AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
A new docuseries opens with a portrait of an African man, Mamadou Yarrow, or Yarrow Mamout. He wears a knit cap and a short beard. And what’s remarkable about this painting is not the colors or brush strokes, but the subject himself, a formerly enslaved Black man, a Muslim who bought his freedom, done by a famous Revolutionary War painter.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SERIES, “AMERICAN MUSLIMS”)
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: I didn’t really even know about this story when I was growing up here as an adult.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #2: This is a story that predates the founding of America.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: Predates the founding of America.
RASCOE: Yarrow’s story is just one in the series “Muslims In America (ph), ” which airs on PBS and explores the untold story of Islam in this country. NPR White House correspondent Asma Khalid hosts two of the episodes, and she hopes these stories can help us reevaluate our own understanding of America.
ASMA KHALID, BYLINE: In understanding, you know, this faith as being indigenous to this country, I hope that it just helps us all better understand what the American story is. And what the American story can be.
RASCOE: Your episodes focus on two men, Mamadou Yarrow and Mir Dad. First, talk to me about Mamadou Yarrow.
KHALID: He was a man who was brought to the United States as a slave, and he was a slave in Montgomery County, which is now where I live, Montgomery County, Maryland. He went on to eventually buy his freedom and purchase a home in Georgetown. And so there’s this very famous Revolutionary War-era portrait artist, a man who painted presidents, people like George Washington. His name was Charles Willson Peale. He ends up hearing about Yarrow Mamout, and he decides he wants to paint him and learn about him. And that’s how we actually know so much about this man’s story is that Charles Willson Peale sits down with him, paints this portrait, and he journaled and talked about his afternoon of sitting with Yarrow and what it was like.
RASCOE: And Yarrow is a practicing Muslim. What was the perception of Islam in the U.S. at that time? Because this is before even the founding of the country, right?
KHALID: Ayesha, this was during the time period when a number of Black people in this country were slaves, and some historians have said that it could be 10 to 15%, possibly even as high as 30% of enslaved Africans came from Muslim parts of West Africa. Many of them were not able to maintain their Muslim traditions under the system of slavery as it was.
RASCOE: Tell me about Mir Dad.
KHALID: Yeah, so, Mir Dad’s story is really personal to me. My family is South Asian. And Mir Dad himself was from an area of what you would say is British colonial India at the time. He jumped ship, as it’s known, and he ended up starting off on the East Coast of the United States, eventually made his way to the West Coast. And like many South Asians, he integrated with sort of Indigenous Mexican populations in the United States on the West Coast and they found homes often with other Black or brown communities. But Mir Dad’s story is also really interesting because it was about building institutions. And in visiting Mir Dad’s granddaughter – she took me to this mosque in Sacramento that her grandfather, her father had helped build. It’s one of the earliest mosques on the West Coast of the United States.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SERIES, “AMERICAN MUSLIMS”)
KHALID: Your grandfather was living in Arizona.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Yes.
KHALID: But still donated to this mosque because he wanted this mosque to exist here on the West Coast. He wanted this marker here…
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: Yes.
KHALID: …In the U.S.
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #3: They were all so proud of it, that that there would be a mosque built as a mosque.
KHALID: And those institutions were really important to the continuity of Islam in this country. And to me, that was really profound to see that there were South Asian immigrants here in the United States for decades and decades prior to when, you know, folks often have thought Asian immigration really started.
RASCOE: And how are the stories of these two men different from how Muslims are often represented in news and pop culture today?
KHALID: You know this – I cover politics. And for the last several years, it has felt like there is open debate about what it means to be American. I think that in telling those stories, it helped me understand how deep the roots are of Islam in this country. You know, there’s this moment from the 2016 election cycle that is very difficult for me to forget. It was March of 2016, and Donald Trump was running for president. In an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, he said, and I’m quoting him here. He said, I think Islam hates us. And It was a strange use of pronouns. Islam hates us, as if somehow Islam and America were antithetical.
RASCOE: There’s no separation there. Americans can be Muslims. Muslims are Americans.
KHALID: It’s a part of the American story. That’s what to me was so important about telling these stories, because who I am, the job that I have, wearing a head scarf, covering the White House, I’m not sure that you could do this type of work in other countries, right? I think that part of what is going on in this country right now with the cultural tensions is because there is danger in a single narrative, and we don’t understand each other enough. When we understand that all of this history is all American history, it helps us understand one another a bit better.
RASCOE: That’s NPR’s Asma Khalid. The first episode of the series, “American Muslims,” is out October 17 on PBS. Thank you so much for joining us.
KHALID: It was my pleasure. Thank you so much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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