How Islamophobia Was Ingrained in America’s Legal System Long Before the War on Terror

Summary: At the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, hundreds of thousands of African Muslims were forcibly brought to the United States to be enslaved. One of them, Omar Ibn Said, from Futa Toro, in modern-day Senegal, chronicled his journey and life under enslavement in a brief 15-page manuscript. “Wicked men took me by violence and sold me,” he wrote. “We sailed a month and a half on the great sea to the place called Charleston in the Christian land.