A Conversation with Kambiz GhaneaBassiri

Associate Professor of Religions and Humanities, Reed College
May 2011

Kambiz GhaneaBassiri is a 2006 Carnegie Scholar, one of a group of distinguished academics who received grants of up to $100,000 from the Corporation for the study of issues relating to Islam and the modern world.  As a result of his research, GhaneaBassiri wrote the book A History of Islam in America, published by Cambridge University Press in 2010.  He shows that Muslims are far from recent arrivals in America. In fact, there is a long historical record of Muslim participation in American society demonstrating their ability to be both Western and Muslim for many generations.

How did you become a scholar of Islam?

I was born in Tehran and my family emigrated in the 1980s, when I was a preteen.  We moved to LA, which was convenient since the city was known as “Tehrangeles.”  It was helpful to be growing up in such a multicultural, diverse group of people.  After high school I attended Reed College initially then moved back to California and got my undergraduate degree at Claremont McKenna.  I taught elementary school for a year then went to Harvard for graduate school.  I’ve been a professor at Reed for nine years now.

What motivated you to write A History of Islam in America?

I am a historian of religion, specifically Islam. This has been my field since my undergraduate years.  My interest is in exploring how religions exist in relation to one another and to other aspects of life.  Religion is one among a variety of ways people can think of the world. Stereotypes exist on all sides, a fact that is central to our thinking about diversity. To me, religion, singular or plural, is a fascinating field of study for understanding humanity both individually and socially. 

As an undergrad I wrote an ethnographic study of Muslims in Los Angeles and it was published in 1997, because not much work had been done in this area. Most people who studied or wrote about Islam in the United States did not have a background in U.S. religious history. As a student of Islam this concerned me. Islam historically has been taught as part of area studies, not religion. I saw that in the same way that the study of Islam in area studies departments had prevented Islam from contributing substantially to our understandings of religion, the study of Islam in the United States by people not trained in U.S. religious history, prevented the experiences of Muslims from informing our understanding of religion in the United States. I saw that the study of U.S. religious history was necessary for putting the subject in its proper context.

What are your aspirations for the book?

I hope that the book demonstrates vividly that we could learn a great deal about U.S. religious history and about modernity more generally by looking at American Muslims’ historical experiences. The history of Islam in America highlights the conflation of race, religion and progress in the making of an American national identity. The book provides a narrative of how American-ness has been appropriated by minority communities. It shows how Americans have historically approach pluralism kicking and screaming while still celebrating it. Becoming aware of the historical conditions helps us see all that.

Better understanding of Islam could help us understand how the black community adopted this religion as a way of establishing a non-stigmatized American identity.  A universal religious concept was integral to the progress of the United States, and Islam has played that role for many of the country’s blacks.  

Who were the first Muslims in America and what brought them here?

The earliest Muslims that we can be sure practiced Islam were brought here as part of the Atlantic slave trade. Others may have come as slaves of European explorers or as indentured servants. Although Islam has been part of America from the beginning, we do not have much information about individual Muslims. My goal was to show a larger context—how the East and West, rather than forming a dyad, intermingled, defining themselves in relation to one another.

Why is so little known about the tens of thousands of African Muslims who lived in colonial and antebellum America?

The main reason is that in colonial America people such as slaves who came from the same ethnic communities weren’t kept together, so they had no community within which to create a history. A general problem with enslaved ethnic communities was that [to the rest of the society] they all became black.  

Islam was involved in the slave trade as a result of jihads in West Africa, which led to the selling of many Muslims to the Atlantic slave trade. But they were not thought of in a religious context. Over the long term, slavery did away with Islam among the original African Islamic communities. For the first Africans born in America, Islam was a memory. If Islam did last, it might have been as part of freemason communities. But scholars have not yet looked deeply into this, and when I tried to explore this possibility, I was told the “lodge’s records were burned in a fire.”

What periods in American history were most critical for Muslims?

There are several important periods of continuity.

The colonial and antebellum periods are central for African American Muslims and for many it serves as their heritage in this country - a heritage they were deprived of by slavery.  To Alex Haley, the author of Roots, for example, this connection allowed him to create the equivalent of an immigrant narrative of trials and triumphs for the descendents of the African slave Kunta Kinte.

Post World War II was important. Like a lot of people of color, Muslims fought in WWII and subsequently demanded not only rights but recognition; they organized and defined themselves as Americans.  This led to an institutional movement – the development of national organizations like the Federation of Islamic Associations incorporating groups from local communities. In some ways, these institutions in America operate like corporations.

Institutions created by Muslims are integral to civic participation. They paved the way for how to be an American Muslim, which was through local impact and participation in civic life. Not being centralized allowed for diversity of experience, so American Muslims from many places and cultures could come to practice together. Everyone shared a common denominator, the Koran, as primary source.  This relativizing of understanding of “what Islam ought to be” meant there was no single cultural authority.

The post-1965 period is important because large numbers of Muslims arrived from Asia and Africa as a result of independence movements. Coming from post-Colonial states they had more concrete ideas about Islam as “a way of life,” and often saw themselves as being “better Muslims.” They also brought Islamic activism and were particularly concerned with institution building ? cultural centers, mosques and the like ? because they had viewed such institutions as integral to the vitality of their religion.

What did you struggle with most in researching and writing the book?

The vastness of the project was a challenge. The data were all over the place, in communities literally all over the world.  It’s a relational history, meaning I had to determine which ideas are most important, to set boundaries that define and make the work manageable.  The histories I used included city hall records, local newspapers and other original sources. No one has really looked at West Coast Muslims, who represent a microcosm of the world Muslim community.  And research in West African Islam took a long time.

Did you make any interesting discoveries?

Yes. I was surprised to find the first book-length study on the subject was written in Arabic in 1960 by a Fulbright fellow at Fordham University in New York who had been in contact with American Muslims and was himself a Muslim. He just wrote up a detailed description of organizations and Muslim communities.

I also learned that in the 1960s and ‘70s pan-Islamic organizations were very interested in Muslim-minority communities for the promise they held to realize their Utopian understandings of Islam. Muslim World League, for instance, was excited about the Utopian potential of Islam and had ideas that they felt could be implemented in the 20th century United States.

What should readers take away from your book?

How people assimilate through Islam; how they form an American Islamic identity. It answers a central question: not can Muslims adapt to America, but how have they adapted? The truth is Muslims have been answering that question for ages and transforming institutions for themselves. They do it by building mosques, community centers, being public servants or taking an active part in politics.

To understand American Islam one can look at prior experiences in community and institution building and learn how Muslims address common problems.  I didn’t grow up in mosques, for example. Coming from Iran, at a time when Islam was so political, my family, although they were religious, stayed away from mosques—so this is one American way of being Islamic.

One concept I teach in my intro class is communicated through discussion of how Sharia law has helped Muslims assimilate, because it has told them how to live their lives. For example, during the first Gulf War Muslim soldiers requested a fatwa to see if they could fight other Muslims, and they learned that it was permitted in the case of a “just cause.”

In everyday life, questions arise about how and when to pray or when Ramadan ends. Should it be the same time as in Mecca? Some Muslims say it should be based on regional time. This has been a source of some conflict in America, which the law has helped to settle. 

What has the response been?

The reviews have been good. I’ve been invited to speak to a number of groups and I’ve been very happy to see people take an interest who are from varying religions and political backgrounds. 

Do you have another project in mind? 

I’m interested in pursuing the role transnational Muslim organizations played in the history of Islam in America. We don’t know a lot about their involvements with American Muslims. For example, some of these organizations, in the early 1970s, knew about the long history of black Sunni Muslim communities in places like Cleveland when scholars only “discovered” them in the past decade.

Another offshoot is the mosque in Islamic history – a religious history through the building of mosques.  There’s been very little examination of the way mosques have been created and used, outside of art history which tends to focus on monumental mosques. We haven’t paid much attention to mosques in general as religious institutions.