Project binds Muslims to Americana

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RALEIGH -- Ask most people who were the earliest U.S. Muslims and they might scratch their heads and come up with Muhammad Ali or maybe Malcolm X.

But an exhibit at the Shaw University mosque Sunday dispels the myth that Muslims, adherents to Islam, first came on the U.S. scene in the 1960s, or that the earliest among them were African-American converts such as the retired boxer or the black activist.

The exhibit, "Muslims in America," demonstrates that Muslim explorers may have predated Christopher Columbus and that Muslims fought in every U.S. war since the Revolutionary War. Census records show nearly 300 men with surnames from Muslim areas fought in the Civil War, for example.

The 200 or so adults and children who peered at the photocopies of letters, portraits and tombstones Sunday also learned that North Carolina was home to one of the most learned of Muslim slaves, Omar Ibn Sayyid of Fayetteville.

"I studied this in college but I didn't know North Carolina's role," said Jamaal Albany, a teacher at Al-Iman, a Muslim day school in Raleigh, who brought some of his sixth- and seventh-grade students to the exhibit. "It's amazing."

The exhibit is the brainchild of Amir Muhammad, a Washington history buff who went in search of his own family roots in Georgia a dozen years ago and stumbled on traces of a forgotten Muslim past, made up mostly of West African Muslims who were brought to this country as slaves.

http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local_state/story/206526.html

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