Pre-Columbian Muslims in the Americas Excerpted and adapted from Islam in the United States of America

By Sulayman S.Nyang (Chicago: ABC International Group, Inc., 1999) pp. 12-13, 30.

Data on the early history of Islam in the Americas is fragmentary and ridden with controversy. Not all scholars accept the fragmentary evidence that exists. There is, however, evidence that Muslims or persons believed to be Muslims visited North America in the pre-Colombian past.1 In 1312 Mansa Abu Bakr of Mali is believed to have traveled from the Senegambian region of the African coast to the Gulf of Mexico. This account captured the attention of distinguished scholars such as Basil Davidson of Britain and others in Africa, America and Europe. It has come to us by way of the writings of al-Omari, a Muslim historian whose work has shed much light on medieval African kingdoms in the sub-Saharan regions of the African continent.2

This piece of historical evidence received support indirectly from the writings of Leo Wiener, the Harvard University professor who wrote a tome on Africa and the Discovery of America.3 His book provides data on ethno-linguistic connections between certain peoples of the West African coast and the native Americans living in the Gulf of Mexico region of the Americas. Though Leo Wiener's study was not accorded much attention by his contemporaries, towards the end of the nineteen seventies Ivan Van Sertima of Rutgers University in New Jersey reminded his colleagues that there were indeed other peoples who came to America before Columbus.4 His book capturing this argument was the topic of academic debates throughout the United States of America. The timeliness of his book was underscored by the fact that Alex Haley's successful book and television series on Roots had already planted in the popular American imagination that Kunta Kinte was a Muslim slave and that he came from the Senegambian coast.5 Until we come across new evidence in this field, the evidence for Muslims in the pre-Columbian Americas depends on a narrative passed to our generation by a fourteenth century Arab writer and on a Harvard University Professor's comparative linguistic analysis of African and native American languages.

1 Abdullah Hakim Quick, Deeper Roots: Muslims in the Americas and the Caribbean From Before Columbus To the Present (London, England:Ta-Ha Publishers Ltd.,1996), pp.l3-37.

2 Basil Davidson, Lost Cities of Africa (Boston: Little Brown, 1959), pp. 74-75. This story of an African visit to the New World in pre-Columbian times is based on chapter ten of ibn Fadi Allah al-Omari's Masalik al-absar fi absar fi mamalik

amsar (Cairo, C.1342 AH). The Arabic original was translated and published in Paris by Gaudefroy-Demombynes in 1927.

3 Leo Wiener, Africa and the Discovery of America (Philadelphia: Innes and Sons, 1922).

4 Ivan Van Sertima, They Came before Columbus (New York: RandomHouse,1976).

5 It should be pointed out here that, in addition to his own book on Roots' Alex -Haley was also the ghost writer for Malcolm X's Autobiography.