In the 1520s and 1530s, a man named Esteban de Dorantes, known as Estevanico, walked across the deserts of what is now Texas, New Mexico and Arizona – decades before the English founded Jamestown in 1607 and a full century before the Pilgrims reached Plymouth in 1620.

Born in Azemmour, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, he had been enslaved and taken to Spain and then across the ocean. In an ill-fated journey in which most people perished, Estevanico survived. He learned various Native American languages and became one of the first people from the Old World to cross the southern interior of the future United States.

By the evidence of his birth in Morocco and the biographical information we have, he was a Muslim. His presence puts a question to the familiar account of Muslims in America as outsiders, particularly after 9/11.

As a scholar of religion, I focus my research on identity and belonging, in places ranging from East Africa and the Western Indian Ocean to Islamic communities in the U.S. South. In my 2026 book on the history and future of American Islam, and a companion volume on the future of religious pluralism in the U.S., I argue that Muslims who were present at the nation’s founding helped shape its music, its laws and its civil society.

Quran recitation and American music

The largest number of Muslims came in as enslaved labor. Among them were Muslims from the Senegambian and Sahelian belt of West Africa, a region shaped by centuries of Islamic learning. By some estimates they numbered in the tens of thousands, and many were literate in Arabic and schooled in the Quran and in Islamic law before they were ever captured.

Some left behind remarkable written........

© The Conversation