Authors of the American Story: Honoring Muslim America This Independence Day
This July 4th, America is celebrating 250 years of independence. We know the stories of our nation: the battles, the founders, and the declarations. But this Fourth of July, USCMO wishes to spotlight the Muslim voice in the American story, from its founding to every major moment that has shaped American history.Â
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In Founding
The Muslim voice can be found even in the U.S.’s founding.Â
One of the most remarkable examples comes from the very beginning of American independence. According to the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Historian, the Sultan of Morocco mentioned American ships in a consular document in 1777, just one year after the Declaration of Independence. The U.S. Embassy in Morocconotes that on December 20, 1777, Sultan Sidi Muhammad declared Moroccan ports open to American vessels, making Morocco one of the earliest nations to recognize American sovereignty. In 1786, the relationship was sealed through the Treaty of Peace and Friendship, which the U.S. State Department records as signed by U.S. Minister Thomas Barclay and Sultan Sidi Muhammad at Marrakech. That treaty still stands today as the longest unbroken treaty relationship in American history. At a moment when the United States was still struggling to be seen as legitimate, a Muslim-majority kingdom extended its hand.
That is not a footnote to American history. It is part of the opening chapter.
The treaty itself, preserved by Yale Law School’s Avalon Project, names John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson in its negotiating history. In 1789,President George Washington wrote to Sultan Sidi Mohammad, expressing the new nation’s gratitude and friendship. Even Thomas Jefferson, one of the central figures of the founding era, owned a copy of the Qur’an, purchased in 1765 while he was in Williamsburg. More than two centuries later, that same Qur’an would return to public life as Keith Ellison’s decision to take his oath of office on the Quran started making national news.
These details remind us of a profound truth: America’s pluralism is not new. They are simply part of our nation’s inheritance.Â
Older Than the Republic Remebers
Muslim presence in America is far older than modern immigration. According to theLowcountry Digital History Initiative, 15 to 30 percent of enslaved Africans who survived the Middle Passage came from Islamic regions of West Africa. They carried with them faith, language, literacy, memory, and scholarship through one of the darkest chapters of American history.
The Library of Congress preserves the Omar Ibn Said Collection, including an 1831 Arabic manuscript by Omar Ibn Said, a West African Muslim scholar enslaved in America. The Library of Congress identifies that manuscript as the only known autobiography written in Arabic in the United States by an enslaved person while in captivity.
Yarrow Mamout, an African American Muslim and former slave, remains visible in the nation’s memory through a portrait placed on view by the National Portrait Gallery, one of the rare early visual records of Muslim life in this country.
Their stories challenge the idea that Muslim America is recent, foreign, or separate from the nation’s roots. Muslim America begins in the deep and difficult soil of American history itself.
We honor these voices, recognize the hardship they endured, and remain indebted to the faith, resilience, and memory they persevered.
Voices That Moved a Nation
From those early lives of endurance came later generations of courage, conviction, and public witness.
The National Archives records that Malcolm X embraced Islam while incarcerated and rose to speak nationally and internationally for the empowerment of Black people. His voice forced America to confront questions of racism, dignity, self-determination, and justice that the nation could no longer ignore.
The Muhammad Ali Center tells the story of Muhammad Ali, born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr. in Louisville, who won Olympic gold in Rome in 1960 before becoming heavyweight champion of the world. Yet Ali became more than a champion in the ring. He became a champion of conscience. Decades later, the world watched himlight the Olympic cauldron at the 1996 Atlanta Games, and in 2005, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
The NBA counts Kareem Abdul-Jabbar among the most celebrated players in league history, with six NBA titles, six MVP awards, and fifteen All-NBA selections. He, too, received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, honored not only as an athlete, but as a writer, public intellectual, and moral voice.
That tradition continues. In 2016, fencer Ibtihaj Muhammad became the first American woman to wear a hijab while competing for the United States in the Olympics and the first Muslim American woman to win an Olympic medal. Her bronze medal in Rio carried meaning far beyond sport, inspiring Muslim American girls to see themselves in the nation’s public life.
These figures were not simply famous Muslim Americans. They were American giants. Their faith, discipline, courage, and moral clarity helped shape how this country understands justice, dignity, freedom, and public responsibility.
Building America, Literally
Muslim contributions are not only written in speeches, books, and public memory. They are built into the American skyline and present in American hospitals.
The National Academy of Engineering honors Fazlur Rahman Khan as a pioneer of tall-building design, crediting him with the bundled tube system first used in the Sears Tower. His work helped transform what modern skyscrapers could become. Princeton’s archive also notes that Chicago’s John Hancock Center stands as a landmark expression of his trussed tube system.
In medicine, the National Library of Medicine records that the Ommaya reservoir, still used today to deliver chemotherapy to the central nervous system, was invented in 1963 by Pakistani neurosurgeon Ayub Khan Ommaya. Somewhere in an American hospital today, a patient may be receiving treatment through a device that carries a Muslim name.
The Face of Muslim America Is the Face of America
oday, Muslim America reflects the very diversity that makes the United States extraordinary.
Pew Research Center’s 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study found that 1.2% of U.S. adults identify as Muslim. Pew also found that Muslim Americans mirror the nation’s diversity: 30% are Asian, 30% are white, 20% are Black, 11% are Hispanic, and 7% are multiracial or another race. It is also a highly educated community, with44% of Muslim adults holding college degrees, including 26% with postgraduate degrees. It is a young community as well, with 35% of Muslim adults between the ages of 18 and 29.
There is no single face of Muslim America. Muslim Americans are Black, Arab, Asian, white, Latino, immigrant and native-born, urban and suburban, students and scholars, veterans and public servants, parents and neighbors. They are not outside the American story. They are woven into it.
The Face of Muslim America Is the Face of America
As the United States marks 250 years of independence, USCMO celebrates the Muslim voices, lives, sacrifices, and achievements that have helped shape this nation from its earliest days to the present.
We recognize Morocco’s early friendship with a struggling young republic. We honor the enslaved African Muslims whose faith and intellect survived the brutality of bondage. We celebrate the athletes, engineers, physicians, entrepreneurs, public officials, soldiers, and families who helped build this country alongside their fellow Americans.
America’s greatness has never come from sameness. It has come from the ability to gather many peoples, many stories, and many convictions into one shared national promise.
On this Independence Day, USCMO honors Muslim Americans not as guests in the American story, but as authors of it.
May this nation continue to live up to its founding promise.
