When did Islam first come to America?
The earliest known Muslim to appear on the continent was a Moroccan slave, Estevanico, who was shipwrecked with Spaniards off present-day Galveston, Texas, in 1528 and helped explore the American Southwest. As many as 30 percent of Africans enslaved in the U.S. were Muslim. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Muslim immigrants arrived from Turkey, Syria, and Lebanon, largely settling in the Midwest; later waves came from Bosnia, Albania, and other parts of Europe. In the 1960s, the Muslim population began to swell as the government lifted immigration quotas and many African-Americans began converting to Islam. Muslim immigration surged at century's end — 45 percent of today's Muslim-Americans arrived after 1990; between 1994 and 2011 the number of U.S. mosques more than doubled, from 962 to 2,106.
Read Full Article »