Muslims were part of America’s story long before the republic began

In the 1520s and 1530s, a man named Esteban de Dorantes, known as Estevanico, walked across the deserts of what is now Texas, New Mexico and Arizona – decades before the English founded Jamestown in 1607 and a full century before the Pilgrims reached Plymouth in 1620.

Born in Azemmour, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, he had been enslaved and taken to Spain and then across the ocean. In an ill-fated journey in which most people perished, Estevanico survived. He learned various Native American languages and became one of the first people from the Old World to cross the southern interior of the future United States.

By the evidence of his birth in Morocco and the biographical information we have, he was a Muslim. His presence puts a question to the familiar account of Muslims in America as outsiders, particularly after 9/11.

As a scholar of religion, I focus my research on identity and belonging, in places ranging from East Africa and the Western Indian Ocean to Islamic communities in the U.S. South. In my 2026 book on the history and future of American Islam, and a companion volume on the future of religious pluralism in the U.S., I argue that Muslims who were present at the nation’s founding helped shape its music, its laws and its civil society.

The largest number of Muslims came in as enslaved labor. Among them were Muslims from the Senegambian and Sahelian belt of West Africa, a region shaped by centuries of Islamic learning. By some estimates they numbered in the tens of thousands, and many were literate in Arabic and schooled in the Quran and in Islamic law before they were ever captured.

Some left behind remarkable written records, such as the autobiography of an enslaved Muslim scholar named Omar ibn Said.

Their deeper imprint, though, lies in the broader culture they helped shape, including musical tradition. Some scholars, such as Shalom Goldman, have noted that Muslim Americans played a significant and often overlooked role in the development of jazz, a genre often celebrated as the nation’s most distinctive cultural contribution.

Consider the field holler that became one of the taproots of American popular music. The field holler was an improvised, solitary cry sung by enslaved African Americans as they labored at tasks such as picking cotton or hoeing crops. Mournful and soaring, these vocalizations allowed workers to communicate across distances, release pent-up emotion and endure the grind of forced labor.

Some scholars have traced elements of this vocal tradition to enslaved West African Muslims, who carried into the fields a devotional practice of singing shaped by centuries of Islamic practice. Scholars have noted similarities between the field holler, the Muslim call to prayer – the “adhan” – and the recitation of the Quran.

The ethnomusicologist Gerhard Kubik traced the vocal style of the blues to a broad region of West Africa that had been in sustained contact with the Arabic-Islamic world since the eighth century. He argues that its melismatic, wavering intonation, in which many notes are bent across a single syllable, is a direct inheritance of that long encounter.

In her lectures, historian Sylviane Diouf has illustrated this argument by pairing her lectures with a recording of the call to prayer with the 1940s field recording of a Mississippi “Levee Camp Holler.” This was a work song preserved by the folklorist Alan Lomax, who recorded thousands of vernacular American performances for the Library of Congress.

Diouf writes that the two share the same ornamented notes, elongated syllables, wavy intonation, melisma and pauses, so that when they are played one after the other it becomes hard to tell where the call to prayer ends and the holler begins.

A century later, another American Muslim would become central to a landmark case on religious freedom.

In 1964 the heavyweight champion Cassius Clay announced his conversion to Islam and took the name Muhammad Ali. Three years later, called to fight in Vietnam, he refused induction, declaring that his faith forbade it. The consequences were immediate and enormous: He was stripped of his title, barred from the ring in his physical prime, convicted of draft evasion and sentenced to five years in prison. For more than three years – from ages 25 to 28 – the finest heavyweight of his generation was not permitted to fight.

He carried the contest to the Supreme Court instead. In the 1971 case Clay v. United States, the justices unanimously overturned his conviction, finding that the government had wrongly told his draft board that his objection was neither sincere nor religious.

The ruling recognized that Ali’s refusal rested on genuine religious conviction – that a Muslim’s faith could ground conscientious objection on the same terms long granted to other American religious traditions that opted out of war, such as the Quakers and Mennonites.

In doing so, the ruling helped clarify that protections for peace churches had been widened to include Muslims. The case prompted the courts to consider that constitutional religious protections extended to all religions, not just Christianity and Judaism.

The third contribution is quieter and repeated millions of times a year. Among the five pillars of Islam is zakat, the obligation to give a fixed share – generally 2.5% – of one’s accumulated wealth to those in need. Alongside it runs ṣadaqa: voluntary charity given over and above that obligation, with no fixed rate and no appointed season, in a form as small as a kind word or as large as an endowment.

Disciplined by these obligations, American Muslims have become outsized contributors to the nation’s charitable life. Though they make up roughly 1% of the population, American Muslims gave around US$4.3 billion to charity in 2020, according to researchers at Indiana University’s Muslim Philanthropy Initiative. On average, that’s about $3,200 per donor, compared to $1,900 from their non-Muslim neighbors.

Roughly 85% of it stays within the United States, and the larger part flows not to mosques or Muslim institutions but to broadly secular ends: relief for domestic poverty, pandemic response during COVID-19, and the defense of civil rights.

The same outward orientation marks the zakat data; of the roughly $1.8 billion in obligatory alms American Muslims paid in 2021, the single largest share passed through charitable nonprofits rather than to relatives or houses of worship.

As the nation marks its 250th anniversary, the full story of Muslim Americans is one in which they appear not as guests but as participants. In a polarized republic, it can help deepen the understanding of the country and the people who helped shape it.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Iqbal Akhtar, Florida International University

Iqbal Akhtar does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.