Moors, Moslems, and Maps: The Self-Naming of Twentieth-Century Muslim Americans

ABSTRACT This article examines the use of the word Moor among Black American Muslims in the early twentieth century, focusing on Noble Drew Ali’s Moorish Science Temple of America and Sheikh Daoud Faisal’s Islamic Mission of America. It argues that both movements employed Moor to challenge American racial categories and assert affiliation with a broader, imagined Muslim world. Whereas Ali framed Moorishness as a new ethnic-racial identity rooted in mythic history and Islamic civilization, Faisal invoked the term to reject racial categorization entirely, emphasizing Islam’s universalism. The article examines these strategies within the longer history of the term Moor, demonstrating how self-naming and the racialization of Islam, particularly through imagined geographies, have helped shape Muslim identities. By placing these two different theological movements in conversation with one another, this article expands the study of early American Islam and emphasizes the significance of self-naming as a form of resistance and spiritual empowerment.