in the same behavior may bring shame on not
only themselves but also their families.
African-American Muslims, although not sep-
arate from the immigrant and expatriate Muslim
community, have a different history of entering
Islam, and have evolved many new indigenous
forms of Islam not found in the larger Muslim
world. East and West African Muslims came to the
New World (the Caribbean, South America, and
North America) as slaves to the British, French,
Spanish, and Dutch colonies from the 16th
through the mid-19th centuries. After the Civil
War (1860–65) most African Muslim ex-slaves
in the United States returned to their countries
of origin, although there is testimony from their
descendants of settlement by African Muslims
and their families in the coastal islands of Georgia
and the Carolinas into the mid-20th century. The
rise and growth of the African-American Mus-
lim community cannot be directly traced to the
descendants of those African Muslims from the
slave era except as an issue of awareness among
modern African Americans of Islam as a religion
of African origin offering an alternative to post-
slavery Christianity.
Although conversion to Islam among African
Americans has been overwhelmingly to the Sunni
tradition, new and sectarian communities have
received far more public and media recognition
since the civil rights era. One such sectarian group,
the ahmadiyya Community, whose missionizing
(dawa) efforts have been highly successful among
African Americans, came to America early in the
20th century. sUFism has also had a strong, but as
yet not fully charted history among African Ameri-
cans. The development of new African-American
Muslim communities includes the Moorish Sci-
ence Temple, beginning in 1913 and led by Noble
Drew Ali; the nation oF islam, beginning in the
early 1930s and led by Elijah Muhammad, and two
of the most recent coming out of New York, the
Five Percent Nation of Gods and Earths, beginning
in the 1960s as a youth off-shoot of the Nation of
Islam and led by Clarence “Pudding” 13X, and
the Ansaaru Allah Community, beginning in 1970
and led by Isa Muhammad. All of these communi-
ties share a commitment to a black theology and
strong apocalyptic tone, which set them apart from
the mainstream of Islam in America and the world
Muslim umma.
The later history of the Nation of Islam reflects
a growing trend toward adopting the Sunni tradi-
tion by the majority of African-American Mus-
lims. Warith Deen Muhammad (d. 2008), after the
death of his father, Nation of Islam founder Elijah
Muhammad, led the majority of the community
toward the Sunni mainstream by directing them to
learn Arabic, practice the five pillars, and join the
world Sunni umma, renaming it first the World
Community of al-Islam in the West and finally the
American Muslim Mission. Relations between the
African-American and immigrant/expatriate Mus-Islamic Society of Salt Lake City, Utah( J. Gordon Melton)
K 694 United States