History
Islam in America: a brief record
Islam is not new to the Western Hemisphere, and its American story is not only a story of the last fifty years. It is also not an unbroken communal line from the colonial period to the present. The institutions that are growing today were shaped, above all, by twentieth- and twenty-first-century migration, conversion, and institution-building.
Enslaved African Muslims
The earliest substantial Muslim presence in what became the United States arrived through the transatlantic slave trade. At a January 2002 Library of Congress symposium on “Islam in America,” scholar Sylviane A. Diouf, author of Servants of Allah, discussed enslaved people brought to America between 1560 and 1860 and said that “at least 100,000 were Muslims,” including people who had been political and religious leaders, traders, students, teachers, and judges in their home societies. That figure is a historian’s estimate presented in a Library of Congress setting; it is not a government census, and scholarly estimates of the Muslim share of the enslaved population vary.
Literacy in Arabic and memory of Islamic practice appear in a number of surviving narratives and manuscripts from the period. The same Library of Congress program discussed the autobiography of Omar ibn Said, a Senegalese Muslim scholar enslaved in America at the end of the eighteenth century, as one documented example. Forced conversion, isolation, and the conditions of slavery meant that this early presence did not, in most places, become a continuously organized Muslim community into the twentieth century.
Early immigration and the closing of the door
A later, voluntary stream of Muslim immigration arrived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. An essay in the National Humanities Center’s Divining America series notes that thousands of Muslims came in that period, most of them Arabs from what was then Greater Syria, and that immigrant communities established worship in places such as Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Ross, North Dakota; and industrial cities including Detroit. That first wave was sharply limited by the immigration-restriction laws of the 1920s, including the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, which the same essay describes as allowing only a trickle of people then classified as “Asians,” a category that included Arabs.
African American Islamic movements
In the early twentieth century, Islamic and Islam-influenced movements took root among African Americans in northern cities. The National Humanities Center essay discusses the Moorish Science Temple, founded by Noble Drew Ali in Newark in 1913, and later movements, including the Nation of Islam. A Library of Congress symposium speaker, Amir al-Islam, described a “proto-Islamic” period between 1900 and 1960 in which some groups appropriated Islamic language in a struggle against racism, with later radicalization in some movements and, in more recent decades, efforts toward a more open, interfaith posture among African American Muslims.
The US Mosque Survey 2020 later recorded a decline in the share of mosques classified as African American — from 23% in 2010 to 13% in 2020 — and a decline in the African American share of mosque attendees. Those are institutional statistics from a later period; they do not erase the historical importance of African American Islam in the American story.
The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act and later growth
The 2020 U.S. Religion Census states that Muslim numbers in the United States “have grown … following the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which allowed more immigration from Muslim-majority countries.” That statute, also known as the Hart-Celler Act, abolished the national-origins quota system that had structured immigration since the 1920s and reopened lawful immigration from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, among other regions.
Post-1965 immigration, together with American-born children and African American Muslim communities, produced the institutional expansion documented in the mosque studies: 962 mosques counted in 1994, 1,209 in 2000, 2,106 in 2010, and 2,769 in the 2020 US Mosque Survey (2,771 in the Religion Census). Pew’s population estimates rise from 2.35 million in 2007 to 3.45 million in 2017 and about 5.5 million in 2026, with a 2018 projection of 8.1 million by 2050 if then-current trends held.
Source: Pew Research Center, “New estimates show U.S. Muslim population continues to grow” (January 3, 2018)
Source: Pew Research Center, “25 years after 9/11, a portrait of Muslim Americans” (September 3, 2026)
Why this history belongs in a civic argument
History is not a blunt instrument. The presence of Muslims in America since the colonial era does not, by itself, settle debates about immigration policy, religious law, education, or security. The recent pace of institutional and demographic change does not make Muslim citizens any less entitled to equal protection and free exercise. A serious country can remember both truths: this is a long American story, and the scale and character of the last half-century are new enough to study with care.
Continue to the research hub for the underlying figures, or to Our Values for the civic principles that guide this project.