Very few Muslims lived in North America and those who did—enslaved African Muslims—seldom were recognized by European Americans as such. Recent scholarship estimates that, among the millions of Africans forced into American servitude, perhaps one out of five was a Muslim. Yet, severely repressive conditions meant that Islamic practices and identities seldom passed to successive generations.

XREF: Connects to scholarship on the transatlantic slave trade and religious identity in diaspora; also relevant to histories of African Muslims in the New World.

Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ Th…, loc. 117