Terrains of Exchange by Green Nile;

Author:Green, Nile; [Green, Nile;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780190222536
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2014-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

EXPORTERS

PIOUS PASSENGERS, ISLAMIC MPRESARIOS

6

MAKING ISLAM IN THE MOTOR CITY

Highland Park is to be the center of Mohammadanism in the western world…

Detroit Free Press (1921)

Introduction

In the summer of 1921, a few minutes walk from Henry Ford’s factory in Highland Park, Michigan, there opened what was probably the first purpose-built mosque in the United States. Constructed at a cost of $55,000, it was funded by the Lebanese American real estate developer Muhammad Karroub, though its congregation drew from the multi-ethnic Muslim melting pot of the expanding motor city.1 Leading the prayers at the mosque was a recent immigrant from India named Mufti Muhammad Sadiq. Making full use of the city’s media, he declared in the Detroit News that ‘this is the first Moslem mosque built in this land and I am proud to have the first prayer in it’.2 To Muhammad Sadiq, who had only disembarked in Philadelphia the previous year, the use of newspapers to claim leadership over America’s growing Muslim community was part of a deliberate strategy that defined his three-year stay in the United States. As his subsequent Urdu biography-cum-autobiography summarized his achievements, in America he ‘opened two mosques and converted around a thousand Christians’.3 For as the self-declared ‘first Muslim missionary to America’, he imported to the religious marketplace of the urban Midwest the proselytizing techniques that in the previous half-century had been perfected in the ‘burned-over district’ of India’s Punjab.4 While Muhammad Sadiq has long been recognized as one of the foundational figures of American Islam, not least through winning the conversion of many of the first African American Muslims, what has not been recognized is the degree to which his success relied on the transfer to America of proselytizing techniques from the competitive religious economy of colonial India. It is this Indian input into American religious history that this chapter reveals.

Previous scholarship has tended to fix Muhammad Sadiq into his erstwhile American setting by linking him to narratives of the development of African American Islam that have their rightful place in the longer story of African American emancipation movements.5 Rather than emphasizing the American contexts of Muhammad Sadiq’s mission, by drawing on his Urdu ‘auto-hagiography’ the following pages focus on its transnational dimensions by arguing that his activities and indeed success in the United States were the result of treating American society in exactly the same way that Indian Muslim missionaries treated the other environments in which they were operating worldwide by the 1920s.6 Rather than being part of a uniquely American story, the converts won by Muhammad Sadiq appear instead as players in a larger global process of Muslim expansion, particularly through the ‘Anglosphere’, in which Indian religious firms were particularly effective.7 It is a process that reveals how America’s immigration history opened the American religious economy to entrepreneurs of distant Asian and Islamic provenance. Moreover, by drawing on a previously unused Urdu memoir of his life, we are able to see how America was perceived in Islamic terms: as part of an undifferentiated world of Muslim activity.

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