About the book

A co-authorship already accomplished

As the United States marks two hundred and fifty years since its Declaration of Independence, this small book offers a record of what Americans of many faiths have built together — and an argument for repair.

Its claim is older than the Republic. A Moroccan sultan was the first sovereign to recognize the new nation. Enslaved African scholars who prayed in Arabic helped build the southern economies and seeded the music that became the blues. A Muslim boxer’s refusal of conscience widened the religious liberty that now shelters every American. Immigrant chemists, nurtured in American laboratories, photographed the breaking of chemical bonds and repaired the machinery of the living cell.

Running beneath that history is an older memory still: the Compact of Medina, by which the Prophet Muhammad bound Muslims, pagan Arab clans, and Jewish tribes into a single body politic while letting each keep its own faith. That covenant rhymes, across the centuries, with the Mayflower Compact, the First Amendment, and the motto a later republic would stamp upon its seal — e pluribus unum, out of many, one.

Written for the seminar table and the dinner table alike, American Islam closes with a documentary reader of primary texts — founding treaties, scripture, the Medinan covenant, and the voices of American Muslims across four centuries — each paired with questions for reflection. The future, it argues, belongs to those who can hold difference together without dissolving it: the bridge-builders. America has been making them all along.