American Muslims: A History Revealed

How Muslim homesteaders constructed one of the first purpose-built mosques in the country.

Even before the United States was founded, tens of thousands of Muslims were already here, captured in West Africa, and brought to colonial America in chains. Host Asma Khalid tells the surprising story of one of these people, a Muslim man named Mamadou Yarrow, who, after 45 years of enslavement and negotiated his way to freedom.

Malika Bilal (Senior Presenter., Al Jazeera English) tells the recently discovered story of Muhammad Kahn, an immigrant from Afghanistan who traveled to the United States in 1861, fought in the Union Army, and left behind a 200-page pension file documenting his experiences. While piecing Kahn’s story together, Malika also discovers the stories of other Muslims involved in the conflict.

Asma Khalid travels to the American South West to tell the story of Mir Dad, a Muslim man from South Asia who came to the U.S. in 1917 and married a Mexican-American woman on the California-Arizona border in the early years of the 20th century.

Did you know that Thomas Jefferson owned a copy of the Qur’an? That George Washington owned enslaved people who were Muslim? And that a Muslim diplomat broke his Ramadan fast in the White House in 1805? These are some of the facts that Aymann Ismail (staff writer, Slate Magazine) discovers as he explores the role that Muslims played in the imagination of America’s founding generation.

In this film, host Malika Bilal (Senior Presenter, Al Jazeera English) tells the story of these early Black American Muslim communities through a woman named Florence Watts, who moved to the bustling South Side of Chicago around 1910, where she found work as a cook and a maid.