How many convert to islam in america

More than half of American adults surveyed by Pew Research in felt that Muslims were discriminated against a lot, and 82 percent said Muslims faced some discrimination. Data Analyst for the U. CGTN America. Muslim DNC delegate on life before and after Trump. This website uses cookies to improve your experience.

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Much of the debate in the US surrounding President Trump's ban on immigrants and refugees has tended to assume that Muslim Americans are mostly migrants and that Islam is a relatively new phenomenon in America, along with questions about integration and assimilation. In fact, Islam has a long history in America, going back to the earliest days of the country's founding. In the past two-plus centuries, Islam and Muslim Americans have been intertwined with American history.

That story is not well-known, and while admittedly that's in part because the Muslim population of the US has often been quite small, Islam still appears in ways that most Americans might find surprising — particularly, for example, in the history of American slavery and emancipation.

What follows is a brief history of Islam in the United States, from its founding up through today, and a guide to the Muslim American community as it has grown and as it exists today. The most visible role of Islam in the America of the Founding Fathers was perhaps in the words and actions of the founders themselves, who deliberately sought to include Islam as they established the principles of religious liberty. Freedom of religion, as they conceived it, encompassed it," explains James H.

Thomas Jefferson, who famously owned a copy of the Quran , had much to say about Islam's place in America. According to Hutson , Jefferson, while campaigning for religious freedom in Virginia, demanded "recognition of the religious rights of the 'Mahamdan,' the Jew and the 'pagan. Even the issue of whether a Muslim could one day be president of the United States — an issue that recently came up when Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson stated that he "would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation" — was an issue the Founding Fathers discussed while ratifying the US Constitution.

In , at a state convention in North Carolina on whether to ratify the newly forged federal Constitution, those who opposed ratification warned that Article VI of the Constitution allowed for the possibility that one day, "in the course of four or five hundred years," a Muslim could become president of the United States. Of course, the Constitution was eventually ratified, and that clause stayed in.

The Ben Carsons of America's founding era lost the debate. There is even a bas-relief statue of the Prophet Mohammed on the north wall of US Supreme Court that, while constructed in , deliberately harks back to much earlier roots.

As noted by scholar Timothy Marr in his book The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism , the "larger-than-life representation of the Prophet Muhammad" is situated "between Charlemagne and Justinian as one of eighteen great law givers of history. In the early years of America's founding, the vast majority of Muslims weren't citizens but slaves. Scholar Richard Brent Turner explains that researchers disagree over the number of Muslim slaves that were brought to the Americas, and estimates range from 40, in just the US all the way to 3 million across North and South America and the Caribbean.

Many Muslim slaves were educated and literate in Arabic, Turner writes, and they "often occupied leadership roles in the jobs that slaves performed on plantations in the American South. Their names, dress, rituals, and dietary laws were perceived as powerful significations of Islamic identities in the slave community.

Historian Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, whose book A History of Islam in America is one of the most comprehensive on the subject, states, "Muslims in colonial and antebellum America came from a variety of ethnic, educational, and economic backgrounds.

In America, their experiences varied depending on when, where, and how they were transported to these shores.

Similarly, writes GhaneaBassiri, "there was no singular interpretation nor practice of Islam. In some instances, Islamic beliefs and practices were means of self-identification that distinguished, and at times even isolated, African Muslims from other enslaved Africans or white Americans. But although many African Muslim slaves tried to maintain their Islamic identities and traditions once they came to America, they also needed to adapt to their new environment and form new communities.

And this ultimately led almost all of them to convert to Christianity. Conversion to Christianity was arguably the most widespread method by which African Muslims reconfigured their religious practices and beliefs to adapt to their new context and to form new communal relations. While we do not know exactly when and how or even whether the open practice of Islam completely ceased in nineteenth-century United States, it is clear from our sources that the American-born children of African Muslims did not practice Islam nor did they self-identify as Muslims.

Thus, despite the massive influx of Muslims from the Atlantic slave trade, by the end of the 19th century Islam had all but disappeared among these communities. At the same time that Islam was fading among communities of slaves and former slaves, millions of immigrants began arriving on America's shores toward the end of the 19th and especially the early 20th centuries.

They were spurred in part by the Industrial Revolution that erupted once America finally emerged from the ashes of the Civil War and Reconstruction era. It was meant to be a "close replica of the Mosque of Sultan Qayt Bey in Cairo," she says, and to "display Islam for American audiences.

The scene at the Chicago "Cairo street" mosque provides a glimpse of the Islamic experience in America in the s — both among Chicago's Muslims and as a sort of exoticized curiosity for non-Muslims. Here is Howell's description:. The second mosque built in the United States wouldn't show up for several more decades: It was located in Highland Park, Michigan, and was completed in Howell describes it well:.

Built by Muslim migrants for use as a place of worship, this mosque, like the one on "Cairo Street," was intended to represent Islam to American observers, but the Muslims of Highland Park hoped to create a very different impression of their faith. The Islam to be practiced in the Moslem Mosque of Highland Park would not be exotic, foreign, or a thing of spectacle. It would be an American faith tradition not unlike those found in nearby churches and synagogues. It would attract worshipers who were American citizens.

The early 20th century saw Muslim immigrant communities in America beginning to establish small, local community organizations across the country. At the same time, Howell writes, African Americans also "began to embrace Islam in the s and 30s partially in response to the radical dislocations and racism they experienced prior to and during the Great Migration the movement of disenfranchised southerners to industrial regions in the North. Several of these African-American Muslim associations would go on to have significant impact on the face of Islam in America by promoting the idea of Islam as a lost part of black African heritage.

Howell writes:. By the UNIA had more than , members and chapters worldwide. Other organizations created during this period — such as the Moorish Science Temple of America, established in the mids by Noble Drew Ali, and the Nation of Islam, established by W. Fard in —helped lay the groundwork for the emergence of Islam as an influential part of the Black Power movement and the broader civil rights movement of the s and '60s.

In , the US Congress passed the National Origins Act, which "restricted immigration from Asia and other Muslim-sending regions and thus stemmed the flow of new Muslim arrivals. But as the 20th century progressed, Muslim immigrants who had already arrived on America's shores, as well as the African Americans who had connected with the religion or, in perhaps some cases, reconnected with long-lost Muslim roots , began playing a much more active role in American politics and society.

Many Americans know the story of how the shared experiences of World War II helped lead African Americans to demand equal rights that recognized their role in defending the country during the war. It turns out a similar phenomenon happened with Muslim Americans as well — and the two communities, at this point in American history, overlapped considerably. Today, we rightly remember and commemorate the role of Christian leaders, most famously Martin Luther King Jr. But Islam played a role as well.

Recent political debates over Muslim immigration and related issues have prompted many people to ask how many Muslims actually live in the United States. But coming up with an answer is not easy, in part because the U. Census Bureau does not ask questions about religion, meaning there is no official government count of the U. Muslim population. Still, based on our own survey and demographic research, as well as outside sources, Pew Research Center estimates that there were about 3. Muslims in the U.

At the same time, our projections suggest that the U. And by , the U. Muslim population is projected to reach 8. The latest estimate combines information from our survey of U. Muslims — which reported on the prevalence of Muslims among immigrants and other demographic groups — with official Census Bureau data on the number of people in these groups.

Learn about Muslims and Islam through four short lessons delivered to your inbox every other day. Sign up now! Muslims are not evenly distributed around the country.