The Huffington Post
The idea that all Muslims should be blocked from entering the U.S. plays well with people who think adherents to Islam are relatively recent arrivals on the American scene. Yet Muslims have been in this country from its inception. Far from being a foreign element, Muslims have been here throughout American history and indeed longer than some Christian religions.

Followers of Islam were present in the U.S. when it was founded. They were represented in the slave population during the colonial period and in the early U.S. Most enslaved Africans who were forcibly brought to the Americas came through ports in West Africa, in a broad swath from modern-day Senegal down to Angola. The captives themselves came from many locations, as numerous people were kidnapped, taken as prisoners of war or purchased in a vast expanse of the African interior. Especially in the northern slaving ports, the transatlantic slave trade scooped up people who adhered to the Islamic faith. Islam had spread into Senegal and Sierra Leone from North Africa; in addition, many more Muslims traveled into the region as traders. Their presence in the regions most affected by the transatlantic slave trade meant they too were captured and enslaved, and scholar Sylviane A. Diouf collected much evidence demonstrating that they had indeed been part of the enslaved population throughout the colonial period and beyond, in her prize-winning 1999 book, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas. One of the best examples she unearthed involved an illiterate slave master who relied on his Muslim slave to keep the books for his plantation. (Muslims, because they learned to read their holy book, the Qur’an, enjoyed high rates of literacy.)

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