Ordinary American stories

Many Americans think of Islam as a religious and moral geography foreign to the American experiment, or at least to its foundational history. This is false, of course. Many of the enslaved West Africans who suffered the Middle Passage were devout Muslims, and Muslims can be found sprinkled throughout 18th- and 19th-century American history. Muslims from present-day Syria who moved to midwestern locales at the end of the great migrations of the 19th century have families who still make their homes in the Midwest. Edward Curtis offers valuable insights on this recent chapter in the story of Muslims in America.

Muslims of the Heartland traces two successive generations of Syrian Muslims across small towns and cities in the Dakotas, Iowa, and Indiana, from 1890 through World War II. Curtis gives readers glimpses into individual accounts—of farmers, peddlers, grocers, assembly line workers, soldiers, a gambler, a wrestler, and a poet—while also interweaving these stories with commentary on broader social, political, and economic trends.

In some ways, these are ordinary American stories. People struggle to hold on to the family farm while imbibing settler-­colonial myths that befog the expropriation of land from Indigenous peoples. They manage small businesses during the Great Depression and form civil society institutions devoted to public charity. They establish ethnically focused religious congregations and sacrifice their children to wars. They experience marital successes and betrayals.