Enslaved Muslims in Early America: Evidence and Memory

Tazeen Ali reminded listeners that Islam was not only an abstract test case in founding-era debates but also present in lived experience: many enslaved Africans brought to America practiced Islam. She cited scholarly estimates suggesting a significant share of trafficked Africans were Muslim and pointed to surviving Arabic manuscripts and names as evidence.

Ali singled out the case of Omar Ibn Said, a West African scholar captured and enslaved in North Carolina who wrote an Arabic autobiography in 1831 that draws on Quranic language. Ali used the example to argue that Muslim presence on U.S. soil predates modern immigration waves and complicates narratives that frame Muslims as recent arrivals.

She warned that Jefferson and other founders often imagined Muslims as foreign diplomatic figures even while enslaved Muslim individuals lived and labored on American plantations, underscoring the gap between theoretical inclusion and lived exclusion.