The Study of American Muslims: A History

Abstract

Though popular images and amateur ethnographies of Muslim slaves and visitors circulated in the nineteenth-century United States, the formal study of American Muslims did not begin until the 1930s. This chapter explores the history of the field, which began as the sociological study of “Black Muslims” and a few immigrant groups and by the 1980s became a religious studies subfield sometimes called Islam-in-America studies. The field’s focus in the 1980s on post-1965 Muslim immigration, however, obscured the presence of African American Muslims and mistakenly analyzed the Muslim American experience as a whole through the lens of a first-generation struggle between American modernity and Islamic tradition. As studies of African American and other Muslim groups multiplied in the 1990s and then increased dramatically after 9/11, however, the leading paradigm of the field was challenged. A new generation of scholars arose to analyze Islam as an American religious tradition and to narrate the lives of Muslims as mundane Americans.