Mustafa Umar – How Islam Came to America
AI: Summary ©
AI: Transcript ©
Assalamu
alaikum,
Alhamdulillah.
It's good to see a great turnout here.
InshaAllah, the reason is not because you thought
they were free burgers, but you actually came
for the topic, I hope. InshaAllah.
I just wanna thank the,
Dawah and outreach committee,
brother Jamala, all the volunteers.
This takes a lot of work to actually
set up a program like this, especially when
there's a lot of food involved,
and some good better advertising,
little extra than we normally do. So, inshallah,
may Allah reward each and every single one
of them. And if you see one of
the volunteers, just, you know, just thank them
and just encourage them, you know, to to
keep on doing it because just just let
them know that this this helps our masjid
and you really appreciate what they're doing. And
try to be like them, inshaAllah, one day
you can volunteer for even one program and
it helps a lot, inshaAllah. So so without
further ado, let's get started. Bismillahrahmanirrahim,
Alhamdulillah, Wassalaahuasalaamu
Ala Rassulaahuwaba.
So
let's start. The history of Islam in America.
First of all,
why do we care about this?
Why should we care about this?
The first reason why we should care
is because
most Americans
have been taught a myth,
and that myth is that Columbus
discovered America,
and that Muslims
primarily arrived
around 1965
and after. So they're newcomers to this country.
Now how many of you,
is anyone did anyone here
arrive in America before 1965?
Anybody?
There's not a single person.
Do you know
personally
anyone
who's a Muslim that arrived prior to 1965?
Okay. So you have some people that are
not African American or white?
Still know some. Okay, good.
Alright. So most people don't, but quite We
got quite a few in the audience. So
this is important, we need to
deconstruct these 2 myths that exist. Now let's
take a look. This is something which most
people learn.
So this is a textbook
called American History, A Survey.
This is the 1987
edition. It's been somewhat updated a little bit,
but just read what this says. This book
is one of the most common AP US
history textbooks. Who took AP US history in
class? A few of you, AP US History?
Okay. Me too. So
that's one textbook that's being taught. The second
place that this book is being taught is
in universities around the country.
This is the 4th most popular textbook
in universities across America.
Now just look at what it says.
It says in the beginning,
for 1000 of centuries,
the continents we know as the Americas
stood empty of mankind
and its works.
The story of this new world
is the story of a creation
of a civilization
where none existed.
There was no civilization that existed according to
this textbook.
This was just like an empty and uninhabited
land, maybe a few savage people roaming around,
and somehow,
you know, Columbus came and discovered everything.
The problem with that
is that it's false,
and that there's a lot of evidence
that it's false.
So there have been civilizations
living in America,
flourishing in these Americas, north and south, for
over 10000 years. People have lived in America.
They have settled in the Americas, both people
who we think are native and people who
came from different places, not only Muslims, but
many different generations, many different communities,
and they built great civilizations,
and they left behind lots of ruins of
the civilizations that they built.
So the problem is this idea that Columbus
discovered America
is still taught quite widely. Because we're in
California, we're a little bit more liberal of
a community,
textbooks are changing quite a bit, and they're
saying a little bit different narrative about Columbus,
but then the Muslim narrative is not very
strong in there.
So the problem is that from European eyes,
Columbus discovered America because you can't discover a
country that's actually inhabited by people. You walk
into someone's home and you break down the
door and you kill everyone, and then you
say, I discovered this house. You can't say
you discovered the house, you can say you
conquered and dominated the house, but you can't
say you discovered it. So the reality is
in 14/92,
Columbus was discovered.
Okay. That's what really happened. It's the other
way around. Right? And it's important to understand
that because if you look at a world
map, we have to understand history. Okay? So
Columbus is sailing from here, this is Europe
over here, and he's sailing over here to
the Americas. Now what's going on is he
sails this way,
and when he gets here, he thinks he's
going to India, and he thinks he landed
in India over here.
It doesn't take a very intelligent person to
figure out that India
is all the way on the other side
over here, so he's very
very far.
He's completely lost, he's on the other side
of the earth.
Right? So And that's why he called the
people Indians because he thought that he had
arrived in India. So that's it's pretty
it's pretty problematic that we're being taught this
narrative on a regular basis. So it's important,
number 1, for us to know the truth,
and that's what we want to learn as
Muslims and just as people. That's the number
one reason why we care about this history.
The number two reason why we care about
this history is because many people are born
in the United States, and they identify first
as Americans.
You can identify simultaneously
like doctor Tarek Ramadan, and may Allah liberate
him. As he says, you can be 100%
American and 100% Egyptian at the same time.
Some people wanna do that, that's fine. Other
people, they say, look, I'm actually more American
than I am Egyptian, I'm more American than
I am Pakistani, I'm more American than I
am
Syrian, or whatever it may be. Right? So
what's happening is
that those people who grew up in this
country, those Muslims who grew up in this
country,
they are pressured to give so much priority
to the culture in which they come from,
that they feel that there's this discomfort
of being identified
internally as an American, even though you speak
English as your first language, you dream in
English,
most of the people you associate with are
Americans, maybe don't even speak another language besides
English, maybe you don't speak another language besides
English, but somehow the culture is given more
precedence than the religion of Islam, and that's
problematic.
And sometimes people get criticized for being too
American. Right? You've heard that. Right? You become
too Americanized.
Something's wrong with you. You know, what's going
on with you? You can say you have
bad character or bad akhlaq. That's not about
being Americanized.
Many people in different parts of the world
have bad character. It's not a characteristic
of being an American.
So it's important for people
that they feel confident
in their American identity,
Whether that's a 100%, 100% identity, or it's
a American first parents are from the back
home country identity, however you wanna identify that.
So that's reason number 2. Reason number 3
we wanna study this is that it has
to do with your self image.
Since September 11th, if you're Muslim,
people have probably at least come up to
you or maybe come up to your friend
or something like that, and says, Hey, where
are you from?
And this is not the where are you
from because I'm from there, cool, we both
speak Arabic or we both speak Urdu. This
is the 'where are you from' like
you're not really American.
They're trying to rob you of your American
identity and saying that you don't actually belong
here.
And that's a problem.
And how do you respond to that? How
does that make you feel internally? Because people
are saying that you are the Johnny come
latelies.
The Johnny come lately basically according to the
definition
is
somebody
who starts a job or starts an activity
later than other people, right? And then they
use the experience and the knowledge of others,
the privilege of others to obtain some kind
of advantage over them. So basically when people
are saying, you know, well where did you
come from? No no no, where did your
parents come from? And they want to know
your back background, what they're trying to do
is they're trying to rob you of the
fact that you are an American as well,
and they want to say that you know
what, we
are American, you're not, and therefore we are
entitled to certain privileges, and you're not.
And that's why it's important to know this
history, because it's not the reality. Muslims were
here,
they were here before Columbus,
they were here with Columbus,
they were here after Columbus, and they've been
here every single generation. So we're gonna see
that, and also there's a hypocrisy involved, and
there's a racism involved.
Because when
an Irish American
or an Italian American
comes to America, they migrate to America after
world war 1 or after world war 2.
A German American
migrates to America after world war 2,
and then somehow their their children, they grew
up speaking without a German accent, they are
looked at as being 100%
American
because of their white European background.
But if someone has a different complexion, they're
gonna say, Where are you from?
They don't ask people, Where are you from?
Are you from Germany? Are you from Ireland?
Are you from which other country you're from?
If you don't look that particular race, you
know, that particular shade. So that's important to
know as well.
And lastly, we wanna know this so we
can understand and contextualize
the present situation which we're in. Why is
Islam in America today the way it is?
How much time have we had to develop
institutions?
How much resources have we had?
And what are obstacles that got in the
way of developing Muslim institutions, strong Islamic institutions?
So we're gonna see that insha'Allah. So to
give you an overview,
k, we're gonna start with pre Columbus,
We're gonna look at pre independence of America.
We're gonna look at post independence of America,
and then we're gonna look at what I
call the modern period. Okay. Which is like
18 eighties and afterwards. Okay. So let's start
with pre Columbus. Okay. We have at least
3
documented
Muslim voyages
from Andalusia
to the Americas.
K. Andalusia or Andalusia
is Andalus.
This is Spain.
And Muslims had controlled Spain for over 800
years. So they developed science. There was a
golden civilization which existed at that time. And
it's it's, you know, it's important to know
a little bit of the history. I'm gonna
give you like super summarize nutshell because we
don't have that much time to cover everything.
This is literally just a few, you know,
aspects of history of Islam in America because
it's a very vast topic. Okay? So Muslims
were in Andalusia, they had their golden age,
they had universities, they had amazing scientist, they
had geographers.
So what's happening is we have at least
in the documents that we found, you have
to understand something,
most of these documents, most of the books
that were produced, they were wiped out completely.
They were burned. All the books were burned.
So we're talking about the remnants of the
books that we have with us. We have
documentation of at least 3 voyages. One of
them is by a scholar
by the name of Abu al Hassan Ali
al Mas'udi. He's a very famous scholar, he's
well known. He died in the year 957.
Understand, Columbus is 1492.
K? So just so you have a good
understanding of the time frame here. Right? As
we were Many of us were taught in
school, 1492,
Columbus sailed
the ocean blue. Right? That's what we were
taught. Right? So now we're talking 1492,
we're talking about
957.
Okay? 957,
or 500 years prior to that. Mas'udi is
writing
in his book, murul jazahb, the Meadows of
Gold. And he basically
documents a voyage of a Muslim by the
name of Hashharsh ibn Saeed ibn Aswad.
So this guy
basically went and traveled over the Atlantic Ocean.
Again, looking back at the map right here,
I know we don't study too much geography
in America anymore. So here, looking back over
here, this is Spain. K? This is where
Muslims were, this is where all the, you
know, intellectual development was, lot of voyages and
everything. Science, mathematics, all that golden civilization happened.
Muslims dominate this entire region over here. So
what's going on over here, this is the
Atlantic Ocean. I'm sorry if I'm being too
elementary but I know some people, they need
to brush up on their geography. Okay? This
is pacific over here. You know Now when
you go to the beach in California, we're
actually in the Pacific Ocean. Just wanna remind
you about that. Alright? Here is the Atlantic
Ocean, and this is how you get from
Europe to America or any part of these
Americas. You gotta cross the Atlantic Ocean. And
it's a it's a long journey,
especially without modern technology, and it's not a
it's not a, the safest journey if you
don't know exactly where the currents are. So
what's happening here is we got a documentation
in this book prior to 957
where
is saying that we got Khashkhash ibn Sa'id
bin Aswad, who's a sailor, he's going and
he traveled past the Atlantic Ocean, he discovered
a previously unknown land in the year 889,
889 c e. And then he came back
and he returned with a shipload of treasures
and he came back to the region. So
he writes specifically, he says, in the ocean
of fogs,
which is the Atlantic ocean, that's well known,
that's what he's referring to. He says, there
are many curiosities
which we have mentioned in detail in our
other book, Akbaruz zama. On the basis of
what we saw there,
adventurers who penetrated it on the risk of
their life, some returning back safely,
others perishing in the attempt. So what he's
saying is people have been crossing the Atlantic
ocean from Muslim Spain. Some of them died
along the way, some of them have went
and they actually came back. And he says
there was a certain inhabitant of the city
of Cordoba. Hey, Cordoba.
He Which was in Spain. He says his
name was Khush Khush. By name, he assembled
a group of young men, his co citizens,
and he went on a voyage on this
ocean. He traveled along and after a long
time he went, he returned back with a
bunch of gold and valuables. And then he
said, every Spanish
every Spaniard knows this history. Meaning like this
is so well documented, we don't even need
to go in detail because every Muslim in
Spain at the time al Mas'udi is writing
because everybody knows this. Everyone knows the details
about it, so we don't need to go
into it. What happens of course, 1000 years
later we don't know the story very well.
So now you're like, Oh, I wish you
would have given us more details. He's like,
There's no need to mention it, everybody knows
this, except he didn't think that our history
would be completely wiped away.
So he didn't write more details. So that's
one journey,
documented evidence that's there. 2nd evidence, there was
a scholar by the name of Ibn Farooq.
He mentioned in 9 99, he landed in
the Caribbean and he actually came back. We
won't go into that in detail, but the
3rd documented evidence that we have is
al Idrisi.
Okay? Muhammad al Idrisi is a very famous
Muslim scholar as well. He died in the
year 11/65.
So he was living in Sicily,
and what happened was later on in Muslim
Spain, there was some
turbulence, there was some wars going on. So
he decided, you know what? I'm gonna go
and work in Sicily right now, under a
Christian king, and do my research and science
because there's some problem going on during his
time. So he was working there, and he's
Muslim. And in the year 1154,
he produces
this map. And this map was the most
accurate map of the entire world in pre
modern times. No one has rivaled his map
anywhere in any civilization
in terms of its accuracy,
during its time or even 2 centuries later.
It took them at least 200 years to
get to where al al Idrisi was actually
writing. So he was an inspiration for Christopher
Columbus, for Vasco de Gama, for all of
these people to develop their maps. There's something
interesting about his map though by the way.
What is one thing you notice that's
something strange about it? Outside of, you know,
Africa being long and all that.
Look at the top of it.
See the top? The text is upside down.
That's because this map, I'm showing the map
to you upside down.
So for Idrisi,
Africa was on the top.
And south and south, and Europe, and Asia,
it's on the bottom.
Their map was flipped.
And I know you would like find it
weird and confusing, so I flipped it for
you and I made it upside down for
you. His actual map was the other way
around. That's the way people used to view
the world. We're so used to viewing the
world as
North America being north and up on the
top, and South America being down on the
bottom, it's actually flipped. Muslims looked at it
on a flipped way because
on what basis do you say it should
be like this or like this? It's the
same thing. Now how do you know it
should be this way or that way? There's
no it just depends on your angle, on
which you're viewing it, right? So this is
the way they used to view things. So
anyways,
he writes
that that he writes about the details. He
says, There were 8 Muslims
who sailed from Lisbon.
Anyone know where Lisbon
is? Portugal. Okay. Lisbon, Portugal, which is right
over here, corner of Spain, it's part part
of the, Iberian Peninsula, which is greater part
of Spain. And he said there are 8
Muslims sailed from Lisbon, they went westward for
31 days,
they arrived on an unknown island,
and they were captured
by the natives of that place for 3
days.
They were captured
for 3 days.
Okay.
And what happened? After 3 days,
a translator
arrived
who could translate Arabic for them so they
can actually understand what's being said. The translator
translated the Arabic, arranged for their release and
finally they said, you know what? Okay, we're
gonna let you go, we're gonna send you
back home. And what happened after that? They
continued
to journey to the same region and they
had contact between these two groups.
Now here's the interesting thing.
What is an Arabic
translator doing in the Americas?
How do you get You know how long
it takes to learn Arabic? If you ever
taken an Arabic class,
you probably dropped out. That's what happens to
a lot of people, you know. They don't
make it, they're like, I wanna learn Quran.
Arabic class, Arabic 101.
That's it. By week 5, you're out. Right?
So that happens to a lot of people.
A fully
conversant
Arabic
speaker translating for them, they went and found
1 and they brought them over. What does
that mean? That means that contact
between these two regions has been sustained for
a very long period of time such that
there are people living there who know the
Arabic language.
And this is all documented. These are books
you can go and find them, and you
can read them. Okay? So that
Those are the 3 voyages
that we know about
specifically documented
from Andalusia, or Andalus which is Muslim Spain.
Then we go and we move on to
the Mandinka voyages.
So the Mandinka
are a specific group of people from Africa.
They're from the west side of Africa. Today
is like modern day Mali and some of
their surrounding areas.
These you know, you have to understand something.
I'll give you a little bit more background
because when we think of Africa, we're like
Oh Africa, there must be a bunch of
jungles and there's a tiger and there's a
lion there or something like that. Africa
You have to understand, let me explain something
to you. Africa,
their golden age of this area, they had
a civilization, the Mandinka civilization was one of
the greatest civilizations that was produced that ever
lived.
They had in a city known as Timbuktu,
they had 3 major Islamic universities.
One of them was known as the Sankore
madrasa or Sankore madrasa.
This is a very prominent
Islamic institution where scholars would come from all
around the world to study.
To put it this way,
during its time in the 14th century and
and little bit before that, they were golden
age of their civilization.
The only library
that could've rivaled the library in Timbuktu
was the library of Alexandria,
but it had already
gone down in prominence. So this was one
of the largest libraries in the entire world
sitting in Africa.
As people don't think, Oh library Africa, you
go there, you do some research, there's all
these books. We're talking about the largest library
in the world at the time. It's very
important that you understand that. So these are
the people known as the Mandinka.
They're an advanced civilization.
They have astronomy, they have mathematics, they have
science, everything is being taught over there, you
know. So now unfortunately, you know, it's gone
down and there was some issues with, you
know, terrorism and all that. But so we're
losing some of the manuscripts too. But the
amount of knowledge that's there, the amount of
remnants, the amount of manuscripts that's there, it's
very important.
So what happens is
that there is a scholar by the name
of shahabuddin
al Umri.
K. He died in the year 1349.
Now he's not from the Mandinka. This is
an Arab scholar. K. He's from like greater
Syria or something.
He goes
and he is in Egypt at the time,
and Egypt is also a center of learning.
There's a great civilization.
What happens is, there is
the leader of the Mandinka
in Africa at this time, his name is
Mansa Musa.
K? Mansa means
like Khalifa or like the king or the
khan, you know, like the great leader basically.
So Mansa Musa This is supposedly this guy
in the picture here. It looks kinda cool,
got a cool background, so I just chose
this picture. Alright, so Mansa Musa
was pretty much
the richest guy that ever lived in the
world,
ever.
And I want you to understand this. This
is there's you can't even calculate his wealth,
because there's a lot of gold in the
Mali region. So they mined so much gold,
and this was such a powerful civilization,
he was the head of the civilization at
the time. So Mansa Musa decides
to go for Hajj because he's a Muslim.
Hajj is a long ways away. From West
Africa, you're gonna travel all the way. So
the Mansa Musa decides, You know what? We're
gonna take a bunch of people, we're gonna
make a giant caravan, and we're gonna load
up a lot of gold on our camels,
and we're gonna spend the gold along the
way while we're moving through the Muslim lands,
it's gonna be able to help everyone. Because
he's got so much gold, he's got so
much gold. Nobody else has this much gold.
So he decides, he starts going and he
starts spending all And everyone writes about Mansa
Musa. Every city he goes through, there's so
many people. Camel Lohj is full of gold
and he's just spending and he's giving and
helping people and everything.
So when he goes and performs his hajj,
he's on his way back, and he's coming
into Egypt,
and shahabuddin al Amari meets him,
and he starts to talk to him. And
he says, you know, we we wanna know
what's going on. Right? So he he I,
you know, I wanna know a little bit
about your history. I'm a historian. I would
like to document something. So he interviews him.
So keep in mind, when Mansa Musa was
in Egypt, just he was traveling back from
Hajj through Egypt,
shihab ad Din Amari, he wrote that he
spent so much gold in Egypt
that the value of gold
decreased
for 10 years after Mansa Musa passed through
Egypt. I mean 10 years, because the more
you have one product spreading, the demand you
know, supply and demand. Right? Simple economics. So
now the value has, you know, gone down.
So it took 10 years for the value
to recover. That's how much gold he spent.
So he's he's interviewing him, and basically what
he says is
For the sake of time, I'm gonna summarize
it. He says, My elder brother He says,
How did you come into power? He said,
My elder brother, whose name was Abu Bakari.
Abu Bakari. You say, Abu Bakari. You say,
my elder brother was supposed to be the
king. He was the king, he was the
mansa
of the time. And what happened was, is
that he
told some people to sail across the Atlantic
and he wanted to go and explore towards
the west. And again, the West Africa, it's
a little bit south of Spain, they can
easily go through the currents that are coming
on the Atlantic ocean heading towards the Americas.
So he said, I wanted I wanted someone
to sail over there. I sent an expedition.
One of them came back, reported in, and
he said, I want to go and I
wanna see this thing for myself.
So he goes, his brother who's the Mansa,
who's the head of the Mandinka
civilization at the golden age of their time,
he says, he went
and he took one expedition. 2nd expedition,
they came in 2 expeditions, you combine the
number of ships,
24 100 ships
cross the Atlantic.
K? Think about that. Columbus is sailing with
3.
So a 24 100 ship, this is huge,
this is massive. So he goes and he
sails across,
but he said, but he never came back.
He never returned. And we don't know what
happened to him, and I'm gonna tell you
a little bit later what probably happened to
him. But he never came back.
So he said, as soon as my brother
was gone, I was next in line to
become the king, I became the Mansa. I'm
the Mansa Musa now, richest guy in the
world. Okay? So we're gonna talk about his
brother in a little bit. So what's happening
here is we have another documentation
of a voyage coming from this specific region
where the Mandinka people are around Mali region.
They're sailing across and they're getting to westward
land, and they're discovering some civilization over there.
So
there's that. Now what happens later on is,
we Again, we've lost a lot of the
records.
But what we do have is we have
some other documentation, some other evidence that's appearing.
So we have inscriptions.
So if you go through
Brazil,
Peru,
we have inscriptions
from the 14th century
in exactly
Mandinka
ideograms.
Ideograms are the symbols that they use to
write. It's their language, basically.
So these ideograms, they were they're writing a
story,
they're preserved and when you date them,
they're exactly from the same time
that this person That the Abu Bakari was
actually sailing and all the other people were
sailing. Meaning that there is very strong evidence
for contact between the Mandinka people
and the people in the Americas. Because they
left behind these traces that are now being
discovered and being studied and being found and
How are you gonna get somehow a coincidence
that the native people
of Brazil or the native people of Peru
or whatever other, you know, country it was,
how could they somehow have the exact same
language
as the people who are in Mali? Just
all of a sudden they just, you know,
it's such an awesome language that people just
thought about it and they're like, This is
how we should draw this exact word. It's
not likely to happen. So there's evidence number
1. Number 2,
you have a native American tribe in South
America
that uses the same Mandinka ideograms
as their form of written communication.
How can that be?
That can only happen if there was actually
contact between these two worlds and they're going
and learning this language.
The third piece of evidence is, you have
another tribe in North America, they're using many
words that are similar to the Mandinka language.
And the fourth thing is, you actually have
a central American tribe that has clan names
like the word mandinka. They are called the
mandinga or mandinka.
So how does all of that happen? It
only happens if there's sustained contact between the
two civilizations.
So that's a little bit about pre Columbus.
There's more.
There's some documentation
of Chinese Muslims arriving in America. There's other
documentation.
I'm not gonna go into all the details
because it'll take too long. Let's move on
to pre independence.
Okay? So when did America acquire its independence?
You shouldn't be doing fireworks if you don't
know this date.
17/76.
Right? So pre independence, prior to that, let's
talk about that region. So you got
Alright. So you got
Columbus
sailing in 14/92.
So in 14/92,
what's happening? There's 2 things happening. 1 is
Columbus is sailing, but the second thing that's
happening We don't wanna stare at this guy
too long, alright, till I get to him.
Alright. So people are like,
Who's this guy?
We'll get to it, inshallah. Alright. So pre
independence,
14/92,
Columbus is sailing the ocean blue. It's true.
That's when he sailed. But there's something else
happening in 14/92.
So Columbus
was actually going and petitioning
the leaders of Spain, says, I need you
to
finance this expedition.
We need to go sail across, and we
need to find a route to to where?
Where is he going? India. So we need
to get to India, and we need to
get around.
Why are they go Why are they trying
to go around
and get to India through the other route?
Because
they used to go from the east.
Because it was easy to travel because you
have Constantinople,
and you have the remnants of the Byzantine
Empire. But something happened in 14/53.
Who took over Constantinople?
The Muslims, the Ottomans. They took over The
Ottoman Empire took over Constantinople,
and it turned into
Istanbul.
Islam Bul, right? Got renamed later on. So
Istanbul or Istanbul
is now shut off
to these western
Christian
Europeans who wanted to get to India, and
you know, kind of get into the spice
trade and everything else in India. Get all
the goods and everything. So like we need
to go find another route. So Columbus goes,
and Columbus is studying a bunch of maps.
And everyone else like Columbus, they're studying all
of these maps. And which kind of maps
are they studying?
Studying Idrisi's maps, they're studying Muslim maps and
they're looking at Muslim navigational techniques.
They've taken the Muslim technology because they're conquering
Spain now, it's called the
and what happens
is that Columbus has been going around asking,
hey you know, can someone finance his expedition?
You know, can you go and give us
some money? And they didn't have they didn't
want to give them the extra money. Because
they said, right now we're at war. We're
we're we're trying to finish off these Muslims
in Spain. So Muslim city after city in
Spain has been falling. Muslims have been losing
all of their cities. The last city to
fall in Spain was Granada.
What year did it fall?
14/92.
And when a city falls,
and it's just I mean, there's a decade
long war against Granada.
In 14/92,
Granada is taken over. Once you take over
the city, you take over everything in it.
You get all the gold reserves,
you get all the other wealth. This is
the last
major Muslim city in the entire area of
Spain. So Muslims
in Spain are finished now, in terms of
political power, in 14/92.
Now we got money from the Muslims. So
they took that money,
said, Okay Columbus, you can go. Used former
Muslim money to finance
the voyage of Columbus to go to the
West. So 1, Muslim money.
2, Muslim navigational techniques and Muslim maps. 3,
Muslim technology of science and navigation that they've
been building up all of this time. So
they're using all of that and on top
of that, Columbus goes and he's got one
of the people navigating his ship is Pedro
Alonso Nino.
He's actually navigating one of the ships and
he's a Muslim, he's a Moor. And what
a Moor is, is a Muslim.
So m o o r is a derogatory
term for a Muslim. It doesn't matter where
you're from. You could be from Africa, North
Africa. You could be an Arab. You could
be
a convert
Spaniard, but you converted to Islam. You are
called a Moor.
Alright? So he was one of the guys,
Pedro Alonso Nino, who was actually guiding one
of Columbus ships in the first voyage in
14/92.
So there was a Muslim on Columbus's ship.
And what scholars say about Moor, it's interesting,
they say the term moors has no real
ethnological
value.
There's no It doesn't achieve anything. It's just
a derogatory term. K?
So,
he is sailing on there. Then you got
Rodrigo de Triana,
another guy who's on Columbus's ship.
He was the first guy to site land.
So if you look at this, Columbus in
sight of land, this is a postage stamp
of 1¢, you know.
The prices obviously changed now. So this is,
Columbus going, and what happened was and this
is documented
in this is documented very well. So Columbus
is going, and they're sailing along, and they're
trying to find, you know, India, but they
find the Americas.
And he says the first person who sites
land Imagine you're traveling for such a long
time, you don't know if you're gonna make
it. The first person to site land, you're
gonna get a bonus reward of this many
gold coins and whatever it is. Right? So
what happens is Rodrigo de Triano is the
1st guy to actually sight the land, and
he sees from far distance, he's looking,
checking out, he's, I wanna be the first
one and we need to find it. You
got Someone's gotta keep looking. He looks and
he finds a land first. What does Columbus
do?
Columbus says,
oh, oh, that land?
I saw that last night, you know, I
just didn't wanna say anything. So he basically
said, no no, I'm gonna get the reward
because I actually saw it the night before,
but I just didn't say it. But I
saw it before you. So he basically deprived
this guy of his, you know, of his
reward that he should have gotten. So what's
interesting about this guy is this guy,
is on Columbus's ship, he arrives with Columbus
into the Americas,
We don't know exactly what happened to him,
what he saw, and his records and everything,
but when he returns back to Spain,
what does he decide to do?
He goes to Africa, and he converts to
Islam.
What did he see on that island, and
what did he witness?
We can only speculate.
Right? So this guy comes, who's on Columbus's
ship, he goes and he accepts Islam. It's
really interesting.
Then there's 3 brothers known as the pinzon
brothers.
These 3 Pinzon brothers,
one of 2 of them are
navigating
the ships of Columbus. I think it was
the Nina and the Pinta. And there was
a third one who was the second in
command on board of one of these ships.
Now these people, we don't know if they
were Muslim or they're what's called moriscos
or not,
but we know for a fact that they're
somehow related to
Abu Zayyan Muhammad the 3rd who was a
Sultan in area of Northern Africa, Morocco, Maghrib
area.
So they have a Muslim
relationship of a background somehow,
and they potentially could have been Muslims.
Now, you have to understand why could they
have been Muslims.
Why why would they be Muslim, but they're
not declaring that they're Muslim. So what happened
was, in Spain,
once the cities of Spain were taken over,
there was something known as the inquisition that
began. And the inquisition was primarily against Jews
and then extended to Muslims. It's basically,
you need to convert to Christianity
or we'll kick you out or we'll kill
you. Basically, we'll burn you or we'll torture
you. Whatever it is, you
you must convert to Christianity.
So Muslims are being forced
to convert to Christianity whether they like it
or not.
So what happens now is that
there's a fatwa.
Fatwa is like a religious ruling
coming from the Muslim Muftis
in the Moroccan region.
So these Muftis issue a fatwa and they
say, Look.
We understand how difficult it is for you
Spanish Muslims that now that you've lost all
of the cities, but you're still living there.
Thousands of Muslims are still living there.
And we know what's going on.
Because of this, the fatwa was,
and one
sharisi is one of those people, and you
could read his fatwa, and all these fatwas
have been preserved.
If they force you
to
convert to Christianity,
you can just pretend
that you've converted, and they list out the
details. So if they try to baptize you,
go ahead and get baptized, but keep reciting
the la ilaha illallah while you're being baptized.
If they force you to eat pork,
you can eat the pork
as long as in your heart you're hating
this, and you're having a distaste and a
hatred for it. If they force you to
drink wine, you can do this, because this
is exactly what happened. They would force them
to be baptized,
they would force them to eat pork, they
would force them to drink wine, and this
is it got so bad in Spain around
this time
that what happened was,
any place
where you were So what happens is anyway,
what happens is if you're forced to become
Christian and you're a Christian now, but you
have a background of being Muslim,
you're not a Moor anymore.
Moor means Muslim.
So now you're called a morisco,
and morisco means a little more. Right? So
it's it's a diminutive form. It's it's a
way it's a type of insult.
So what morisco
basically means is,
you are saying you're a Christian,
we don't know if we believe you, and
they probably shouldn't believe them because they were
forced to convert anyways, but it got so
bad that they were so scared of anyone
practicing even the smallest amount of Islam,
that on Friday,
they used to make sure anyone who's a
maurisco, who has a background of a Muslim
background,
your house
doors and windows
have to be opened the whole day on
Friday.
Just in case
somehow we see you standing against the wall,
and you're trying to somehow pray in your
mind. We wanna make sure that you are
not practicing
anything in Islam.
It was so bad,
the Muslims initially what they would do is
they would stand against the wall,
and they would just be looking as if
they're looking at the wall, and they will
be doing their salah. They will be praying.
They can't do a motion, they can't do
a movement because the moment they make a
move, someone will report them to the inquisition
council, they'll be tortured, they'll be killed. So
that's how bad it got, you know. And
I was I've traveled to Spain many times,
insha'Allah we'll do another trip. There are people
today who say, our grandparents
These are not Muslims, these are Christians, they
just say, Our grandparents,
we
remember some rituals.
5 times a day, for some reason,
they would go and they would walk up
to a wall,
and they would stand in front of that
wall, and they would say something, and we
don't know what they're saying. I was a
little kid, I remember my grandparents, and they
would just do this, and they're doing this
5 times a day, and it doesn't make
any sense to me, you know. And then
my grandma or grandpa passed away, and we
never really understood what they're doing. But this
is what we remember,
and they're doing it exactly
at the prayer times. They would wake up
We don't understand why would they wake up
before sunrise
to go and stand at a wall
and do this
is because we're talking about 400 years later,
people were preserving their Islam even though Islam
has been completely outlawed for the last 4,
you know, 400 over 400 years in Spain.
So this is what a Morisco is anyways.
So these Pinzon brothers actually come from a
Muslim background where they have relatives as being
Muslims. They potentially it said that they could
have been Moriscos who are actually sham conversion
to Christianity.
Allah knows best, you know, we won't dwell
on that too much. There's another guy
named Nuflo de Olano.
He was an African Muslim who was with
Vasco Nunez de Balboa,
who actually visited Central America or quote unquote
discovered, you know, Central America. Muslim was on
that ship. He arrived there, he was in
the Americas.
One of the most famous people that we
know is
of Azamor.
K. So
sounds like a really nice Spanish name.
What it means is,
Estevan is
Name for it? Steven. Right? Estevanico
is
little Steven. Right? So this is little Steven.
Little Steven's real name is Mustafa
Zamuri.
Mustafa Zamuri is born in Morocco, in the
city of Azamur. Azamur is defeated by the
Portuguese, they conquer the city, they capture him
as a slave. He goes on an expedition
in 15/27,
and he reaches Hispaniola.
Hispaniola
is which two countries today?
Anybody? Trick question. Well it's not a trick
question.
Dominican Republic and?
Haiti. Awesome. Good. So that's Hispaniola.
K? So he arrived there, Dominican Republic and
Haiti. He gets there in 15/27,
which is not too far from Florida.
So now they're making their way to Florida
in 15/27.
A hurricane comes, destroys most of their ship,
most of the crew is dead.
Four people survive.
Mustafa or
I'll call her mustafa from now on, it's
nice. Alright. Mustafa comes along, and he takes
over and he leads the rest of the
group. They travel
from Florida
all the way across the Western United States
down to Mexico City,
5000 mile journey, pretty much on foot.
K? It takes them
from 1527
to 1536
they arrive in Mexico City. They're moving along
very slowly, but they're basically going and they're
discovering
the rest of America over here, discovering
quote unquote. Right? So he's there. He's known
as the person who discovered New Mexico.
K. So if you're in New Mexico and
you knew something about that state and you
cared about that state somehow,
then you would actually know his nickname, he's
known Estebanico,
is the discoverer of New Mexico, quote unquote.
So what happened is there's a scholar by
the name of Juan Francisco Moura.
They You know, they have theories of what
happened to this guy. So basically he went
down into Mexico City, he joined the rest
of the Spanish, but he's still a slave.
He led the expedition, he led the other
three people,
but because he's a background, he's Muslim,
he's still a slave. Right? Because he's from
Africa, he's from that part of the region.
So he goes down,
and then somehow he goes up and they
say, You know what? He just disappeared.
We don't know exactly what happened to him,
but we think he was killed by this
native tribe.
Now that's one theory. Right? And they say
he's dead.
One
Francisco Moura, he's a scholar, in 2002,
he wrote He said that the Zunis, the
tribe, they did not kill astivanikoh.
What actually happened was, him and his friends,
they faked
his death,
and he actually could get freedom from slavery
because he was just sick and tired. He
said, after all of this that he's done,
they're gonna keep him in slavery? He said,
forget that. So he actually went, and he
joined the tribe.
And from there, we don't know the rest
of his story.
Maybe he
preached Islam, intermarried with them, we have no
idea what happened because the documents don't exist,
but we can just imagine what happened. So
a very interesting guy. Estevanikoh
is very well known, he's celebrated, there's statues
of him, all that stuff. Right? So he's
there as well, pre
independence.
Then we got
the settlement in Jamestown.
I'm gonna have to speed up now, because
we get 9:30. So settlements in Jamestown, there
were Turkish Muslims living in America
pre independence as well. So what's happening is,
the Ottoman Empire is very strong still at
this time. It's one of the world powers,
it
conquered Constantinople,
which is now Istanbul.
So you have silk and textile workers
coming into Cuba, coming into Florida
in the 16th century, 1500.
This is all documented. So you have these
workers coming in, and there were many Turks
coming in from the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman Empire,
Turks doesn't mean they're necessarily
Turkish
in origin. Anyone who's a subject of the
Ottoman Empire, they're gonna be coming in, and
almost all of them are Muslims.
So what happened was, in 16/31,
the colony in Jamestown
Jamestown is the first,
English colony in the Americas.
Very famous, you've probably heard of Jamestown, you
probably studied it in American history, and then
you forgot it, you know, the week after
your exam. But you probably remember the name.
Alright? So Jamestown is the first English colony
in America.
In 16/31,
they passed a law, and they said, there
are no more Turks gonna be coming into
Jamestown.
No more Turks, and no more infidels.
Okay. Infidels are the Muslims.
We don't want infidels, and we don't want
Turks. Why don't we want Turks? Because there's
so many Turks here.
And they have a problem, they're like, why
are there so many Muslims in Jamestown coming
in? That's it. We gotta put a stop
to it. So they made this document, passed
a resolution,
no more Turks coming into Jamestown. What does
that mean? That means there's a lot of
Turks living in Jamestown and they're all Muslim.
It's 16/31.
So they're living there, they're doing stuff, something's
happening. You have documents
of their names. Mehmed the Turk. Alright? Very
common Turkish name. It looks like they haven't
changed in 400 years. It's still Mehmed.
Mehmed Muhammed. Alright. Mehmed the Turk, Ahmed the
Turk, Sayan Turk, all of these names are
documented in registers, which you can find in
libraries.
There are,
2 documents from 1652
documenting the type of Turks in that region
as well. Lot more research exists in that
as well. So that is pre independence.
1776,
America gets its independence,
and we have some other people coming along.
So in before we move on to this
guy, Alright? You don't have to stare at
him. 17/90.
17/90
you have Moroccans coming into America. K. These
were people who were forced as slaves in
the beginning, and what happened was, they were
working, they were doing good, they come from
educated backgrounds, so they petitioned the congress,
they petitioned the president of the United States.
And they said, 1790.
And they said, you know, we're tired of
being treated this way. You know, we're in
we are indentured servants. We came here to
work and you're treating us, you know, bad
and we don't like this treatment.
So what did they do?
The president passed an act. It's known as
the more sundry act by president John Adams.
And in that document he says, there should
be no enmity
against any
Right? And then he continues, the document goes
on. What is that? They're mentioning that there
are Muslims here, they're being petitioned by the
president of United States. He says,
there's nothing wrong with Muslims.
17 nineties. Right? So this is important. And
then we don't know exactly what happened to
this group and what they did. The documents
have not been preserved. Next guy that comes
along,
Ayuba Suleiman Diallo.
K? Ayuba Suleiman Diallo. He was captured in
Gambia in the year 17/31.
He was shipped in
as a slave into the Americas.
He earned his freedom because he was a
very highly educated person. He was so educated,
he met King George the 3rd King George
the second.
He wrote 3 qurans from memory over there
in the Americas.
There was a painting of him, this is
the painting that they made. When they came
back to Europe, they decided they're gonna paint
him. While they were painting him, they said,
We we want to draw you in your
native dress, not in your American clothing because
he's wearing American clothing. We want to know
what it what your native dress is like.
Can you somehow, you know, go and get
your native dress and you know, you can
wear that? And he says, you know, no.
You don't you don't need me to wear
it. Right? I'm gonna describe to you exactly
what my dress looks like, and your expert
painters will paint it perfectly.
They'll do it exactly.
This is not possible. We we can't draw
from a description.
And then what did he say? He was
trying to prove a point. He says, you
guys,
Christians,
you draw
God
in a picture who you've never seen in
your life. You've seen me and I'm describing
my clothes. I can describe to you what
my clothing is, and you're saying you can't
draw from a description? You've never seen god?
You've never had god describe to you what
he looks like? And you still draw him
in your pictures.
This guy is not afraid.
This guy is not looking up to white
Europeans saying, Oh man, I gotta be careful.
I gotta be quiet. This is a person
who has self confidence, he has dignity, and
these people are role models for us. When
we r when you study their history, they're
amazing role models. We should really read. There's
so much to read. There's so many biographies
out there. We're just gonna speed through it
real quick though. One day we'll have a
seminar on it. This is Abdulrahman
Ibrahim ibn Suri. K. He was born in
17/62,
he died in 18/29.
What's interesting about this guy, other than the
fact that he looks really cool in that
coat, is that he was a prince
from Guinea. He's a Fulani.
Fulani is a tribe. He's a Fulani prince
from Guinea.
He's captured in the year 17/88,
and he's shipped to Mississippi. And he's highly
educated. I mean, if you're a prince prince
princely family coming from this region, highly educated
community.
So he knew 4 African languages,
he knew Arabic, he knew English.
And he got captured somehow I mean, he
studied in Timbuktu. I mentioned Timbuktu, the madrasas,
the Islamic universities there. So he studied in
Timbuktu, very well versed, very well learned person.
So he
goes, ends up in Mississippi somehow.
While he's in Mississippi,
he is a slave.
So somehow along the way, he met somebody
he knew visited Africa, doctor John Cox.
Doctor John Cox was an Irish surgeon who
actually had visited him, and he was one
of the people who helped him learn English.
So he goes and he says, What are
you doing here in America?
You're the prince of the country over there.
What are you doing here? I was captured
as a slave and they brought me over
here. So he goes to his
owner, Thomas Foster.
It's funny cause he owned a farm, so
like Foster Farms, you know. So anyways, so
he owns a farm, and he goes, okay.
He started referring to him as prince, so
he nicknamed him prince. He goes, Hey prince,
go do this, go do that. But you
know what? Mister Foster would not let him
go. And doctor Cox was saying, You need
to let this this is a prince, you
can't keep him in slavery.
Doctor you know, Thomas Foster didn't like it.
He spent 38 years working on a cotton
plantation.
38 years.
And then finally in 18/26,
he wrote back to his relatives
a letter saying, you know, I need to
get out of here. You know, he figured
out a way somehow he knew his relatives,
he sent a letter.
This is really interesting. So he While he's
sending the letter, one of the local reporters
in that area, they got a hold of
the letter somehow. They said, Woah, this guy
is a prince, and he's living over here
in Mississippi. So he goes and he hands
it to the senator of Mississippi.
Senator of Mississippi looks at it and goes,
The heck? What is this? Goes and sends
it to like the state department of America.
State department goes and says, Woah. Okay. We
need to send this to the US embassy
in, you know, Morocco because they thought he
was Moroccan. We need to go send this
to the US embassy in Morocco and figure
out what's gonna happen. So they go and
they send it to the US consulate in
Morocco, they just assume they assume that he
was a Moor. A Moor meaning like from
that regent because he wrote his letter in
Arabic. And they think, Oh these people don't
write Arabic because for them they're like, Oh
they're African, they only know their Fulani language,
or their Mandinkan language.
If you studied in Timbuktu University, you know
Arabic, you're a scholar, you know the Quran.
They have the Quran memorized.
They have hadith memorized. They have all of
these things going on for them, right? So
what happens now is
after the consulate of Morocco they said, You're
not gonna keep this prince. Doesn't matter if
he's from Morocco or not. This is a
prince guy coming from Africa,
you need to release him. They sent a
letter to the president of the United States.
In 18/28,
US president John Quincy Adams and the secretary
of state Henry Clay,
they decide that we're gonna release him.
They go to mister Foster.
Like mister Foster, you need to let this
guy go. Then Mister Foster,
not a very nice guy. Outside of the
fact that he calls him prince, he's not
a very nice guy. So he says, okay,
the only this is the president of the
United States telling you this guy needs to
let me let go and he needs to
leave. Maybe because he was so good at
what he did, he controlled the whole plantation,
right? He's a very educated guy. He was
very good at what he did.
So he says, one condition, I will release
him on one condition.
And that is I mean obviously he's gonna
get money from the government and everything. He
says, He's not allowed to live in America
as a freed slave. He needs to go
back to his country. I don't want him
in America.
This guy is like, you know, really got
a problem. So that was his condition. They
said, Okay fine. We're gonna free him, we're
gonna send him back.
Before he leaves the US, what does Abdul
Rahman do? He goes
to visit
with Washington DC,
he meets president Adams
in person, talks to him, and he starts
raising funds.
He does a fundraiser in Washington DC
and he says I wanna raise funds
to liberate my family, my wife and my
kids, because I wanted them to come back
with me and mister Foster is not letting
them go. So he raises some money from
the people there, liberates his wife,
didn't get to liberate all of his sons,
and he moved back to,
library at the time. So there's a drawing
of him in the library of congress,
and there's a good book about him, it's
called Prince Among Slaves, and they made a
movie out of it as well. And the
narrator of the movie is Mostaf, Yacine Bey.
If you guys heard of the rapper Mostaf,
he is, the one who's narrating in the
background. Very interesting story about him. Next guy
is Nicholas Said. Right? That's an interesting name,
but that's not his real name.
Right? So this guy is Muhammad Ali ibn
Sa'id. Okay? Muhammad ibn Ali Sa'id
was
sold to a Russian. He was enslaved, sold
to a Russian,
traveled around a bunch of different countries in
Europe, all over the place. Then he was
freed. He's emancipated. He's not a slave anymore.
Then he decides to move to America.
In 18/62,
he is in the city of Detroit. He
becomes a school teacher.
When there's
what happened in the 18 sixties in America?
Very important significant event.
Civil war. So what does he do? He
joins the union army.
When he joins the union army, he is
a private.
Within 2 months, he's so good as a
soldier, he becomes a sergeant within 2 months.
There's his entire biography was published in 18/67
by the newspaper or the periodical The Atlantic
Monthly, which is like the most prominent periodical
at the time. So his detailed
biography is there, his autobiography is there, Atlantic
Monthly has his old article as well. You
could read about his life as well. It's
pretty interesting.
There's another guy by the name of Bilali
Muhammad. I don't have a good picture of
him, I don't think No, I don't got
a good picture of him. So Bilali Muhammad
was
another West African who was enslaved.
In 18/02,
he ends up in Georgia.
He's from an educated family, he's a very
educated man. He's owned by someone named Thomas
Spalding.
Thomas Spalding is not like mister Foster. He's
actually a really nice guy. So what he
does
is he puts he realizes Bilali, Bilali Muhammad
is so intelligent, he's so quick, he's so
sharp, that he goes and puts him as
the manager of the entire plantation
overseeing 500 other workers. So he's the head
of the plantation, he doesn't need any oversight.
This guy is very smart, very educated.
So his owner goes, mister Thomas Spalding, he
goes and he finds a copy of the
Quran. He knows Bilali is a Muslim.
He finds a copy of the Quran, he
buys a copy of the Quran, and gives
it to Bilali. So he gives him a
copy of the Quran, and then Bilali goes,
You know, can we build a masjid? Because
there's more Muslims among the slaves here. He
goes, Yeah. We're gonna let you build a
masjid. So Bilali Muhammad built the 1st masjid
in America that we know of
before the year 18/12.
And I'll tell you why, how we know
it's before 18/12.
So what happens is,
an important event happens in 18/12. What is
that?
The war of 18/12. So the British come
along, and they're gonna try to fight America,
right? And,
they go and they tempt the slaves,
and they say, You know what? Any slave
who rebels,
we're encouraging you to rebel and stand up
and join the, you know, British Empire, and
we'll grant guarantee your freedom. We're about to
take over America.
Now that's a very tempting offer, right? It's
like someone is gonna free you, give you
your complete freedom.
But Bilali Muhammad was he respected this man.
Even though he's a slave, he's not really
being treated like a slave. So he goes,
he respects this man so much, he says,
don't worry. We're gonna protect your plantation.
We're gonna handle everything. And he said, look,
this is what I can do for you.
There's 500 slaves here.
We will stay here and fight. If you
need to leave, that's fine. We will fight
the British while we're here in the war
of 18 12.
I can guarantee you
that every single Muslim here, they're not gonna
join the British. They're gonna stand here, they're
gonna protect your land, and we're gonna fight
till the death.
But for the non Muslim slaves,
I can't guarantee anything because I don't have
any control over them. Which means what? Which
means that they're a community. There's a Muslim
community, there's a masjid, he actually has a
leadership, he's like the leader of the Muslims
over there. So he goes and they actually
fight. Now what does this guy do, Thomas
Spalding? He goes and gets 80 muskets, 80
rifles, 80 guns, and he arms all of
the Muslim slaves here.
I mean this doesn't happen normally, right? You
know, you don't arm your slaves. This is
probably the only time in history where they
armed the slaves. They armed them,
and he goes and they fight.
In 18 in 18 12, they fight and
they and they're successful and obviously America, you
know, did not get taken over by the
British. What's interesting afterwards
is Bilali Muhammad dies in the year 1857,
Much later.
They found a document
in his in his house.
It's 13 pages and it's in Arabic. So
they figured, oh, this is the diary of
Bilali Muhammad. He probably wrote how he was
feeling, what he's doing in America and all
that. And then finally,
decades
later, someone comes along and they looked at
it and they said, Wait a minute. This
is not an autobiography.
This has nothing to do with him. It's
actually
a work of fiqh. It's a book on
Islamic law. It starts out with Islamic beliefs,
then it talks about tahara, how you make
wudu, and how you make tayammum, and all
that. Then it goes to salah, it goes
to the adhan, it goes through everything.
And then when they compared it with another
book which is known as the risala of
Imam Abi Zaydul Khairawani, which is a maliki
fiqh book which is taught throughout North, you
know, North Africa. I mean I studied in
France. It was part of our curriculum as
well. This is a book which many people
they're taught and they memorize word for word.
He had this book memorized,
but when they compared it, they realized this
is not an exact
duplicate.
He didn't duplicate the book.
He modified the book for his own circumstances,
which means what? It means that Bilali Muhammad
wrote the first original work
of Islam
in America
at that time, in around 18 20, 1830,
whatever it may be. So this is really
interesting, the first Islamic literature that's been produced
in America.
Alright? Then we got
a few other people.
We got this guy.
This is
his name is Hajjali,
if you can see. That's a pretty funny
name. Right? Hi Jolly. How are you doing?
Right? So Hi Jolly is actually Hajj Ali,
because he performed Hajj, so he's known as
Hajji.
Ali.
But the Americans, they're like, Hajj Hajji
Ali
We call it Hi Jolly, alright? That sounds
good. That's that's gonna be better. So his
name becomes Hi Jolly.
This was a guy who basically came into
America, he was recruited from the Ottoman Empire,
and he became the head of the US
army
camel corps in the year 1856.
So the president of America decided, you know
what, there's so much desert in America especially
in the west like where we are, We
need
a way to transport things on a much
cheaper scale and a quick scale, and we
need some camels to go to the desert.
You know people make fun of camels and
all that. US had a camel corps, right?
Camel corps, part of the US army led
by a Muslim from the Ottoman Empire, alright?
So people should just be quiet, right? So
camel corps coming along, and he is in
charge of this, 1856.
He led this in the southwest,
he became a citizen in the year 18/80
because he decided to stay. And then he
was hired again by the US army in
18/85.
He died in the year 1902 in Arizona.
And in the sight of courtside Arizona, they
decided 30 years later that we love this
guy so much, he's so interesting, he's such
an important figure that they made a monument.
So they made a little pyramid, you know,
and even in Islam you're not supposed to
make all these monuments and stuff on graves,
but anyways they did it. They made this
monument and they put a camel on top.
So this is
the most vivid visited site in Quartzsite, Arizona.
I'm sure there's not much in Quartzsite, Arizona.
Anyways, but So this is a place if
you ever traveled to Quartzsite, Arizona, you can
see * Ali, * Ali. You can't even
tell he's Muslim if you see * Ali.
But it's * Ali, he was there. Okay?
So then you got
If you think about it, 20,000,000
enslaved Africans came and they were shipped to
America. It's estimated that between 20 to 30%
of these people were Muslims. And what's interesting
is, many of the Muslims who were enslaved,
they were highly educated.
In fact, they may have been more educated
than the American southerners who are, you know,
these tobacco plantations and sugar plantations. Many of
these were so illiterate they couldn't even read
or write. The only difference is they're reading
and writing in Arabic and in their native
language whereas, you know, the Americans who are
there in the plantations and all that, they
have a different language. But they're probably more
knowledgeable than the other ones. And what we
have is we have a bunch of what
they consider to be scribblings and documents left.
No one could read these things. So they
got destroyed. They're like, Oh, what is this?
Some slave is writing some document. What who
what does he think he's doing writing? So
they just destroy it. So we've lost a
lot of that unfortunately, but there is
So
so what we have here is a bunch
of slaves coming. These slaves are writing, but
much of this history is lost because of
the reasons which we mentioned. Alright. Now we
got the modern period. Super summarized version of
the modern period here.
In 18/93,
you got Alexander Russell Webb.
He established the American Muslim Brotherhood,
not to be confused with the Muslim Brotherhood
today. Okay? So he established the American Muslim
Brotherhood. He was giving lectures. He was an
ambassador to the United Nations on behalf of
Islam. He attend he gave a lecture on
Islam. Mark Twain, the famous author, was in
attendance
of that lecture. If Somebody said, Oh Mark
Twain didn't know about Islam. No, he knew
exactly about Islam. Right? So you got him,
very important figure, an amazing book written by
Doctor. Omar Farooq Abdullah about his life. I
recommend you check it out. Then you got
this guy.
This is Wallace D. Farooq.
K. This is the guy who is basically
responsible
for the founding of the Nation of Islam.
Nation of Islam is a very powerful,
movement or it was a very powerful movement,
which produced someone who we really know well
as Malcolm X, and may Allah be pleased
with him. So this is,
Wallace Defard. What happened was he met
Elijah Muhammad, who became his student, and then
somehow Wallace Defard disappeared and went back to
another country. Elijah Muhammad comes along, establishes the
nation of Islam, becomes a very powerful force
for many African Americans or many black Americans
to come into Islam even though it's a
distorted form of Islam.
His son,
when he passes away, his son is supposed
to take over and his son comes along,
Warruddin Muhammad, and he says,
My father was wrong. He was not correct.
This is not true Islam.
We need to join true Islam. So among
his followers,
500,000
people accepted Islam
in one shot under his son, and they
came into from the nation of Islam, they
came into Islam.
Many people trace their origins back including Malcolm
X and many many other figures. So he's
an important figure in history. K? Before we
conclude, there's a bunch of other things, you
know, short of time. Inshallah, one day should
we do, like, a seminar on this, like,
a day seminar? We should do a day
seminar. Okay. So
yeah.
So there's a lot of information. There's a
lot of good books. So I'll recommend more,
but it's it's important to know how Islam
developed. But the last thing I'll mention here
is,
in 19
1924,
there was a law that was passed called
the National Origins Act,
or it's called the Asian Exclusion Act.
And what happened was is in 1924, the
Americans said, we don't want all these Asians.
And when they say Asians, they meant far
east Asians, Japanese, Chinese, workers, and all that.
So we don't want these people in our
country.
So they made this National Origins Act, which
stopped immigration from everyone,
particularly Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, all those people. But
then down in the list somewhere, they there
were all the people from the Middle East,
and the Muslims, and all the other countries
that you have Muslims from. So there's no
migration of Muslims coming in because they're not
allowed to from 1924.
In 1965,
the National Origins Act was repealed.
And now that's repealed, the borders are open.
And that's why the vast majority of Muslim,
the new generation of Muslims, they all started
migrating after 1965
because immigration was not open, unless you're coming
in as like a PhD student, or you're
coming in as a doctor, or or something
very very highly skilled level worker for some
other reason. Right? So this new wave of
immigration came along. Muslims in America
founded
the Federation of Islamic Association in America and
Canada in the fifties,
The Muslim Student Association in the sixties.
In 1982,
they founded the Islamic Society of North America,
and then you have all the other organizations
coming later. Islamic Circle of North America, Muslim
Students,
what is it? Mass Muslim American Society, and
all the organizations that are built. So the
conclusion of all of this is this, is
that
Muslims, first of all, are not Johnny come
latleys.
We've been in America
before
Columbus was here,
while Columbus was here, before independence, after independence,
we've been part and parcel of the entire
American history, in some capacity. There has been
a major contribution
from Muslims, even though they've been suppressed. So
Islam was here. But what I want you
to take home is,
I want you to look at the people
who lived
through the slavery, through the circumstances,
through everything,
all of the situation that they lived through.
What
what kind of resources did they have? What
kind of money did they have to try
to preserve Islam in America with the little
amount that they had? They actually achieved a
lot if you look at it in detail
in history.
Look at the resources that we have.
We got people from all different walks of
life. They're making good salaries.
They're going to good universities.
They have marble kitchens.
They have, you know, cable TV or Netflix
or whatever it is. They got, you know,
smartphone. We got so much
resources today.
We have so many privileges that people of
the past did not have.
If we can't do
significantly
larger effort than these people did, and we
complain about the Islamophobia that we're going through
and we say it's too difficult, and we
got Donald Trump now as our president, and
we got, you know, we got some random
ISIS group, and every time keeps coming on
the TV.
The patience
that these Muslims had to go through,
we can't even imagine it. Read their biographies,
read their autobiographies,
read what they went through, and read how
they
maintained
their Islam throughout all of this. And that's
an amazing left You know, that's amazing lesson
for us. And we need to make sure
we have to look at what we have,
we need to make sure that our kids
grow up to be proud Muslims in America
without any inferiority complex whatsoever. We ask Allah
subhanahu wa ta'ala to help us to establish
Islam in this land, and have strong Muslim
families in this land. Last thing is we
have a table from California Islamic University outside,
where we have some books and we have
some classes coming up. Inshallah, I'll finish since
I did so much research anyways. We'll do
a seminar soon from California Islamic University on
this topic, probably 6 hour seminar or something
like that. So look forward to that.