The history of Islam in America is a harrowing reminder of the disjuncture between religious and racial modes of integration in American history prior to the mid-1960s. When in the late 1920s, Noble Drew Ali founded the Moorish Science Temple, he deliberately chose to organize African Americans around a distinct Islamic national identity because he recognized the roles race and religion played in America’s national identity and in the economic and social assimilation of minority communities. … In hindsight, Noble Drew Ali was naive. Religion did not wash away prejudice based on phenotype. His efforts to counter the stigma of black skin by defining a distinct, black, Moorish national identity was up against America’s white, Protestant national narrative, and brought him and his followers under state surveillance.

XREF: Connects to broader scholarship on race, religion, and the nation-state in America, and to the limits of identity redefinition against entrenched national narratives.

Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ Th…, loc. 291