As is discussed frequently on AskHistorians, the Ottoman Empire had no economic or political benefit to be gained from stretching themselves thin across hemispheres. As for the Barbary states of North Africa, they encountered Euro-America quite well, thank you very much--according to North American captivity narratives, piracy and kidnapping of American crews in the Mediterranean was lucrative enough without risking the Atlantic crossing. While South America sheltered a surprisingly sizeable population of ex-Spanish Jews (kicked out in 1492 and bouncing around for a bit afterwards), the expelled mudejar population largely did not have the financial resources to set themselves up as New World traders. The first mosque in the U.S. wasn't even built until 1893--and it was torn down after the World's Fair for which it had been built as a tourist attraction.

There were some individual exceptions, of course. Anthony and Abraham Jansen van Vaes or van Sale were settlers in New Amsterdam who bequeathed a Quran to their descendants down through the 19th century. They were the sons of a Dutch Mediterranean privateer originally against Spanish ships who, upon capture by Barbary corsairs, announced his conversion to Islam and offered his services to the North Africans. From the early nineteenth century, there is a trickling tradition of white U.S. men in particular who developed an interest in Islam even to the point of conversion.

But for the major pre-Industrial Revolution presence of Islam in the Americas, therefore, we should look to kidnapped African slaves and the communities they helped create and maintain.

Yes, create and maintain. Scholarship on African Muslims in the "early" (19th century even!) U.S., Caribbean, and Latin America still often begins with an apologia about the long history of attempts to minimize or occasionally weaponize the persistence of Islam among slaves--before explaining that there was in fact quite a lot to minimize.

Two stories of African Muslims in Brazil will serve to illustrate the ongoing, active practice of Islam by slave communities there. In 1865, a traveler and scholar Abd al-Rahman al-Baghdadi added several stops in Brazil to his itinerary. His The Foreigner’s Amusement by Wonderful Things details that he spent a year among slave communities in Brazil to "teach the Muslims." Rufino, on the other hand, was kidnapped from West Africa into slavery in Latin America. When he bought his freedom in 1835, however, he eventually found his way to Sierra Leone, where he garnered himself a serious education in Arabic and Quranic studies. And with that knowledge? He came back to Brazil to serve as a religious leader to the Muslim community in Rio.

Although exact numbers are impossible to determine, it might come as a surprise that a significant number of African Muslims were literate. In the Caribbean, the occasional slave owner notes their delight at the usefulness to them. But there and in Latin America, literate African Muslims wrote for themselves, and as Sylviane Diouf notes, for themselves as Muslims. Excerpts from the Quran and famous scholarly texts, instructions for prayer, or even just letters that use Islamic/Arabic greetings and common formula. (Many surviving manuscripts are written in ajami, meaning an African language using the Arabic alphabet).

There is less surviving source material from North American slaves themselves (or else it hasn't been identified as related to Islam yet). However, names in slave owners' "runaway slave" advertisements indicate the Muslim tradition of naming sons Muhammad was alive and thriving in black communities into the nineteenth century. Intriguingly, some of these Muslims seem to have been among the self-emancipated former slaves who ended up living in Native American communities in the South.

Nevertheless, there are some spectacular individual stories. Ibrahim and Isabella 'Abdul Rahman managed to gain their freedom in 1828 after Ibrahim wrote a letter to the sultan of Morocco explaining he was a Moroccan noble and the descendant of a famous religious leader. Of course, it took ostensible conversion to Christianity for the U.S. government to intercede on their behalf. But when Ibrahim and Isabella moved to Liberia, they seem to have apostasized themselves right back into the faith they had probably maintained all along.

Stories like the ones I've relayed here are, obviously, highly exceptional. However, they serve an important purpose: they're evidence that African Muslim communities in the Americas remained tied into a larger Islamic world. Islam certainly served as a pillar of community formation among specific groups of slaves (including offering cover for planning revolts, although scholars disagree on the extent to which they were religiously motivated). But practices like the use of Quranic verses carried on pieces of paper as talismans weren't isolated, fading, and empty inheritances. Exceptional stories help solidify Islam as a major contributor to the creation of black diaspora culture in the Americas--and thus, yes, to the heritage of the United States.