
in Lamont, Calif., where he worked at the nearby El Rancho Farms. Fifteen
strikers met early that morning at the Smokehouse Café when Kern County
Sheriff's Department Deputy Gilbert Cooper arrived to harass the workers. The
deputy targeted Nagi, who tried to run away. Cooper ran after him and smashed
Nagi in the head with a long five-cell metal flashlight. Nagi's spinal cord was
severed from his skull. Two sheriff's deputies picked Nagi up by the wrists and
dragged him for 60 feet, taking no care to protect his head, which repeatedly
hit the pavement, and then dumped him in the gutter. Deputies arrested workers
who attempted to help Nagi, and he died shortly thereafter.
U.S. Muslims today continue the legacy
of a people's history. Linda
Sarsour, executive director of the Arab American Association of
New York, is an outspoken critic of stop-and-frisk and proponent of immigration
reform -- she was arrested
in October 2013 at the national immigration reform protest in
Washington, D.C. She is also at the forefront of
protests against the NYPD and CIA-sponsored secret surveillance program against
Muslims that began in 2001. Not only is Sarsour's nonprofit
one of the organizations targeted by the illegal spying program, so too is her children's
soccer league. The NYPD included the league in its community outreach
program until further investigation found that the NYPD's
involvement was simply a way to spy on the community. As Sarsour explains
in a Democracy Now! interview, "[W]hat it does is it
creates psychological warfare in our community." Considering the fact that
Muslims have
been routinely disappeared by the U.S. government since 9/11, her
willingness to stand up to the NYPD and CIA is even more courageous.
Students need these stories of
Muslims throughout U.S. history in order to talk back to the dominant media
stereotypes of Muslims as lying,
violent,
brown foreigners.
If we gave students the historical examples in this article and more, they would realize that the history of Muslims in the United
States is not limited to 9/11 and, in fact, spans from the late 15th century
through today.
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