American Islam

American Islam tells a story most Americans have never been taught: that Muslims were not late arrivals to the United States but co-authors of it, present at every chapter of the national story. Published by The East-West Foundation to mark the nation's two hundred and fiftieth year, this concise volume traces an unbroken thread from the founding to the present-and argues that the resources for mending a fractured republic are older, and closer to hand, than we tend to assume.

Morocco was the first sovereign nation to recognize American independence, and the Moroccan-American Treaty of Friendship remains the longest unbroken treaty relationship in U.S. history. Enslaved African scholars who prayed in Arabic helped build the southern economy and seeded the music that became the blues. Muhammad Ali's refusal of conscience widened the religious liberty that now shelters every American. Three Americans of Muslim heritage have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Across politics, medicine, science, sport, philanthropy, and the arts, American Muslims have enlarged the common life.

Running beneath that history is an older memory still. Fourteen centuries ago, in Medina, the Prophet Muhammad bound Muslims, pagan clans, and Jewish tribes into a single body politic by written covenant-an arrangement that rhymes, across the centuries, with the Mayflower Compact, the First Amendment, and the motto e pluribus unum. The book reads this covenantal tradition as a tested grammar of difference, uniquely suited to a polarized age.

A documentary reader closes the volume, gathering the founding treaties, the Compact of Medina, the Qur'anic verses on pluralism and conscience, and the voices of American Muslims across four centuries-each paired with questions for reflection, for the seminar table and the dinner table alike. It concludes with the Mīthāq al-Taʿāruf, a contemporary Muslim covenant of pluralism, human dignity, and the common good.

Neither a plea for acceptance nor a catalog of grievance, American Islam is an argument about co-authorship and a summons to the bridge-builders. The future, it insists, belongs to those who can hold difference together without dissolving it-and America has been making such people all along.