Muslim American

Born to a wealthy family in West Africa around 1770, Omar Ibn Said was abducted and sold into slavery in the United States, where he came to the attention of a prominent North Carolina family after filling "the walls of his room with piteous petitions to be released, all written in the Arabic language," as one local newspaper reported. Ibn Said soon became a local celebrity, and in 1831 he was asked to write his life story, producing the only known surviving American slave narrative written in Arabic.

It's no secret that federal agencies are waging a broad global war against terror. But, for the first time, in this memoir, an active Muslim American federal agent reveals his experience infiltrating and bringing down a terror cell in North America. Due to his ongoing work for the FBI, Elnoury writes under a pseudonym. An Arabic-speaking Muslim American, a patriot, a hero: To many Americans, it will be a revelation that he and his team even exist, let alone the vital and dangerous work they do keeping all Americans safe.

Shabana Mir's powerful ethnographic study of women on Washington, D.C., college campuses reveals that being a young female Muslim in post-9/11 America means experiencing double scrutiny—scrutiny from the Muslim community as well as from the dominant non-Muslim community. i>Muslim American Women on Campus illuminates the processes by which a group of ethnically diverse American college women, all identifying as Muslim and all raised in the United States, construct their identities during one of the most formative times in their lives.

Haroon Moghul was thrust into the spotlight after 9/11, becoming an undergraduate leader at New York University's Islamic Center and forced into appearances everywhere: on TV, before interfaith audiences, in print. Moghul was becoming a prominent voice for American Muslims even as he struggled with his relationship to Islam. In high school he was barely a believer and entirely convinced he was going to hell. He sometimes drank. He didn't pray regularly. All he wanted was a girlfriend. But as he discovered, it wasn't so easy to leave religion behind.

Pakistani American Farah Naz Rishi’s first year of college was perfectly, thankfully, uneventful. After all, she was in college to learn and forge a path of self-sufficiency, especially after her last relationship fell apart—dashing her mother’s aspirations for an early marriage. What could Farah expect, anyway? For the ideal guy to just conveniently waltz into her life? Life isn’t a love story.

Using his unique lens as a critical race theorist and law professor, Khaled A. Beydoun captures the many ways in which law, policy, and official state rhetoric have fueled the frightening resurgence of Islamophobia in the US.

This three-book edition of His Other Wife—Umm Zakiyyah’s popular online series turned novel—is a story about love and betrayal, faith and personal crisis, and withstanding deep emotional wounds. Jacob is a successful businessman and college professor, and his wife Deanna is a renowned marriage counselor and author. Together they are their Muslim community’s power couple. Aliyah is Deanna’s recently divorced best friend who has just accepted a position at the college where Jacob works—and who is the unwilling recipient of Deanna’s constant unsolicited relationship advice, ...

Allie Abraham has it all going for her - she’s a straight-A student with good friends and a close-knit family, and she’s dating popular, sweet Wells Henderson. There’s only one problem: Wells’ father is Jack Henderson, America’s most famous conservative shock jock, and Allie hasn’t told Wells that her family is Muslim. It’s not like Allie’s religion is a secret. It’s just that her parents don’t practice and raised her to keep it to herself.

When Huda meets Hadi, the boy she will ultimately marry, she is six years old. Both are the American-born children of Iraqi immigrants, who grew up on opposite ends of California. Hadi considers Huda his childhood sweetheart, the first and only girl he's ever loved, but Huda needs proof that she is more than just the girl Hadi's mother has chosen for her son. She wants what the American girls have - the entertainment culture's almost singular tale of chance meetings, defying the odds, and falling in love.

The riveting true story of America’s first homegrown Muslim terror attack, the 1977 Hanafi siege of Washington, DC.

By the time he was twelve, Taymullah Abdur-Rahman (born Tyrone Sutton) was a rising pop star, recruited as part of the RB group Perfect Gentlemen, with a top-ten hit, national teen magazine covers, and an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show. However, after his music career peaked, Abdur-Rahman found himself back home, with little to show for his success. He quickly became a teen father struggling to survive in Roxbury, MA. Seeing Islam as a way out of his hard-scrabble environment, he happily converted.

This powerful, inspiring book tells the story of an ambitious Afghan girl who seeks to fulfill her promise to her mother, fight for the right to education, and empower girls. Zynab lives in a small village in Afghanistan where education is deemed unnecessary for girls and even frowned upon. But Zaynab's family and life are very different from those of other girls in her village. Her father is a teacher who began teaching her Rumi's poetry when she was only five. One poem, in particular, inspires and encourages her: "You were born with potential. You were born with divine energy You were ...

Over the last few years, Moustafa Bayoumi has been an extra in Sex and the City 2 playing a generic Arab, a terrorist suspect (or at least his namesake "Mustafa Bayoumi" was) in a detective novel, the subject of a trumped-up controversy because a book he had written was seen by right-wing media as pushing an "anti-American, pro-Islam" agenda, and was asked by a US citizenship officer to drop his middle name of Mohamed. Others have endured far worse fates.

On October 3, 1807, Thomas Jefferson was contacted by an unknown traveler urgently pleading for a private "interview" with the president, promising to disclose "a matter of momentous importance". By the next day, Jefferson held in his hands two astonishing manuscripts whose history has been lost for over two centuries. Authored by Muslims fleeing captivity in rural Kentucky, these documents delivered to the president in 1807 were penned by literate African slaves, and written entirely in Arabic.

A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams, Homeland Elegies blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at its heart it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home.

In Temple Folk, Black Muslims contemplate the convictions of their race, religion, economics, politics, and sexuality in America. The ten stories in this collection contribute to the bounty of diverse narratives about Black life by intimately portraying the experiences of a community that resists the mainstream culture to which they are expected to accept and aspire to while functioning within the country in which they are born.

Muslim men are stereotyped as either oversexed Casanovas willing to die for 72 virgins in heaven or controlling, big-bearded husbands ready to rampage at the hint of dishonor. The truth is, there are millions of Muslim men trying to figure out the complicated terrain of love, sex, and relationships just like any other American man. In Salaam, Love, Ayesha Mattu and Nura Maznavi provide a space for American Muslim men to speak openly about their romantic lives, offering frank, funny, and insightful glimpses into their hearts—and bedrooms.

Beginning with a sweetly funny, moving account of her arranged marriage, the author undercuts stereotypes and offers the refreshing view of an American life through Muslim eyes. In chapters leavened with humor, hope, and insight, she recounts an immigrant's daily struggles balancing assimilation with preserving heritage, overcoming religious barriers from within and distortions of Islam from without, and confronting issues of raising her children as Muslims - while they lobby for a Christmas tree!

Servants of Allah presents a history of African Muslims, following them from West Africa to the Americas. Although many assume that what Muslim faith they brought with them to the Americas was quickly absorbed into the new Christian milieu, as Sylviane A. Diouf demonstrates in this meticulously researched, groundbreaking volume, Islam flourished during slavery on a large scale.

Romance, dating, sex and - Muslim women? In this groundbreaking collection, 25 American Muslim writers sweep aside stereotypes to share their search for love openly for the first time, showing just how varied the search for love can be - from singles' events and online dating, to college flirtations and arranged marriages, all with a uniquely Muslim twist. These compelling stories of love and romance create an irresistible balance of heart-warming and tantalizing, always revealing and deeply relatable.