Some slaves were Muslim, but not the majority. For the most part they came from coastal West African regions where animism predominated at the time. This source estimates that about 20% of enslaved people in Africa were Muslim. (Among those born in the Americas, the percentage would of course be lower.)
AHC: Muslim-Majority USA
- Thread starter Kayin Dreemurr
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Some slaves were Muslim, but not the majority. For the most part they came from coastal West African regions where animism predominated at the time. This source estimates that about 20% of enslaved people in Africa were Muslim. (Among those born in the Americas, the percentage would of course be lower.)
I agree with that Las point. If you already have a large Muslim population in the US, the country will become more attractive to more Muslim immigrants. Also with a sizeable Muslim constituency on their home turf, lawmakers might be less inclined to restrict the arrival of new Muslim immigrants and not put up too much hurdles for residency and eventual citizenship.
Third: With Islam already being an established religion in America, conversion will be a lot more common and a lot more acceptable. And with no real central hierarchy, like the catholic church, local variants and split-off groups will invariably rise. If we introduce Islam far enough in the past, an 'African Muslim Church' might even take the place of today's African Baptists.
So the main challenge would be how to get a sizeable Muslim population into the US by 1900.
Third: With Islam already being an established religion in America, conversion will be a lot more common and a lot more acceptable. And with no real central hierarchy, like the catholic church, local variants and split-off groups will invariably rise. If we introduce Islam far enough in the past, an 'African Muslim Church' might even take the place of today's African Baptists.
So the main challenge would be how to get a sizeable Muslim population into the US by 1900.
Yes, in the scenario I made most of them would eventually convert to Islam because Islam gets associated with African American nationalism (like a succesful version of Nation of Islam)
Not sure how realistic that is. Conversion from one monotheistic religion to another is relatively uncommon - much less common than conversion from animist/pagan religion to monotheism. I'm not sure you can just have huge numbers of African Americans abandon Christianity for Islam, in a country where there is no tangible benefit to doing so (e.g., no jizya tax to avoid).
Well this is not the most plausible scenario, but the challenge was pretty difficult. But I believe if that a muslim African American population remains (because of a longer slave trade), that a Nation of Islam-like movement could be more successful.
Somehow you need to get a Muslim colony in North America, either run by a nation or by private figures. Somehow.
I dunno, let's say in the 17th century - when the Ottomans were feeling bolshy under Murad IV - they decide to invest in their own North American colony, they want in on all that sweet wealth or just to show they can. New Turkey is formed near where the Thirteen Colonies will be, slowly growing. The distance between New Turkey and the Empire makes it relatively autonomous and it starts to get interested in all this independence talk it's hearing from its neighbours. It launches its own war of independence in the late 18th century and starts trading with the United States for £££s. Eventually, it decides to join up with the United States in a formal merger (yeah not quite realistic but). Muslim settlers have also spread down into Mexico as happened with Yanks in Texas, setting up enclaves that also join the US after the Mexican-American War.
Add in Muslim Great Revivals alongside the evangelist ones, the conversion of slaves before that's abolished and conversion of defeated Native American tribes, babies being born, and waves of immigrants leaving a declining Ottoman Empire and West-occupied Morocco for "the New World". Islam ends up as one of the biggest faiths in the US by the start of the 20th century.
I dunno, let's say in the 17th century - when the Ottomans were feeling bolshy under Murad IV - they decide to invest in their own North American colony, they want in on all that sweet wealth or just to show they can. New Turkey is formed near where the Thirteen Colonies will be, slowly growing. The distance between New Turkey and the Empire makes it relatively autonomous and it starts to get interested in all this independence talk it's hearing from its neighbours. It launches its own war of independence in the late 18th century and starts trading with the United States for £££s. Eventually, it decides to join up with the United States in a formal merger (yeah not quite realistic but). Muslim settlers have also spread down into Mexico as happened with Yanks in Texas, setting up enclaves that also join the US after the Mexican-American War.
Add in Muslim Great Revivals alongside the evangelist ones, the conversion of slaves before that's abolished and conversion of defeated Native American tribes, babies being born, and waves of immigrants leaving a declining Ottoman Empire and West-occupied Morocco for "the New World". Islam ends up as one of the biggest faiths in the US by the start of the 20th century.
You know, I'd forgotten that - Morocco and the United States had friendly ties from the jump. If I've got a large Muslim population joining up with the States, that could mean demands in the US to step in over French and Spanish conquest. "This is our mate and we owe him." (Which gets Morocco and the US are going to be a place where dissidents are going to flee from Arab nations)
Umayyad victory at Battle of Tours and Siege of Constantinople would make Europe Muslim and then Islam Spreads to Northern Europe while Vikings Adopt Islam
Then When Europe is Muslim and then America would been Muslim when Europeans Colonize Americas
Then When Europe is Muslim and then America would been Muslim when Europeans Colonize Americas
Cuāuhtemōc
Banned
The Ottoman Empire undergoes some horrific apocalyptic-level collapse during the nineteenth century and the Europeans sweep in to seize control. The chaos in the former Empire forces millions of Muslims to migrate to the New World, a significant portion of whom end up settling in the United States? Contact between Muslim Americans and the black community fosters a revival of interest in Islam in the latter. Discrimination against Muslims by white America encourages Muslims to move to the sparsely populated Great Plains territories where they quickly make up the majority of the population.
I don't see how getting an Islamic majority in the USA* by 1900 (or even 2015) is possible, but I think it's possible to get Muslims as a significant percentage of the US population by 1900, equivalent to Roman Catholics in OTL. Not easy, but possible.
The first thing you need to do is to give very large numbers of Muslims a reason for wanting to go to the USA, even though the people of the USA are alien in religion and culture. Second, you have to make it so that the mainly Protestant natives of the USA are not so bigoted against Muslims that they totally shut the door to Muslim immigration, the way they pretty much did to immigration from East Asia after the 1880s.
One way to get large-scale Muslim immigration to the USA would be for the European powers to be more aggressive and successful in conquering Islamic lands in the 19th century, and more aggressive in settling colonists there and either driving Muslims off their lands or trying to Christianize and Europeanize them. Perhaps the Ottoman Empire totally collapses in the early 19th century, the French and British and Russians move into North Africa and the Middle East earlier than OTL, and are more explicitly anti-Islamic. This would probably mean nasty guerrilla and anti-guerilla warfare across much of the area, but would also mean large numbers of Muslims willing to consider totally uprooting themselves and moving to a very foreign land. The USA, with a government that at least officially doesn't favor any religious group and doesn't persecute on the basis of religion, might look more attractive than most other options despite its distance and alien culture.
Now, how to get the mainly Protestant USA to accept these people? Well, I'm not totally sure about this one. If the Muslim immigrants are lucky, they won't be regarded in any more negative light than the Catholics and Jews who would probably also be immigrating in growing numbers as the 19th century goes on. In some ways, the aesthetics and practices of Muslims might even seem less alien to US Protestants than those of Roman Catholics. After all, most Protestants and most Muslims have a religious organization that is relatively decentralized, and where the clergy and religious leaders are seen more as guides and teachers than as intermediaries between God and humans. Also, both Muslims and many US Protestants were fiercely opposed to the use of images and figurative art in religious worship. Both Muslims and US Protestants heavily emphasized the centrality of their holy texts and preaching to worship. There are of course many, many big differences as well, but it's not impossible that some people on both sides will find common ground.
It's quite possible to envision a USA where by 1900 Muslims are roughly equal to Catholics in size and political and economic influence.
* I'm assuming that when the original poster refers to the "USA" they mean the same political entity as OTL, the one that declared independence from Great Britain in 1776 and adopted a stable constitution in the late 1780s. Of course, it's possible to have a plausible timeline where the same land that the USA occupies is occupied by a predominantly Islamic nation or nations, but this would not really be the "USA", and it would mean a POD long before the USA as a political unit existed.
The first thing you need to do is to give very large numbers of Muslims a reason for wanting to go to the USA, even though the people of the USA are alien in religion and culture. Second, you have to make it so that the mainly Protestant natives of the USA are not so bigoted against Muslims that they totally shut the door to Muslim immigration, the way they pretty much did to immigration from East Asia after the 1880s.
One way to get large-scale Muslim immigration to the USA would be for the European powers to be more aggressive and successful in conquering Islamic lands in the 19th century, and more aggressive in settling colonists there and either driving Muslims off their lands or trying to Christianize and Europeanize them. Perhaps the Ottoman Empire totally collapses in the early 19th century, the French and British and Russians move into North Africa and the Middle East earlier than OTL, and are more explicitly anti-Islamic. This would probably mean nasty guerrilla and anti-guerilla warfare across much of the area, but would also mean large numbers of Muslims willing to consider totally uprooting themselves and moving to a very foreign land. The USA, with a government that at least officially doesn't favor any religious group and doesn't persecute on the basis of religion, might look more attractive than most other options despite its distance and alien culture.
Now, how to get the mainly Protestant USA to accept these people? Well, I'm not totally sure about this one. If the Muslim immigrants are lucky, they won't be regarded in any more negative light than the Catholics and Jews who would probably also be immigrating in growing numbers as the 19th century goes on. In some ways, the aesthetics and practices of Muslims might even seem less alien to US Protestants than those of Roman Catholics. After all, most Protestants and most Muslims have a religious organization that is relatively decentralized, and where the clergy and religious leaders are seen more as guides and teachers than as intermediaries between God and humans. Also, both Muslims and many US Protestants were fiercely opposed to the use of images and figurative art in religious worship. Both Muslims and US Protestants heavily emphasized the centrality of their holy texts and preaching to worship. There are of course many, many big differences as well, but it's not impossible that some people on both sides will find common ground.
It's quite possible to envision a USA where by 1900 Muslims are roughly equal to Catholics in size and political and economic influence.
* I'm assuming that when the original poster refers to the "USA" they mean the same political entity as OTL, the one that declared independence from Great Britain in 1776 and adopted a stable constitution in the late 1780s. Of course, it's possible to have a plausible timeline where the same land that the USA occupies is occupied by a predominantly Islamic nation or nations, but this would not really be the "USA", and it would mean a POD long before the USA as a political unit existed.
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After 1640 or so, the vast majority of growth in the USA was from natural growth, not immigration. The overall ethnic makeup of the US has been relatively stable since 1700, being majority English with significant minorities of Germans and Blacks. In order to have the USA be muslim-majority, muslims need to outnumber Christians prior to 1700, and most likely prior to 1640. We need at least 30,000 muslim settlers there by that time.
So now the question becomes, how to get 30,000 people from one part of the world across the ocean to an entirely different continent, to serve a country that does not share your language or religion, where conditions are harsh and you are surrounded by hostile natives?
Suppose the Ottoman Empire collapsed in the 1590s, and collapsed hard. The early holders of colonial charters, unable to get settlers from England, instead kidnap boats full of Turks and Arabs, and then dump them in Virginia in the hopes that they would survive and grow cash crops for them.
That is a phenomenally stupid plan. If the Ottoman Empire collapsed that hard, the entire eastern mediterranean would be pirate central, and only a total moron would try to kidnap hundreds of people who don't even speak your language to send to a colony that doesn't even exist yet.
I'm just going to call this ASB.
So now the question becomes, how to get 30,000 people from one part of the world across the ocean to an entirely different continent, to serve a country that does not share your language or religion, where conditions are harsh and you are surrounded by hostile natives?
Suppose the Ottoman Empire collapsed in the 1590s, and collapsed hard. The early holders of colonial charters, unable to get settlers from England, instead kidnap boats full of Turks and Arabs, and then dump them in Virginia in the hopes that they would survive and grow cash crops for them.
That is a phenomenally stupid plan. If the Ottoman Empire collapsed that hard, the entire eastern mediterranean would be pirate central, and only a total moron would try to kidnap hundreds of people who don't even speak your language to send to a colony that doesn't even exist yet.
I'm just going to call this ASB.
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I was going to make a crack about how the best way to go about this involves the old horse of Cordoba defeating the Reconquista and becoming a colonial power, But I think that Muwatalli's Idea is much more interesting, and probably is a better answer since the POD occurs after the US actually forms. Would be an interesting ATL. The question is though: How mush territory do the Brits and Natives have to take in order for that to happen, and how crushing does the British-Native victory have to be for them to take so much land?