Islam in America: Ahmadiyya Muslim "efforts made up the first successful Muslim missionary movement in the West"

Editorial Note: The following is a great article by Julia Duin appearing in The Washington Times on this day. While we agree with the spirit of the message conveyed by Ms. Duin, it must be pointed out that the statement,"they [Ahmadis] believe their founder, Ghulam Ahmad — not Muhammad — was the final prophet for Islam", is factually incorrect. It is absolutely preposterous to attribute an incorrect term of faith to any person, much less to an entire group.  Such small and subtle errors also subtract from the credibility of the newspaper(s) responsible for carrying the stories. (... continued at the bottom)

Ahmadiyya Times | News Staff | Around the net
Source & Credit: The Washington Times
By Julia Duin | February 18, 2010

Indiana University religious studies professor Edward Curtis' recent book, "Muslims in America," is, according to his publisher, the first single-author history of American Muslims from Colonial times to the present.

There is not a whole lot of competition. I don't know of any textbooks that mention how there were Islamic names like Hassan and Ali in documents from our Spanish colonial period (in the American Southwest) in the 1600s.

In 1730, roughly 280 years ago, the first identifiable Muslim arrived on the Eastern Seaboard.

He was Ayuba Suleiman Diallo. The hapless man was enslaved by Muslim slavers in present-day Senegal and put on a slave ship that landed in Annapolis. From there, the African was taken to a nearby tobacco farm. He became known as Job, and he could read and write Arabic and had memorized the Koran.

Somehow, he got a letter circulated asking for his release. It fell into the hands of James Oglethorpe, a member of the British Parliament who arranged to have Job freed and eventually returned to Africa.

Given that Islam had nearly 1,000 years to expand into West Africa before Protestant missionaries began arriving in the 19th century, it seems only logical that many of the slaves captured and sent across the Atlantic were Muslim. I called Mr. Curtis in Jordan, where he's doing research on a Fulbright scholarship, to ask why so little has been said in our history books about Muslims in America.

"There's a lot of street knowledge that Islam is part of the black American past," he said, "but there is little sense of America's Muslim past among the general populace. There's a sense today one can't be Muslim and American.

"But Thomas Jefferson was quite a scholar of Islam. He had his own Koran. The Founding Fathers saw Islam as a rational religion in contrast to Roman Catholic popery."

Mr. Curtis chronicles the stories of several Muslim slaves who, although in America against their will, made the best of their situation and either became overseers of other slaves or joined anti-slavery movements.

After the Civil War, Muslims — mostly from Syria and Lebanon — began to trickle in. There were only a few white converts, the first being Alexander Webb, the U.S. consul to the Philippines, who accepted Islam in the late 1870s.

Islam's most famous American convert, Malcolm X, didn't discover the faith until the 1940s, while in prison. In 1952, the year he was released, there already were 20 mosques in North America, thanks to some savvy proselytizing among blacks.

Mr. Curtis says that started in the 1920s, when American Muslims achieved enough mass to constitute a religious denomination. In 1920 itself, Indian missionary Mufti Muhammad Sadiq immigrated here to convert people to the Ahmadiyya movement in Islam.

Although most Muslims view the Admadi Muslims as heretics because they believe their founder, Ghulam Ahmad — not Muhammad — was the final prophet for Islam, Mr. Sadiq's efforts made up the first successful Muslim missionary movement in the West.

"I honestly believe part of the tensions between Muslims outside of the United States and inside the United States is due to ignorance," Mr. Curtis says. "My hope is that by conjuring up our American ancestors, we will think of ourselves in the present differently."

Read original article here: DUIN: Muslims here since slavery

Julia Duin (pronounced "Deen") is an accomplished writer and journalist who has worked for 5 newspapers, written four books (with three published), along with more magazine articles than she can count. She earned a master's degree in religion in 1992. In addition to her reporting that includes more than three years with the Houston Chronicle, she was a city editor for The Daily Times in Farmington, N.M.Currently, she is a religion writer and assistant national editor for The Washington Times. Julia Duin can be reached at jduin@washingtontimes.com. [http://juliaduin.chalfonthouse.com]



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Ahmadiyya Times: Editors Note (cont'd.): It is not uncommon for writers to take a single source to establish both; context and reference and it should continue to be an acceptable method for necessary circumstances; such as for a working hypothesis. But it should remain the writer's responsibility that the facts and mere conjectures are separated and made to stand with proper 'name tags.'

Now, it seems that Ms. Duin very likely took the conjectures advanced by Edward Curtis in the book under her review and conveyed those forward, which, sort of, came out as if facts.

Well, that is what we are here for - to set the records straight. According to our research and 'personal experiences', the account of Ahmadiyya Muslim beliefs is as following:

The claims made by the founder of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, Hadhrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, constitutes the basis of the beliefs of the Worldwide Ahmadiyya Muslim Community. In 1891, Hadhrat Ahmad pronounced that on the basis of Divine revelations, he was the Promised Messiah and Mahdi whose advent had been foretold by the scriptures of many faiths and by the Holy Founder of Islam, Prophet Muhammad. [read here]

Hadhrat Ahmad made no such claims that he was the 'final prophet for Islam' or 'last prophet' (or even a 'rival prophet' as suggested by Pamela Constable in her article in The Washington Posts few days ago [read here]).

As we had conveyed to Pamela Constable with reference her article in the Washington Post, there is nothing that offends more than one's own position being misstated by someone else.

Once again, this is not at all to take away from the article Julia Duin wrote, but merely to set the record straight.