New York City’s Forgotten Muslim Past
Excerpt: Back when Donald Trump was a Presidential candidate, he said, “I think Islam hates us,” and called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” The realities of office reined him in somewhat, and in January of 2017 he signed an order to block the entry of people from only select Muslim-majority countries. (The Supreme Court upheld the policy last month.) What bothers Katherine Merriman, a Ph.D. candidate in Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is that Trump misses the fact that Islam is already part of America’s history. For the past four years, Merriman has been giving Muslim-history tours of Trump’s home town, focussing on Harlem. “There are roughly three hundred mosques in New York City,” she said the other day. “New York is one of the most, if not the most, diverse Muslim cities in the world. There is no such thing as a ‘Muslim world’ somewhere else.”