Estimating the Muslim Population in the United States Using Census 2000 Data

Acknowledgments: Jennifer Paluch provided valuable research assistance on this project.

Introduction

There has been a Muslim presence in the United States for centuries. It is virtually certain that many of the slaves brought to the Americas from Africa were Muslim because western Africa, from which most slaves came, has a long history of Muslim civilization (Nyang, 1992), dating back to the 11th and 12th centuries (Levtzion, 1968). For example, the northern part of Nigeria has been largely Muslim since at least the 1300s, and Nigeria was frequented by slave traders in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. According to Haddad (1986a), there is evidence that as early as 1717 there were Arabic-speaking slaves in America who reportedly ate no pork and believed in Allah and Muhammad. There is some evidence that as many as ten percent of slaves brought to North America were Muslim (Austin, 1984), but Christianity was imposed upon the slave population, and slaves who refused to convert were persecuted or killed (Nyang, 1999).

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Muslim (as well as Christian) migrants entered the United States from various middle eastern nations, including what are now Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq (Haddad, 1986b). Although these immigrants established a clear presence for Islam in American society (Haddad, 1986b; Rashid, 1999), it was not easy to be other than a Christian in the United States. The passage of the highly restrictive national origins quota system in the US in the 1920s effectively cut off immigration from all but northwestern European and Latin American countries, until that law was replaced by the less restrictive Immigration Act of 1965. The post- World War II partition of Palestine, and subsequent political and economic unrest in the region led to refugee migration to the United States, but the volume of migrants and refugees from a number of predominantly Muslim nations has increased