The popularity of Crusoe

Excepting the Gospel narrative, no story has so dominated the imagination of Europe as Robinson Crusoe. First published in London in 1719, it went through an unprecedented six editions the same year. Over the next century or so, it saw 700 editions and innumerable translations into every major European language. Since then, it has undergone adaptation and abridgement into other media – opera, pantomime, film, serial, cartoon, and so on. For over 250 years Crusoe has been a part of the self-image of every schoolboy with a European education. The author, Daniel Defoe, to cash in on the instant success of Crusoe, had a sequel ready for the press within four months (The Farther Adventures), and later wrote a more philosophical and contemplative third volume of Crusoe’s ‘Serious Reflections’. These sequels never caught on. What holds the imagination is the original situation: how a quite ordinary man, stranded for about 25 years on an uninhabited island, retains his sanity and dignity through every hardship and even emerges from this ‘trial’ with a modest fortune. The novel is a working up of the actual experiences of Alexander Selkirk, a sailor marooned five years on an island off Chile (subsequently named Isla Robinson Crusoe) who got back to England in 1708 and recounted his experiences to an eager public.

Crusoe: the myth derived from the novel

A book so widely read for over ten generations during which the world has undergone remarkable transformations cannot be un-connected to those transformations. The novel has in fact become a modern European myth, and the myth varies from the novel in important ways.

The transformation of Crusoe began very early, through the status accorded to it by the French philosopher Rousseau in Emile (first English trans. 1762). In this treatise on ‘natural education’ (i.e. education without the religious/cultural preconceptions used to adapt children to their future role in society), Rousseau wrote:

I hate books; they only teach people to talk about what they don’t understand… Since we must have books, there is already one which, in my opinion, affords a complete treatise on natural education…. Emile [the boy whose education is being planned] will need no other book in his library for many years. It will afford us the text to which all our conversations on the objects of natural science will serve only as a comment. It will serve as our guide during our progress to a state of reason…. You ask impatiently what is the title of this wonderful book? Is it Aristotle, Pliny….? No. It is Robinson Crusoe.

Robinson Crusoe, cast ashore on a desolate island, destitute of human assistance, and of mechanical implements, providing, nevertheless, for his subsistence, for self-preservation, and even procuring for himself a kind of competency …The most certain method for [Emile] to raise himself above vulgar prejudices and to form his judgement on the actual relations of things, is to take on himself the character of such a solitary adventurer, and to judge of everything about him, as a man in such circumstances would, by its real utility. This romance beginning with his [Crusoe’s] shipwreck on the island, and ending with the arrival of the vessel that brought him away, would, if cleared of its rubbish, afford Emile…. both instruction and amusement …. The practise of simple manual arts, to the exercise of which the abilities of the individual are equal, leads to the invention of the arts of industry the exercise of which requires the concurrence of the many. The former may be practised by hermits and savages; but the latter can be exercised only in a state of society.

This account of Robinson Crusoe the novel is inaccurate and unfair. But it is a near perfect account of the myth. The explicit contents of that myth are: a man can enter upon an unknown land with nothing and, by applying his native energies without inhibition, learn the arts and crafts necessary for survival and economic success; later, he can improve this success by using the labour of others as well as his own to exploit resources in a more organised way. The implicit elements of the myth are less attractive: the adventurer is a white man (not a woman), a European. He never enters into abstract speculations about the moral worth or ultimate purpose or far consequences of particular actions; instead, he calculates their present utility and applies the necessary means to secure himself and make economic surpluses. The land is there for him to subdue and use to his present advantage. Ideally, the land should be uninhabited, but if it happens to be inhabited, he must act as if it were in fact empty. For reasons never uttered, the European adventurer has a right to eliminate any competition: the natives will eventually understand that it is better for them to be ruled by the adventurer.

Crusoe: the novel vs. the myth

The reason is that the myth is still carried by the novel and the novel, being better and greater than the myth, saves the myth. Among several inaccuracies of the myth vis A vis the novel, one is the notion that Crusoe enters upon the island unequipped. In fact, though he lacks needle and thread and a metal spade (for which he improvises with characteristic resolve), Crusoe has pretty well everything else – some food, rice and barley seed, cloth and clothing, an axe and other tools, guns and gunpowder, pen ink and paper, the Bible, a dog and two cats, also his comfort drugs: tobacco and the pipe to put it in and rum. He is not, as the myth pretends, humanly unassisted: the assistance of others is available to him in the compacted form of the ‘capital of all that he salvages from the shipwreck. Without this capital’, Crusoe could not have begun, let alone succeeded, as an entrepreneur. Similarly, on the land itself, he has no rivals – neither predatory animals nor fellow- Europeans nor, until he is relatively securely established, natives. In sum, the Europeans complete self- sufficiency is a fabrication. It has been added to what is there in the novel, namely his resourcefulness with his capital.

Most significantly of all, the myth has wiped from the novel its religious dimension: this is probably what Rousseau meant by the phrase: ‘if the romance were cleared of all its rubbish’. But the religious dimension is not rubbish, it shapes the character and temperament of Robinson Crusoe. The novel has pretensions to spiritual autobiography, in the tradition of Pilgrim’s Progress, but without overtly allegorical characters or plot: the events and the central character are meant to be believed as literally true, not figuratively true. Defoe, it is worth noting, was the author of a very popular book of moral guidance, The Family Instructor, first published the year before Crusoe, and often reprinted.

Crusoe is a first-person diary of events told, as they were experienced at the time, by the wise Christian the narrator has become. Crusoe tells us that his ‘original sin’ was to disobey his father’s instruction to make a career as a lawyer; he could not resist the urge to wander, and ran away to make a fortune in the slave-trade; though he had opportunities to learn the skills of a sailor, he disdained to do so, dressing instead as a ‘gentleman’ (one who does not need to labour with his hands). Through the vicissitudes of storms and capture by pirates, Crusoe tells us, he hardly ever looked upward to heaven or inward to the condition of his own soul. But alone on the island, an earth-tremor that destroys much of his painstaking handiwork, and the sight of seeds sprouting, and his own near death by fever, lead Crusoe to recover his spiritual senses. His life thereafter is one of steady, solitary labour in a state of constant fear – fear of want, of hunger, of attacks by unknown animals or persons. But he maintains a gritty composure, looking regularly for signs of Divine Providence in whatever occurs, expressing gratitude for God’s care of him, in particular of his soul. There are constant references to the patriarchs and prophets of the Bible, so that Crusoe is, as it were, in a state of continual dialogue with his own soul. It is by dint of these inward as well as his outward labours to secure the necessities of life that, little by little, he comes to regard his island not as his prison but as his garden. He accepts his fate by choosing it as his destiny and, till the day he finds a human footprint on the sand, he imagines that he could live there alone and content until Providence decreed his death.

The footprint throws him into turmoil. In part he is afraid of a threat to the security of his person and property. But his chief fear is that the company of men will reintroduce to his life the temptations to sin and forgetfulness of God. Alone, he has no use for money, his needs are minimal; in company, his needs will grow as opportunities for commercial exchange and competition are presented. The ‘state of nature’ (man on his own), conceived as a state of fear, can be relieved by a conscience resigned to Providence; but from the state of society (conceived as a ‘state of conflict’, the war of each against all), there is no relief.

In relation to the natural world, Crusoe is no contemplative or scientist: he sees a tree, not with the eye of botanist or poet but of an entrepreneur, as timber fit for building. He assesses all the islands resources in the same way, and desires to improve them, by which he means quite explicitly ‘to increase their economic value’. His understanding of God does not come through reflection on the natural world as signs of God It comes, instead, through his feeling inwardly that circumstances, and the resources put at his disposal, are all arranged by God to test his faith and actions. His response to the testing is to work hard, resigning success or failure to the wisdom of Providence, and to keep up a stable, steady thankfulness. Once he has attained this peace with himself he can hope that, whatever crisis occurs, he will act in a decent way pleasing to God and his conscience. Thus, for example, when disgusted by the sight of cannibals feasting on the sea-shore, he has an impulse to kill them all in cold blood, but he overcomes the impulse.

Among the resources Crusoe manages and improves is himself.

This aspect of the story is what most delights its young readers: the analysis of how things work or are made, the resort to first principles, the improvisation with inadequate or insufficient materials and tools, the delight in whatever gets made, however clumsy or incompetent. Crusoe is a self-made man, in the moral as well as the economic sense: from the materials provided by Providence, he makes his character – his humility conscience, forbearance, composure, open-mindedness – as well as his outlandish clothes, rickety furniture, leaky bowls, the famous umbrella. Moreover, his religion is not a passive observance, but active personal prayer, personal turning to God, personal reading of the Scripture. What deeper wish does a young boy have, instructed to believe or pray or think in particular ways, and surrounded by things that enter his world ready- made, than to obtain some understanding and mastery of himself and his things through his own effort? Robinson Crusoe is the fulfilment of that wish. It enacts in rich, realistic detail the attainment of economic and moral independence by an individual of ordinary abilities and background, assisted by an omnipresent and benevolent Providence.

Crusoe builds himself a little domain, colonises a little empire. But he did not intend to do so; his empire just came to him by way of economic reward for initiative and effort. On the individual scale, his enterprise involved relatively little cruelty to others, no ugly national or racist pride, no brutal genocide, no violent competition with other colonisers. Crusoe is a decent man, disciplined, humble and, in a typically English way, composed and self-deprecating. It is through this self-achieved moral character and temperament that the novel saves the myth: it allows the English in particular to delude themselves that they did not mean to build a world-wide empire, it just came to them – as if armies and navies, mechanised industries and compelled trade, savage taxation of natives and cynical diplomacy, and the rest, had nothing to do with it. The appeal of the novel rests on this principle: provided an individuals own conscience is clear with respect to his personal actions, whatever evil may be done collectively by the state or society or the nation of which he is a part need not be an additional burden to that conscience. Morally, the individual is independent of the collective: at liberty to protest and to take personal initiatives to help alleviate the consequences of collective actions, he is not charged with moral responsibility for those actions themselves. The evident contradiction may be illustrated from the incident of naming Crusoe’s slave, Man Friday.

Naming the native

This incident was described earlier from the perspective of the myth: as Crusoe names his dog, so he names his slave, Friday, the day he ‘discovers’ him. It is not like that in the novel. At the time Defoe was writing, it had been reported by returning travellers that some of the ‘savages’ they encountered did not have names for each other until the Europeans gave them names. The fact is utterly impossible: there are no human beings who do not use human language, and no human language is conceivable where consciousness of one’s self and the other’s self (which necessitates naming each other) does not exist. But we must allow that such reports were accepted as plausible, even as true, without any particular malice – simply as a mistake – by Defoe’s contemporaries. In this way, giving a name is a positive and indeed kindly act. It is certainly the case that Crusoe sees Friday as a person like himself, a fellow human being with feelings like his own (for example homesickness) and faculties like his own (for example curiosity and dexterity), above all with a past and a mind of his own, to whom he imparts the story of his own life and misfortunes as well as his religion. Crusoe learns from the companionship with Friday, and he says so. Because readers may suspect I am overstating the case, they will allow me an extensive quotation. On spotting his homeland from a hill-top, Friday expresses great delight. Crusoe quickly and wrongly suspects that Friday will now return to his people, come back with them in great numbers and kill and eat him. Here are his reflections on his suspicion:

I wronged the poor honest creature very much, for which I was very sorry afterwards. However, as my jealousy [suspicion] increased, and held me some weeks, I was a little more circumspect, and not so familiar and kind to him as before, in which I was certainly in the wrong too, the honest grateful creature having no thought about it, but what consisted with the best principles, both as a religious Christian, and as a grateful friend, as appeared afterwards to my full satisfaction.

Can there be any doubt that Crusoe means well by his Man Friday? Yet, he is patronising in calling him ‘creature’, even as he praises him and criticises himself. The distance between master and slave is taken as a given; Crusoe never questions its propriety. He contemplates entering the slave- trade and his only negative comment on it is that it is a risky business, that it may be more prudent for him to purchase and pay a traders profit margin than risk the financial perils of capturing and transporting his own slaves. Since Crusoe abhors cannibalism without reserve, we may be sure he is capable of recognising something as an absolute evil; evidently, the slave-trade did not rate as such at that time.

The treatment by Europeans collectively of those natives or imported Negro slaves whose abused lives fuelled their commercial wealth is well known; natives and slaves were not accorded a status much above that of property or livestock, and their mistreatment continued long after such policies were officially condemned and outlawed. At the end of the 20th century, the attitudes behind that abuse have begun to die away, but the economic relations and political structures within which that abuse happened are proving more durable. The individual kindnesses in attitude and practice – and one could give historical as well as fictional examples – were irrelevant to affect or contain the evil done collectively.

The novels relationship with the myth is, in short, that it justifies the secularisation of economic and political life then taking place in Europe. Fifty years after Crusoe, the publication of Adam Smiths Wealth of Nations, marked the formal and permanent separation of economics/politics from ethics/ jurisprudence.

All of Crusoes moral and religious reflections are now read (outside specialist academic circles) as idiosyncrasies of the individual, a part of the charm of his character. Most modern Christians, and especially Christians of the Dissenting Non-Conformist Protestant tradition to which Defoe belonged, do not, as Crusoe did, rely upon Providence and their own industry, they rely upon their own industry exclusively, appealing to God only when they are unable to help themselves, and after they are helped, they are oblivious again – precisely the loss of grace Crusoe dreaded on seeing the human footprint. That loss was inevitable. For the reality is that the economic surplus that Crusoe achieves on his island in the state of nature (i.e. alone) is an impossibility: it can only be achieved in the ‘state of society’ (the conflict of each against all). This reality is represented in this realistic novel by (1) the ‘capital’ with which Crusoe starts his enterprise, a fact which, as we noted, the myth simply denies; and (2) Crusoe’s re-joining the economic mainland, his returning to England and voyaging Out again to new colonialist ventures, and (3) the revival of his hopes of entering the slave trade.

(Note: Robinson Crusoe Part 2:Economic individualism and secularisation and Part 3: The Muslim castaway: Hayy bin Yaqzan will appear in subsequent issues of The Fountain.

I imagined you travelling on the hills of my heart.

A mirage, I know, but it sufficed to calm the anguish of my heart.

As I mentioned you again, nothing else remained in my memory.

I wish I could move the whole of time with love of you,

and travel in your horizons, rising high like spirits;

I wish I, finding a way, could fly into your heart.

I wish I could move the whole of time with love of you.

I’ve come to understand that it’s too late to reach you,

I will lament continually for the pangs of separation;

Lamenting, I will wait with ever-fresh hopes of union with you.

I’ve come to understand that it’s too late to reach you.

My heart, like a pigeon’s, trembles following your footprints;

I beg you to give me a feather from your wing,

so that I might continue after you and reach you.

My heart, like a pigeon’s, trembles following your footprints.

O Rose, which changed dry deserts into gardens of Eden,

Come and, with your intoxicating colour, enter my heart!

It’s time that you smiled into my weeping eyes,

O Rose, which changed dry deserts into gardens of Eden!

Let me be your slave who, like Majnun, runs after you,

Spark such embers within me that I catch fire like a furnace,

and come out of this dream, enduringly bitter without you.

Let me be your slave who, like Majnun, runs after you.

I count how many days have passed without you,

and a gloom invades my soul, darkening it;

Let me see your face, as the sun is about to set.

I count how many days have passed without you.

Let my setting, the last moment of my life, be a new rising,

and my heart be invaded by the colours of your climate;

let lutes be played everywhere, and reed flutes heard.

Let my setting, the last moment of my life, be a new rising.

***

In the following historical survey I cover some basic realities of the Muslim experience in the US. I have adopted different ways of looking at our present reality and past experiences. Some of these are case studies, some are from personal experience and others are from my readings of history.

Today, as a community, we are at a point where we can either succeed or fail to a much greater extent than in the past. We have schools, professionals, Islamic centres and knowledgeable Muslims. However, we lack a core of brothers and sisters willing to try to organize the Muslims into cohesive voting blocks and into strong neighborhoods and communities where the Muslims are visible and where they will have a voice in the destiny of the greater society as well as, to some degree, in the foreign policy of America.

There are, by various estimates, between two and thirteen million Muslims or non-practising descendants of Muslims in America. Unfortunately, some of them are not well-versed in the literature and doctrines of their religion. Most of them would like to pass Islam on to their children and grandchildren, but this is unlikely if parents do not have sound knowledge about the Islamic faith, nor practise it in their daily lives. One way of understanding our current situation is to study our past. In order to develop my theme along this line, I will divide the history of Muslims in the United States into five eras: before 1800, 1800-1890, 1890-1910, 1910-1950 and 1950-present.

Before 1800

Before 1800 there were five Muslims in America who deserve mention:

1. The navigator of Columbus who, during the famous voyage, brought a copy of a travel narrative about Portuguese Muslims who had sailed to the New World in the 12th century. The narrative by al-Idrissi was called ‘The Sea of Tears’. In it he discusses the voyage of 80 mugharrirun, explorers from Lisbon, Portugal, during the reign of the al-Murabit ‘amir Yusuf ibn Tashufin. The narrative mentions visits to fourteen islands, half of which have been identified as belonging to either the Canaries or the Azores. However, the ones not traced could have been as far away as the Caribbean. An early voyage, from 942 ce, is mentioned in the annals of al-Mas’udi (see Arameo World, May-June, 1992).

2. Istafan the Arab was a guide for the Spanish settlers in the area of Arizona in l539. Istafan was from Azamor, Morocco, and had previously been to the Americas in the ill-fated expedition to Florida of Panfilo de Narvaez in 1527. He was a guide for the Franciscan friar. Marcos de Niza and was invaluable in this capacity until he was killed in an Indian attack in present day Arizona and New Mexico in 1539.

3. Another early Muslim of this period is Nasruddin. He is notable for having killed a Mohawk princess who refused to marry him and for being the earliest permanent Arab settler in the New World (see history of Greene County, N.Y., pp.l9-22).

4. Ayub Sulaiman ibn Diallo became a minor go- between with his people and the British after his repatriation. I mention him because he continued to practice Islam during his two years of slavery in the l730s in Maryland. He was well-versed in Arabic and wrote at least a half dozen letters in that language, translated coin inscriptions for the British Museum and drew a map of West Africa in which he wrote the place names in Arabic.

5. Salim the Algerian, who was a Muslim from a royal family of Algiers, studied in Istanbul. After returning from a visit to Istanbul, he was captured by a Spanish man- of-war and was later sold into slavery to the French in New Orleans, eventually escaping and regaining his freedom. He lived among American Indian tribes and settled in Virginia. Salim was found in rags, almost naked, and was taught English. Eventually, it was ascertained that he knew Greek, and he was given a Greek New Testament. Several future members of the US Congress befriended him, and he converted to Christianity. As a new convert to Christianity, he decided to go back home to spread the Gospel. Alter a disastrous journey to his homeland (where he was shunned as an apostate), he returned to America, met Thomas Jefferson, attended the 1st Continental Congress and, at the instigation of Congressman Page, his portrait was painted by an artist called Peale. Salim lapsed into insanity, perhaps brought on by his traumatic visit to his homeland. Salim’s final months are a misery. Some accounts tell of him regaining his sanity while others say he died in an insane asylum. It is also unclear if Salim renounced his adopted religion but it is possible that he died a Christian and he remained on the Page estate until the cod of his life. (See Graham’s magazine, 1857, pp.433-7.)

It should be noted that none of these men tried to spread Islam, and that only Ayub tried to preserve his own belief. An important point is that these Muslims were not unique in being able to read and write Arabic. In fact, in many slave quarters in the Caribbean and Brazil, there were clandestine Arabic and Islamic schools. One can find references to them in the works of Nina Rodriguez and in the two volume book Twelve Months in Jamaica by Robert Madden (1835).

1800-1890

During the nineteenth century, the presence of Islamic captives in slave quarters was documented by four individuals:

1. Theodore Dwight Jr wrote two articles about a slave named Lamen Kebe who had been a school teacher in Africa. Lamen Kebe gave Dwight a list of over twenty texts used in his schools and several pages of information on teaching methods (much of it still valuable today). At the end of one of the articles, he also attached one of the earliest glossaries we have of the Serrekuleh language. Dwight also mentions Abdul Rahman and Ayub b. Sulaiman Diallo.

2. James Cooper wrote the story of Salih Bilali, published with other ethnological writings in William Brown Hodgson’s Notes on North Africa (1844). Salih was a Fulani (as are all the others mentioned) and his story is only found in a letter by Cooper. This letter has been reprinted in Africa Remembered by Philip Curtin. Here we have an oral remembrance of Africa and a vocabulary of Fula, but nothing about his training or practice in Islam.

3. William Brown Hodgson did perhaps the most important of these documentaries. The main characters Hodgson recorded were the following: Bilali Mohammed, who wrote the only extant book on Islamic Law written in America and who contributed several Islamic terms to the Gullah dialect of English. He gave his descendants Muslim names and taught them until the generation of his grandchildren. Umar ibn Sa’id was a butler for Governor Owens of Fayetteville, North Carolina, and he wrote an autobiography and thirteen pages in Arabic. What he wrote shows that he might have been a Qadariyyah Sufi, a trader, and a school teacher who feigned conversion to Christianity under difficult circumstances. Abdul Rahman Ibrahim Sori wrote two autobiographies, two copies of sura al-Fatiha, signed a charcoal sketch of himself that was done by Henry Inman (this picture was on the cover of Freedmen’s Journal and is on display in the Library of Congress) and he dictated several letters to his family while travelling in the US to raise money to return to Africa. None of his Arabic writings show the least formal education, but it is surprising that he remembered the little Arabic he knew after forty years in slavery. Said eventually returned to Africa, where he died. His story is documented in Prince Among Slaves by Terry Afford (1977). A slave named London is described in a pamphlet by Hodgson (1844) called The Gospels Written in the Negro Patois of English in Arabic Characters by a Mandingo Slave Named London. This was perhaps the only systematic try at writing English in Arabic letters up to that point. London was held in slavery by the Maxwell family of Savannah, Georgia. They later moved to Florida where he died. An unknown slave correspondent from Georgetown, South Carolina wrote five chapters of the Qur’an from memory. This was translated by Hodgson.

4. William Carruthers, author of The Kentuckian in New York, tells of a slave who wrote sura al-Fatiha at the request of a traveller. He also mentions Ayub ibn Sulaiman Diallo.

One Muslim of this era not covered by these writers is Hadji Ali (Philip Tedro) who was a Greek convert to Islam and one of six camel handlers (three Arabs, two Turks and Hadji Ali) in the short-lived US camel calvary in 1856. The Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis, introduced a bill in Congress, passed in 1855, to import camels for military purposes in the Arizona desert. During this experiment, 77 camels and six handlers were brought over from the East. When the Civil War broke out, this experiment was abandoned. Hadji Ali was the only one of the cameleers to remain in America. The others returned to their homelands. Circuses and zoos acquired some of the camels while others were turned loose. The camels that were turned loose in the desert terrorized live stock and wild animals for years. Hadji Ali became a prospector in the Colorado River Area. He eventually became a legend under the corrupted name, ‘Hi Jolly’, given to him by soldiers in the US calvary. The only legacies of this experiment are a highway grave marker for Hadji Ali and some US Army Manuals (see ‘Report Upon the Purchase, Importation, and Use of Camels and Dromedaries, to be Employed for Military Purposes, According to Act of Congress March 3, 1855. Made under the Direction of the Secretary of War 1855, ’56, ’57’). A movie by Walt Disney called Hawmps, starring Slim Pickens and Denver Pyle, highlights this moment in history. Hadji Ali lived until 1903 in Quartzsite, Arizona, where he was a prospector and resident imam. His three daughters were raised as Muslims, but I have yet to verify how many generations of his family continued practicing Islam.

The Omani Embassy published a pamphlet about the exploits of the first Arab traders to the United States during the 1840s. (However, these traders did not settle here: see Eilts, 1962),

One other Muslim is Yarrow Mamount who was poorly covered by other writers. He deserves mention as he was perhaps one of the longest-lived individuals in this country; his reported age at death was over 130 years, and he was one of the first shareholders of the Washington, DC Columbia Bank, the second chartered bank in the United States.

1890-1910

During this period the only movement of great interest is that of Mohammed Alexander Russell Webb. He is commonly believed to be the first white convert to Islam in America. Before he became a Muslim, he was a newspaper editor and from 1887-92, served as US Consul to the Philippines, he accepted the post of Consul in 1887. While a Consul, he began to read books on Eastern and Oriental religions. Soon afterwards he began written correspondence with Indian Muslims, and in 1888 he publicly declared that he was a Muslim. He resigned his post in 1892, and went to India where he made a lecture tour of four cities: Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta and Hyderabad. These lectures were published in the books The Three Lectures and Lectures in Various Locations. The topics for these lectures included:

‘Islam, the Better Way’ and ‘Philosophical Islam’. Upon returning to the US, he set up the Oriental Publishing Company, which published at least a half dozen of his books including Islam in America (1892) and his short-lived periodical The Moslem World. He had a mosque on upper Broadway which failed prior to his death in 1913. His appointment as the Polish Emissary to the US and his writing of a still very pertinent book, The Armenian Problem and Its Solution, as well as the views of Webb on the war between the Turks and the Armenians, may have contributed to the decline of the group. Webb also failed to address the needs of the generality of the people; his was a movement for ‘philosophers’.

1910-1950

Between 1910-1950 several Orthodox, Sufi, Ahmadiyyah. Bahia, Shia and Black Nationalist groups arose. However, I shall focus on the orthodox mosques (in Ross, North Dakota; Detroit, Michigan and Cedar Rapids, Iowa) and on Sheikh Dawood, Soufi Abdul Hameed, Noble Drew Ali and Elijah Mohammed. Two mosques were built in the early years of this century. In 1915 the Albanian community built a mosque in Maine and another in Connecticut, but little documentation has survived of their administration. In Brooklyn, New York, Polish-speaking Tatars built a mosque which was still in use in 1926. The Red Crescent was founded in Detroit in 1920 and the mosque built there was in regular use from 1926-1932. This organization appears to have suffered from lack of finances, rather than lack of numbers. Only a few brothers kept the masjid afloat but the Great Depression proved to be too much of a financial burden for them. Perhaps the most successful of these early, orthodox communities was the Ross Mosque, having a congregation of about 100 followers at its height. The mosque was built in 1930 and remained standing until 1978, and in regular use until the late l960s. At this time, conversions and mixed marriages had decreased the number of Muslims, and Arabic was no longer used. Also, there were no practising Muslims to attend Friday prayers and the cemetery had fallen into neglect.

The Lebanese masjid in Cedar Rapids is a success story. Started in 1935, the mosque is still in use. This community seems to have suffered fewer of the problems common to the others; going overseas to marry was common, finance was freer and fewer people drifted from Islam. Arabic continued to be used widely, language being an important factor in uniting a community.

Sheikh Dawood and Soufi Abdul Hameed represent home-grown orthodox Islam. Sheikh Dawood founded the Islamic Mission Society on State Street in 1934 in Brooklyn, New York. Over 75,000 people accepted Islam under his tutorship before his death in 1981. His theory of Islam being genetic was to be adapted by many later leaders such as Elijah Mohammed and Imam Isa. His success was due to his willingness to stiffer personal abuse and financial difficulty for the sake of Islam. His writings and theories are contained in his self-published book Islam the True Religion of humanity (1965). His contemporary, Soufi, and his teacher, Mandaly from Egypt, had similar successes in Harlem, but their work was cut short when Mandaly died following a heart attack, and Soufi perished in an aeroplane crash. Their problem was that they failed to train proper successors, and the movement died with them (see Ottley, 1968, pp.116-19).

Noble Drew Ali and Elijah Mohammed represent the Black Nationalist side to Islam between 1910 and 1950. Both movements outlasted these men. Ali started his move- merit, the Moorish Science Temple, in May 1913 with the short-lived Canaanite Temple. He gave an identity to the recently freed Africans and showed them how they could have self-esteem, and allowed them to take part in a movement that was not under the former slave masters’ control. His main error was to fail to fully bring people into the reality of the Arabic language, the Qur’an and ibadah, but he gave them a clear concept of a Jesus they could accept and of tawhid, which Christianity had failed to give them.

Elijah Mohammed’s organization, the Nation of Islam, was begun in Paradise Valley (a black ghetto in Detroit) on July 4, 1930 by Mr W.D. Fard. Fard was a mysterious peddler from the East and a one-time challenger to Drew Ali’s leadership of Islamic Nationalism in Newark, New Jersey. Fard was reputed to have been born of a white mother and a black father (Mimi and Alfonso) on February 28, 1877 in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. He supposedly receiving his education at U.C.L.A. and Oxford. Fard was to have been a member of the diplomatic corps in the Hijaz, but he decided against it in order to go to the ‘wilderness of North America to find his Uncle [the Black Man] and teach him Islam and the true history of the black man. After teaching for three years, he left the US for an unknown destination. He left behind a successor, Elijah Mohammed, and some written teachings which were set down in several lesson plans of which seven are extant today. This was a way of teaching that was not uncommon to church catechisms, Masonic degrees or Moorish American Qur’an Questionnaires. By 1934, Fard became a sort of hidden Imam common to the doctrines of the Druze and Isma’ili versions of Islam. He seemed to expound rhetoric similar to military manual directives, Moorish Science, Masonry and some vague eschatology as well as doctrines (such as blood atonement), similar to that of early Utah Mormons. His movement succeeded due to dedicated individuals and strong leadership that was willing to suffer for the movement. His weaknesses were failing to teach proper rules for prayer and fasting, and his preaching the concept of Ali reincarnated through the Imams and the Mahdi (later he was considered God incarnate).

1950-Present

The next forty years saw the rise and fall of the Nation of Islam and its rebirth (primarily with Silas Mohammed, Farrakhan, John Mohammed, W.D. Mohammed and Imam Isa). The groups that were resurrected tended to try to revolutionize the teachings. Silas works with the white community and calls Elijah Mohammed ‘the Virgin Mary’ and himself the ‘Spiritual Son of Elijah Mohammed’. Farrakhan works with other minorities and has been working against the drug problem; he attacked a drug dealer after he found out his own son was a drug abuser. W.D. Mohammed works with the immigrant community in a liaison role. John Mohammed is the ‘orthodox’ Nation of Islam teacher, as he tends not to teach anything except what Elijah Mohammed distinctly taught. Imam is a Unitarian Universalist, Spiritualist, Jewish, Ansar, Black Nationalist successor to the self-proclaimed Messenger of Allah, Elijah Mohammed. All are in serious error because they fail to address the greater problem of developing the basic groundwork for a strong, growing and evolving Islamic community in America. Only W.D. Mohammed has begun the needed work of teaching sound Islam based on the Qur’an and the Sunna, but he is somewhat hindered by the legacy of his father, tending to give the teachings of the Qur’an as mostly symbolic as he was taught the Bible was. Others left the Nation of Islam, and we must remember them as true Muslims. These true Muslims include Mohammed Ali, Hamas Abdul Khaalis, and Malcolm X. Mohammed Ali went on to become one of the greatest sportsmen in this nation and a great Contributor to the spreading of Islam. Hamas Abdul Khaalis founded the Hanafi Mah-Hab Centre in New York in 1968. It was later moved to Washington, DC. At his height he had over a thousand followers and led protests for several Muslim causes. His famous follower is Kareem Abdul Jabbar. In 977, Khaalis and some of his followers seized a building in Washington, DC as part of a protest, and they held the people for some 30 hours. One hostage was killed and Khaalis is currently serving a prison sentence of 4l to 120 years. One of the greatest-ever Muslim leaders in America was, of course, Malcolm X (or according to his true Muslim name, Al-Hajj Malik at Shabazz). He started the political street organ of the Nation of Islam, the Mohammed Speaks newspaper, and influenced several generations with his eye-opening autobiography. Until the end of his life, he was dedicated to the struggle for the rights of all oppressed people of the world. He was killed at the hands of FBI-sponsored infiltrators from the Nation of Islam.

Conclusion

It is strange that the religion of peace is always forced into violence against itself. God says in the Holy Qur’an:

And thus, We have made you a middle nation that you may witness to all people and We made the Messenger a witness to you… (al-Baqarah, 2.143).

How could this history, with its successes, failures and disappointments exist, when we are instructed to be a middle nation of witnesses to mankind, and to propagate Islam?

In sum, this historical briefing on Islam in America focused on American Muslims and Muslims that were becoming Americans points to the need for da’wa, for Islamic schools, for fighting assimilation, for bilingual education, for masjids, and for taking part in the greater society.

The groundwork is da’wa, developing schools and businesses, youth and adult education programmes to teach Arabic and Qur’an to such an extent that our community here will become bilingual and stay that way. Next, we need to have Islamic holidays recognized in public schools in much the same way as Jewish holidays are. Finally, we need to make sure proper books on Islam are in every single public and private library in the US and that hooks on Islam are placed in as many non-Muslim homes as is feasible.

First of all, it is useful to recall why the institution of slavery is thought of or remembered with such revulsion. Images of the brutal treatment of slaves, especially in ancient Rome and Egypt, provokes sorrow and deep disgust. That is why even after so many centuries, our conception of slaves is of men and women carrying stones to the pyramids and being used up in the building process like mortar, or fighting wild animals in public arenas for the amusement of their owners. We picture slaves wearing shameful yokes and chains around their necks.

Nearer modern times there is the practice of slavery on an enormous scale by the Western European nations; the barbarity and bestiality of this trade beggars all description. The trade was principally in Africans who were transported across the oceans, packed in specially designed ships, thought of and treated exactly like livestock. These slaves were forced to change their names and abandon their religion and their language, were never entitled to hope for freedom, and were kept, again like livestock, for hard laboring or for breeding purposes-a birth among them was celebrated as if it were a death. It is difficult to understand how human beings could conceive of fellow human beings in such a light, still less treat them thus. But it certainly happened: there is much documentary evidence that shows, for example, how ship-masters would throw their human cargo overboard in order to claim compensation for their loss. Slaves had no rights in law, only obligations: their owners had absolute rights over them to dispose of them as they wished-brothers and sisters, parents and children, would be separated or allowed to stay togather according to the owner’s mood or his economic convenience.

After centuries of this dreadful practice had made the West European nations rich from exploitation of such commodities as sugar, cotton, coffee, they abolished slavery-they abolished it, with much self-congratulation, first as a trade, then altogether. Yet the Muslim regions had also known considerable prosperity through the exploitation of sugar, cotton, coffee (these words in European languages are of Arabic origin), and achieved that prosperity without the use of slave labour. More important, let us also note, when the Europeans abolished slavery, it was the slave-owners who were compensated, not the slaves-in other words, the attitude to fellow human beings which allowed such treatment of them had not changed. It was not many years after the abolition of slavery that Africa was directly colonized by the Europeans with consequences for the Africans no less terrible than slavery itself. Further, because the attitude to non-Europeans has changed little, if at all, in modem times, their social and political condition remains, even where they live amid the Europeans and their descendants as fellow-citizens, that of despised inferiors. It is barely a couple of decades since the anthropological museums in the great capitals of the Western countries ceased to display, for public entertainment, the bones and stuffed bodies of their fellow human beings. And such displays were not organized by the worst among them, but by the best-the scientists, doctors, learned men, humanitarians.

In short, it is not only the institution of slavery that causes revulsion in the human heart, it is the attitudes of inhumanity which sustain it. And the truth is, if the institution no longer formally exists but the attitudes persist, then humanity has not gained much, if at all. That is why colonial exploitation replaced slavery, and why the chains of unbearable, unrepayable international debt have replaced colonial exploitation: only slavery has gone, its structures of inhumanity and barbarism are still securely in place. Before we turn to the Islamic perspective on slavery, let us recall a name famous even among Western Europeans, that of Harun al-Rashid, and let us recall that this man who enjoyed such authority and power over all Muslims was the son of a slave woman. Nor is he the only such example; slaves and their children enjoyed enormous prestige, authority and respect within the Islamic system, in all areas of life, cultural as well as political. How could this have come about?

Islam amended and educated the institution of slavery and the attitudes of masters to slaves. The Qur’an taught in many verses that all human beings are descended from a single ancestor, that none has an intrinsic right of superiority over another, whatever his race or his nation or his social standing. And from the Prophet’s teaching, upon him be peace, the Muslims learnt these principles, which they applied both as laws and as social norms:

• Whosoever kills his slave, he shall be killed. Whosoever imprisons his slave and starves him, he shall be imprisoned and starved himself, and whosoever castrates his slave shall himself be castrated. (Abu Dawud, Diyat, 70; Tirmidhi, Diyat, 17; Al-Nasa’i, Qasama, 10, 16)
• You are sons of Adam and Adam was created from clay. (Tirmidhi, Tafsir, 49; Manaqib, 73; Abu Dawud, Adab, 111)
• You should know that no Arab is superior over a non-Arab and, no non-Arab is superior over any Arab, no white is superior over black and no black is superior over white. Superiority is by righteousness and God-fearing [alone]. (Ibn Hanbal, Musnad, 411)

Because of this compassionate attitude, those who had lived their whole lives as slaves and who are described in ahadith as poor and lowly received respect from those who enjoyed high social status (Muslim, Birr, 138; Jannat, 48; Tirmidhi, Manaqib, 54. 65). ‘Umar was expressing his respect in this sense when he said: ‘Master Bilal whom Master Abu Bakr set free’ (Bukhari. Fada’il al-Sahaba, 23). Islam (unlike other civilizations) requires that slaves are thought of and treated as within the framework of universal human brotherhood, and not as outside it. The Prophet, upon him be peace, said:

• Your servants and your slaves are your brothers. Anyone who has slaves should give them from what he eats and wears. He should not charge them with work beyond their capabilities. If you must set them to hard work, in any ease I advise you to help them. (Bukhari, Iman, 22: Adab, 44; Muslim, Iman, 38:40; Abu Dawud, Adab, 124)
• Not one of you should [when introducing someone] say ‘This is my slave’, ‘This is my concubine’. He should call them ‘my daughter’ or ‘my son’ or ‘my brother’. (Ibn Hanbal, Musnad. 2, 4)

For this reason ‘Umar and his servant took it in turns to ride on the camel from Madina to Jerusalem on their journey to take control of Masjid al-Aqsa. While he was the head of the state, ‘Uthman had his servant pull his own ears in front of the people since he had pulled his. Abu Dharr, applying the hadith literally, made his servant wear one half of his suit while he himself wore the other half. From these instances, it was being demonstrated to succeeding generations of Muslims, and a pattern of conduct established, that a slave is fully a human being, not different from other people in his need for respect and dignity and justice.

This constructive and positive treatment necessarily had a consequence on the attitudes of slaves to their masters. The slave as slave still retained his humanity and moral dignity and a place beside other members of his master’s family. When (we shall explain how below) he obtained his freedom, he did not necessarily want to leave his former master. Starting with Zayd bin Harith, this practice became quite common. Although our Prophet, upon him be peace, had given Zayd his freedom and left him a free choice, Zayd preferred to stay with him. Masters and slaves were able to regard each other as brothers because their faith enabled them to understand that the worldly differences between people are a transient situation-a situation justifying neither haughtiness on the part of some, nor rancour on the part of others. There were, in addition, strict principles enforced as law:

Whosoever kills his slave, he shall be killed, whosoever imprisons his slave and starves him, he shall be imprisoned and starved himself.

Beside such sanctions which made the master behave with care the slave also enjoyed the legal right to earn money and hold property independently of his master, the right to keep his religion and to have a family and family life with the attendant rights and obligations. As well as personal dignity and a degree of material security, the Islamic laws and norms allowed the slave a still more precious opening-the hope and means of freedom.

Human freedom is by Allah, that is, it is the natural and proper condition which must be regarded as the norm. Thus, to restore a human life, wholly or partly, to this condition is one of the highest virtues. To set free half of a slave’s body has been considered equal to saving half of one’s own from wrath in the next world. In the same way to set free a slave’s whole body is considered equal to assurance of one’s whole body. Seeking freedom for enslaved people is one of the causes for which the banner of war may be raised in Islam. Muslims were encouraged by their faith to enter into agreements and contracts which enabled slaves to earn or be granted their freedom at the expiry of a certain term or, most typically, on the death of the owner. Unconditional emancipation was, naturally, regarded as the most meritorious kind, and worthiest of recognition in the life hereafter. There were occasions when whole groups of people, acting together, would buy and set free large numbers of slaves in order to obtain thereby the favour of Allah.

Emancipation of a slave was also the legally required expiation for certain sins or failures in religious duties, for example, the breaking of an oath or the breaking of a fast: a good deed to balance or wipe out a lapse. The Qur’an commands that he who has killed a believer by mistake must set free a believing slave and pay the blood-money to the family of the slain (al-Nisa’, 4.92). A killing has repercussions for both society and the victim’s family. The blood-money is a partial compensation to the family of the victim. Similarly, the emancipation of a slave is a bill paid to the community-from the point of view of gaining a free person for that community. To set free a living person in return for a death was considered like bringing someone back to life. Both personal and public wealth were expended to obtain the freedom of slaves: the examples of the Prophet, upon him be peace, and of Abu Bakr are well known; later, especially during the rule of ‘Umar bin ‘Abd al‘Aziz, public zakat funds were used for this purpose.

A possible question: ‘It is true that Islam has commended humanity in the treatment of slaves, and encouraged most forcefully their emancipation. We can see from the history of many different peoples in the Islamic world that slaves quickly integrated into the main society and achieved positions of great prestige and power, some even before they gained their freedom. And yet, if Islam regards slavery as a social evil, why did the Qur’an or the Prophet not ban it outright? There are, after all, other social evils which pre-existed Islam, and which Islam sought to abolish altogether-for example, the consumption of alcohol, or gambling, or usury, or prostitution. Why does, Islam by not abolishing slavery, appear to condone it?’

Answer: Until the evil of the European trade in black slaves, slavery was largely a by-product of wars between nations, the conquered peoples becoming the slaves of their conquerors. In the formative years of Islam, no reliable system existed of exchanging prisoners of war. The available means of dealing with them were either (i) to put them all to the sword; or (ii) to hold them and attend to their care in prison; or (iii) to allow them to return to their own people; or (iv) to distribute them among the Muslims as part of the spoils of war.

The first option must be ruled out on the grounds of its barbarity. The second is practicable only for small numbers for a limited period of time if resources permit-and it was, of course, practised-prisoners being held in this way against ransom, many so content with their treatment that they became Muslims and changed sides in the fighting. The third option is imprudent in time of war. This leaves, as a rule for general practice, only the fourth option, whence followed the humane laws and norms instituted by Islam for what is, in effect, the rehabilitation of prisoners of war.

The slave in every Muslim house had the opportunity to see at close quarters the truth of Islam in practice. His heart would be won over by kind treatment and the humanity of Islam in general, especially by the access the slave had to many of the legal rights enjoyed by Muslims, and, ultimately, by getting his freedom. In this way, many thousands of the very best people have swelled the numbers of the great and famous in Islam, whose own example has then become a sunna, a norm, for the Muslims who succeeded them-imams such as Nafi’, Imam Malik’s sheikh, and Tawus bin Qaisan, to name only two.

The reality is that in Islam it is overwhelmingly the case that being a slave was a temporary condition. Unlike Western civilization, whose values are so much in fashion, slavery was not passed down, generation after generation in a deepening spiral of degradation and despair, with no hope for the slaves to escape their condition or their status. On the contrary, regarded as fundamentally equal, the slaves in Muslim society could and did live in secure possession of their dignity as creatures of the same Creator and had steady access to the mainstream of Islamic culture and civilization-to which, as we have noted, they contributed greatly. In the Western societies where slavery was widespread, particularly in North and South America, the children of the slaves, generations after their formal emancipation, remain for the most part on the fringes of society, as a sub-culture or anti-culture-which is only sometimes tolerated, and mostly despised, by the still dominant community.

But why, our critics will ask, when the Muslims were secure in their conquests did they not grant emancipation wholesale to former captives or slaves? The answer has, again, to do with realities not theories. Those former captives or slaves would not have either the personal, psychological resources or the economic resources needed to establish a secure, dignified independence. Those who doubt this would do well to examine the consequences upon the slaves in the former European or American colonies of their sudden emancipation- many were abruptly reduced to destitution, rendered homeless and resourceless by owners who (themselves compensated for their loss of property) no longer accepted any kind of responsibility for their former slaves. We have already noted the failure of these ex-slaves to enter upon or make a mark in the wider society from which they had been so long excluded by law.

By contrast, every good Muslim who embraced his slave as a brother, encouraged him to work for his freedom, observed all his rights, helped him to support a family, to find a place in the society before emancipating him, might well be pleased with an institution that opened to him a means of pleasing Allah. The example that comes first to mind: Zayd bin Harith who was brought up in the Prophet’s own household and set free, who married a noblewoman, who was appointed as the commander of a Muslim army which included many of noble birth. But one might swell the list of examples to many thousands if one had the space.

There are two important points to emphasize concerning the attitude of Muslims to slavery, one on the part of Muslims themselves, the other of slaves and non-Muslim countries. Although slavery is accidental to the Islamic fiqh, a matter which is to be solved step by step until it almost completely disappears in the course of time in parallel with spiritual, cultural and social developments, it was sometimes observed that some Muslims, especially some Muslim rulers, continued to hold slaves in their possessions. Islam, however, cannot be blamed for this practice, which came from the spiritual deficiency of such Muslims in practising Islam in their lives. The other point is that habits and the lifestyle of a man cause him to develop a second nature in him. When Lincoln legally abolished slavery in the US in the previous century, most of the slaves had to return to their owners because they had already lost initiative and the ability to make a free choice so as to be able to lead their life as free people. It is because of this psychological fact that the prisoners of war were first distributed among Muslims so that they, after their emancipation, would be able to lead a true Islamic social life as free human beings in a Muslim society and to enjoy their legal rights fully. Islam, thus, sought to solve the problem by steps: in the first step it enabled slaves to realize their true human consciousness and identity; then, it educated them in Islamic, human values, and inculcated in them love of freedom. When, at last, the slaves were emancipated, they found themselves to be fully equipped with all kinds of possibilities to be useful members of the community as farmers, artisans, teachers, scholars, and commanders, governors and ministers or even prime ministers.

Islam attempted to destroy the institution of ‘individual slavery’, and never envisaged nor tried ‘national slavery’. So, as a Muslim, I pray to God that enslaved-coIonized, oppressed-peoples of the world should enjoy real freedom.