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The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, with its clearly imperialist intentions, was deemed sufficient to justify jihad and even for some scholars to declare jihad mandatory for all able-bodied Muslims. Yet the American invasion of 2001—vastly different in its intent and execution—was also characterized by some scholars as a justification for jihad. And the persecution of Muslims need not be military. Much of Al Qaeda’s ideological justification is based on American and Western economic and (to a lesser extent) cultural hegemony.

It’s not surprising that American Muslims would take part in the jihad against the Soviets when Ronald Reagan was denouncing communism and pronouncing the mujahideen heroes and freedom fighters. It may be harder to see why Americans go to Somalia and kill fellow Muslims.

American jihadists are an incredibly diverse group. They include all levels of economic success and failure and every sort of background and ethnicity, including blacks and whites, Latinos, women, and even Jews. They come from big cities and small towns and every part of America, including the East and West Coasts, the Deep South, and the Midwest.

These are their stories.

1

The Early Years

Islam has been a significant part of the American fabric since at least the days of the slave trade, when African Muslims were forced from their homes and brought to the United States to labor in the fields. Perhaps one in ten slaves was Muslim—maybe more, maybe less. No record was made. Most Muslim slaves lost their traditions; some were forced to convert under duress.1

Bilali Muhammad was one such Muslim slave, captured in North Africa in the late eighteenth century, who tried to keep the traditions of Islam alive on the Sapelo Island plantation where he was enslaved in Georgia. He wrote about the Islam he remembered, using the Arabic alphabet but not the Arabic language, and kept the document close to his heart until he died. Although he did not ultimately succeed in preserving the religious tradition he had chronicled, traces of Islam pervade the Christian and cultural practices of his descendants. Black churches on the island face east toward Mecca.2

“We were Christian by day and Muslim by night,” one former Sapelo slave told her daughter.3

Other traces of Islam lingered like a half-forgotten dream. The “Levee Camp Holler,” an early blues song whose roots stretch back to slave music in Mississippi, is strikingly reminiscent of the Islamic call to prayer, which sounds five times a day from minarets around the world.4 For the most part, however, the memory of original Islam faded over decades of slavery and Christianization.

Yet those origins influenced the shape of Islam in America for many years after the Civil War. Although orthodox Sunni Islam was represented by a few individuals and small, isolated congregations in the young United States, the dominant expression of Islamic thought in the twentieth century came from African American communities, whose interpretations often differed greatly from the original traditions.

The Moorish Science Temple, founded in New Jersey and later established in Chicago, was one of many early groups claiming to be part of an Islamic tradition. In reality, it was a barely recognizable amalgamation of theosophical beliefs revolving around a book called the Seven Circle Koran, which was derived from the incipient New Age movement.5

Later, the Nation of Islam channeled Black Nationalism through a filter of Islamic rhetoric, making significant alterations in the process. Malcolm X led many African Americans into a more orthodox understanding of Islam after completing the Hajj—a ritualistic trip to the holiest site in Islam, the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, that all Muslims are required to make at least once if they are able.

Starting in the 1960s, these indigenous Islamic communities were joined by increasing numbers of orthodox Muslim immigrants from Egypt, Iraq, and elsewhere