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So go and get some books. In the current political moment, there's widespread anti-Muslim rhetoric. It would be easy to conclude that the large portion of white Americans see Islam at odds with American values. But a longer view of history reveals a long-standing appreciation for Islam and even conversion to the tradition among white Americans.
Patrick Bowen uncovers this rich history in the history of conversion to Islam in the United States, Volume 1, white American Muslims before 1975. Bowen outlines American views of Islam in 19th century and early 20th century and demonstrates the various motivations for conversion. Early converts who turned to her were seen as renegades by most of their peers, but the broadening of American liberal religiosity throughout the 19th century fostered further intellectual engagement with the tradition. The early 20th century saw significant changes in the social landscape that shaped conversion.
It was now social relationships rather than esoteric interests that aided white Americans in their conversion. Greater contact with immigrant Muslims and greater participation in Islamic organizations, publications and social activities further increase conversion throughout the second half of the century. The book is part one in a multi-volume project which will also address conversion among black and Latino Americans up until the present. In our conversation we discussed the earliest known white converts, a revival of the occult, the Theosophical Society, Alexander Russell Webb, Marriage, Pan-Islamic Goals, the International Muslim Student Population, Sufi Reading Groups, Women converts, Asian Religious Movements in America, US Muslim Institutions and the overall goals of the multi-volume project.
I'm one of your co-host Christian Peterson and thanks again for listening to new books in Islamic Studies. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Patrick Bowen. Welcome Patrick, thanks for joining me today. Thanks for having me.
So this is really a tremendous book. Thank you for producing this very detailed historical analysis and thoughtful and theoretical interjections into the field of Islamic Studies. But before we get into the book, we always start here at New Books in Islamic Studies with a little bit about how you got interested in the study of Islam and Muslim societies. Can you tell us a little bit about some of your training, background, influences, things like that?
Sure. Well, I initially studied Religious Studies at University of Colorado Boulder and that was a very great experience. In fact, my religious studies courses were the only courses that I found interesting. So I really appreciate all my teachers back then, Ross Bryant, Bernanke, Terry Klayman, Ira Churnis, Lotteep, and everybody I enjoyed all my courses back then.
And I never took anything about Islam, even though Frederick Dany was teaching back then. The one semester I was going to take a course. He was on sabbatical or something. So I never studied Islam back then.
However, a fast forward a few years later when I decided to graduate school, it was about 2005 or 2006. And Islam was really in the news a lot because it's a 10 11th in the war. So I figured if I'm going to graduate school to study religious studies, I should do something that people would want to have information about people who are curious about Islam. And I should not just study something I'm personally interested in.
I should study something that other people will find a value, especially since graduate degree is recognition from society. So this is for society. That's how I looked at it. And I went to graduate school, University of Denver, and the religious arts department.
And I was encouraged to really consider what I wanted to do. And I went and talked to almost every teacher I had, and almost every advisor I had, and asked them how I should decide what my topic should be within Islamic studies. And I had one teacher from the international school. And he was my, he taught international philosophy, international states philosophy.
And he said that you have to do something that you can imagine doing for the rest of your life. So you really have to choose carefully. And you have to do something that isn't just what society wants, it's something that's personal to you in some way. So one of the things I've been interested in prior to going to graduate school was the intersection between race and religion in the United States, particularly in mixed communities.
And at first what I was going to do was study interfaith dialogue in the United States, Muslim Christian interfaith dialogue. But then I heard about Muslim conference. And then I heard that there were white converts and that the Relentino converts ended up because I'm sure everyone served African-American conferences. So that surprised me.
And I found out there was very few studies that were very few studies that went on white Latino converts. And I was most interested in white and Latino mixed communities in the United States. So I decided to do conversion to Islam and focus on white and Latino whites and Latinos. And so I did that for my master's thesis.
I studied some white Latino and white immigrant African-American at a local mosque in the Lantecon's Graduate School. And actually studied my dissertation on African-American converts. But I was working in the background on white and Latino converts so I could have a broader understanding. And it has really been my passion and that naturally led to this book.
Now this book, the way this project came about. Let me just say real quick, let me just mention some of the professors that really helped me along the way. The University of Denver School of Theology. First of all, is Lee Hottakeen, who's my early advisor.
And he was great in giving me so much guidance. He put me on to so much information and knowledge of theory that has guided me to this day. And Akal Raski also provided a lot of theoretical background for me. Over at ILIF, he was an American theology and critical race theory.
He was my advisor to my PhD and he was absolutely wonderful. And really made me question and think about a lot of the presuppositions I had. And helped me direct my thinking on race and religion in America. A son of other people, Tony One Cole, Nadir Hashmi, Andrew Sandin, I go over to you.
Some other people helped me along the way and kind of guided me. I really appreciate all of them. As far as the book, I started collecting research on white and Latino Muslims, as I said, from my master's thesis. Then I couldn't find anything.
So I decided I had read about in various books, mentions in the past of whites and Latinos in American Islamic groups. I think I read in Richard Brantner's, the African American experience, a mention of whites in the Akmadias. And then I had read in Michael Muhammad Knight's book about the 5%ers about whites in, I guess, the 5%ers and through Landborn Wilson's book, Sacred Drift, I think he mentions whites in the war sign symbol. So I read about these things and my idea was maybe I will be able to find out more information about whites and Latinos.
If I dig deeper into African American Islamic history and find information about groups that haven't received a lot of attention and look for every clue I could find, maybe I'll stumble on some white and Latino converts from before 1975 in the past. So I did that and I started finding all sorts of things about African American converts that I know and talked about before. And it was just tons of information at home. I have several, well, I'll get this full of stuff that I found on Islam in America, most of which hadn't really been discussed before.
So by the time I was finishing up my dissertation, actually even at the beginning of my dissertation, I had tons of information that I was having a hard time processing on. And I felt I couldn't really communicate all this stuff in a single book. I wanted to write a comprehensive history of conversion to Islam in the United States with African Americans, white and Latinos. But in order to integrate everything so I can understand all the different interconnected dynamics.
However, I had so much, I felt I had enough for three volumes and I could only explain it in three volumes. So I wanted to write a three volume, essentially chronology of the history of conversion to Islam in the United States. I contacted several publishers and everybody would say, well, we'd be interested in a book on just white Muslims in the United States and one volume. And that was all the American publishers.
So I contacted the Brill and I have to just praise and thank over and over again, Nikki Breenen, who is my editor over at Brill in the most of my Nordie series, who was totally on board with my vision for a three volume book. However, we proposed the idea initially and she encouraged me to change the topic of each volume to be in a way where we could sell each volume individually and be on a specific topic that wasn't chronological. They found that chronological multivolumers don't sell as much. So I had to choose what specific topic I would want to do for each volume.
Well, I was working on my dissertation on African American Muslims and there was just so much to be learned about African American Islam. And I had only come at it from an Islamic studies approach. I hadn't even done a good background in African American studies. So I felt I definitely wasn't prepared to do that even though I had done a lot of research on African American Islam groups and a lot of public articles.
I hadn't, I wasn't as grounded as I wanted to be. And I didn't have the content for a whole book on early Latino Muslims in the United States. So I said I have enough for a single volume on early white Muslims. And so that's how I decided to work on this particular topic and why we have a book that is just on white Muslims.
And so I wanted to explain to you the part of the reason why this is volume one, is the volume two when some of my think, well, a history of conversion to the United States needs to start with African Americans. Well, I agree so softly. I think that because there are millions of African American Muslims and only maybe a couple of tens of thousands of white Americans Muslims. That just the priority in their early appearance and everything, just the priority puts them philosophically first.
However, I want to make sure I did the volume on them well. So I needed extra time. I needed multiple years to work on that. In addition, I have found that there were numerous white conversations in the 1800s.
Well, we only found hints of African American Congress in the 19th century. So a three volume book that's not necessarily chronological should still kind of have a chronological feeling in my opinion. So since we could spend a lot of time on the 19th century with the white Americans, that would justify coming first. Now, another reason I could justify coming first was that a lot of topics on African American relate to African American Islam have connections with white American Muslims.
And so I felt we could get into a lot of detail about topics that might just receive a footnote in the volume on African Americans Muslims. But we could do more research. I could do more research and talk at length about things that will be relevant for both. And if I had tried to just force it into the African American Muslim volume, that I wouldn't be able to get into the detail to give a good enough background.
So to make a long story short, we're even longer. That's a journey from learning about it, being interested in Islamic studies to creating this book. While we're on the topic, I was going to talk about this later in the conversation, but since you've kind of outlined it here somewhat, could you just maybe briefly describe what the other volumes will focus on? Sure.
Volume two will be African American Muslims. This volume volume one is white American Muslims up to the year 1975, or 1974 actually. I don't know again, it's 1975. Volume two will be African American Muslims primarily up until the year, the very beginning of 1975.
It will also include some new information about white American Muslims and Latino Muslims. And volume three will be American Muslim converts of all ethnicities from 1975, so roughly 2005 or 2010, I'm not sure yet. So those are three volumes. Great.
Yeah. Now, after reading this first one, and knowing the great detail you go into, the broader historical movements that are going on and fostering and enabling or motivating white converts, it does seem helpful that you could do that in this volume, which will then pave the way for the second volume, which sounds very exciting. So good luck with that. And I look forward to that.
You talk a little bit about these numerous sources you have, but at the same time, at least for the majority of the 19th century, these sources are scattered and scarce. Can you talk a little bit about how you piece together this narrative from these multitude of tiny, tiny sources? Okay. It was a very long journey, and I was blessed to have stumbled upon and been given the opportunity to stumble upon a number of great, rare sources along the way.
I'd like to start off by mentioning Dustin Crohn, who I met, whom I met when I was just beginning my research. He was a friend of a classmate of mine, and he is the one who told me about George Bethune English, and he had told me that some Muslim converts were aware of him, and I took that and started researching him. And then I had a really heavy familiar with the literature on Alexander Russell Web, which a lot of people have done great research on, particularly, Brent Singleton, and Marath Abdullah, and Muhammad al-Hari, who has helped me great deal along the way. So I had to get familiar with all their literature and start contacting them, find out how they found their sources, which weren't listed in American catalogs, or only one or two issues of old web-sold newspapers listed.
So I contacted them, especially Brent and Muhammad, and I learned a lot about how to get these together, but then I saw the issue of how am I going to get from the earliest converts, the renegades, to web in the 1890s. The first couple decades of the 1800s, we have information about commerce, usually sailors in the Mediterranean, and we have the 1890s, which is Alexander Russell Web. How is it going to get in between there? And I was talking to Sharif N.I.O.
Bay, who is a more American researcher, historian, and he was emphasizing to me the importance of esotericism in the history of Islam in America, and I really needed to look into Paschal Beverly Randolph, which was a mid-century 1850s, 1870s, spiritualist, African, African-American, who, who, who, teachings were used in esoteric, who, he was really emphasizing this, currently, he's well-known in the conscious community. I didn't know that. I had seen this as they mentioned before by Ernest Allen Jr. and maybe a few other people who had written on African-American Muslims in Islam in the United States.
So I started researching them and getting back into the books, I think I'd skimmed the books about him before. And then I discovered that a group called the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor used Paschal Beverly Randolph's teachings as their own teachings, and that the American president of this international, local, or esoteric organization, the American president, Thomas Morijons, also happened to be a member of the Theosophical Society in St. Louis in the lodge at Alexander Russell Webb, happened to be in the 1880s. And this excites me, so I attempted to see if there were any descendants of the Johnson's who might have saved any of his old books or records or anything like that.
Well, it turns out that Johnson family has a whole library of Thomas Morijons and his works. He was a plate-newst who collected thousands of rare books on the old plate-newst and theosophy. And it's a great library in Osceola, Missouri, a small town in Missouri. Well, I contacted the Johnson family to find out if they had any letters.
Turns out they do. Initially they told me, well, we only have a few letters, maybe talking about theosophy. And I said, that doesn't matter. I really, really want to see them.
I'll come out there. And I was able to get grant. And I went out to Springfield because the Johnson family hooked up with the Missouri State University and their Special Collections Department in order to preserve, sand, and digitize these letters. And these letters, it was just a treasure chest, treasure trove of information about the history of esotericism in America.
Connected, passed with Beverly Randolph with her Meg Brotherhood. And in terms of the topics they read and why they read him, it talked about the Rosicrucians who have Islamic elements in their teachings. It talked about theosophy that even mentioned Alexander Webb and his close friends in St. Louis.
And I used that information and built on that to start really researching all sorts of different topics of the 19th century. I got into all sorts of esotericism, spiritualism, tons of newspapers. Mark Demarast and I connected. He was interested in collecting spiritualist newspapers.
And so was I researching the topic. K. Paul Johnson, who wrote a lot of books on theosophy, was also researching the her Meg Brotherhood. And I connected and we started sharing resources.
And I saw this link from the early 1800s, actually from the late 1700s, all the way to the 1890s of esotericism and alternative views in American religiosity. And I traced on every single resource I could find going through archives, calling archives, crossing the United States internationally, and springing this all together. So that's kind of how it happens. There are actually tons of sources I didn't even mention that I think are great and we're very hard to find.
And I hope people check out the books, even on Google Books, to see the kinds of sources that we discovered while researching this topic. Patrick, you really do an amazing job of covering a wide array of sources and bringing these narratives, life of their own. So you talked about moving from these early white converts to this important figure, Alexander Russell Web, and how this liberal American religiosity fostered interest in Islam. Perhaps you could tell us a little bit about Alexander Russell Web, who plays this key role in history of white Muslim converts, in the sense of how did his early life shape his conversion to Islam related to some of these the esophical society and other types of non-traditional forms of religiosity.
Why did they foster an interest in Islam, how did this play out in Web's life? Web was the son of a Jeffersonian Democrat newspaper publisher and editor, and Web himself was kind of an intellectual rebellious kind of non-man. He didn't like going to church, he lived in upstate New York, which is already kind of a hotbed for liberal religious views. He wasn't really religious as a young man, he was more inspired by the desire to innovate, to be an entrepreneur.
He became a jeweler when he could have just become a newspaper editor like his father. He didn't want to do his own son. He went off and tried to do his own thing. Married a woman went to Chicago, tried to run a jewelry business, and was always trying to do something innovative and make a name for himself.
He eventually wound up in St. Louis where he ended up getting into the newspaper business simply because his jewelry enterprises had all failed. And his manager's first wife, whose father was helping him with jewelry business, ended. So he's in St.
Louis working for various newspapers in the 1870s, and he even tries to become a traumatic producer and tried to do plays, and he failed at that as well. Now he's in, I believe, his late 30s, and he has failed a lot of things, but he still has his entrepreneurial spirit, this innovative spirit, and this desire to go off and try new things. And so he gets into spiritualism, which is a belief that spirits and come and communicate with people, living people. And it was a very show-y kind of religious experience going to the seance rooms that we see in the 1930s and 1940s movies about spiritualism.
And so, you know, floating this and all this. He gets into this. He believes it's an exciting thing. And it just so happens that a bunch of the newspaper reporters and editors that he spends with that in St.
Louis were interested in spiritualism, and they were also all getting interested in the theatre. And I believe he might have been interested in the Theosophical Society, because I believe one of the former newspaper editors from St. Louis was Thomas Moore Johnson, and I talked about earlier. And I believe he might have been convincing people.
There were other people, Elliot Page, for instance, was, and Vicious Clerk in St. Louis. In ways, Webb is interested in these alternative religious expressions as this is his new way of being innovative. And I'm pretty sure his goal was to be the first person to start a spiritualist in St.
Louis taking his skills so he can be an entrepreneur. However, all these newspaper men who were spiritualists started getting into the Theosophical Society in the early 1880s. And so Webb followed with them, and it was really intellectually stimulating. Now, the Theosophical Society is the first, it's not the first, it's the first esoteric organization to become popular in the United States.
It's an organization, a formal, local organization to become popular. And the St. Louis Lodge happens to be the first American Theosophical Lodge to be formed outside the state of New York. It's one of the most important lodges in Theosophical History, it's called the Pioneer Lodge.
And Webb was one of its first members. Just what happens is that people involved in this lodge, namely Thomas Moore Johnson were also interested in Islam because of various promotions of Islam that were going through the spread of Theosophical Literature at the time. Webb gets interested in this, and it appears that he began to think that he could be even more innovative and even more entrepreneurial if he were to follow this interesting Islam. So the founder of the Akmadias, Boulamamad, has a story in the Theosophical Journal in 1886, like 1886.
Webb reads it as the other members of the Theosophical Society in the West, but Webb lashes onto this, and he becomes very involved with the search-writing letters with Akmad, and he eventually decides to move out to the east so he can study Islam. Now right before that happens, in March 1887, Thomas Moore Johnson, as the head of the Theosophils of the, he's one of the leading members of Theosophical In America, and the head of the American President, the American Brotherhood, begins to create, this is right after he hears about the Boulamamad's article in Theosophical Society. He creates a Sufi organization that is going to be used as a part of the Hermetic Brotherhood, some of the items taken from Passek, but really Randolph emphasized Islam and spiritualism, and he had been reading very Sufi texts prior to that. So it's not clear exactly what motivated him, but all these sources came together, and they happened in March 1887.
It starts a Sufi organization, and within weeks Webb is deciding he wants to go to the east. The study is not, we don't know for sure that Webb was a member of that Sufi, he's called a Sufi circle, we don't know for sure that Webb was a member, but he wasn't touched with multiple members, so we know this over the next several years. So Webb goes to the east, he meets different Muslims out there, he gets funding to start an Islamic movement in the United States, and he takes that funding, contacts other theosophils across the United States, and then decides to come back in 1893. And then he takes the esophils, all of his philosophical contacts with his background in dramatic production background in newspapers, and he uses this together to promote an Islamic movement.
Now this is the first official land-know-bell organized movement to spread Islam in the United States. And the reason he's able to do this is because of his connections with theosophils, Hermetic Brotherhood, spiritualists, all these kinds of people, so that's in that sense. So a little bit about once he returns in 1893 to focus on this new Islamic mission, what kind of efforts and activities was Webb and his network, what were they up to? And since we know that this didn't last very long, how should we assess Webb's mission overall?
Okay, well they had a lot of goals, they were mainly interested in promoting a positive image of Islam in the United States. And so the reason that they were able to learn about Islam, they felt was an important step to achieving widespread peace to help people overcome their prejudice as Muslims. He contacted a lot of liberal people, gave speeches for writers including March Wayne, he contacted theosophils, wrote for them, and he gave the osmecious of theosophils. Unitarians were a very popular kind of audience for him.
He spoke at the Columbiaan Exposition at the World's Fair in 1893 to a Parliament of Religions, which was a big liberal religious together, where they had representatives of various religions and experts on various religions talk about the religions because liberal Protestants at the time were increasingly interested in finding common ground with different religions, because of a progressive attitude at the time. So Webb was thoroughly involved in all this web and his network of people were thoroughly involved in all this. They produced a newspaper, actually produced several newspapers. And they were all relatively short lived, nothing less than an acid, really over a year, but they would run stories about Islamic events throughout the world, about bigotry being perpetrated by Christians in the United States, including against African Americans.
He was not strongly committed to racial equality, but he did believe in it, even if he sometimes expressed some racist use. But generally, he was trying to promote better acceptance of Islam, he was focusing on this, and some international Muslim teachers would come out to the United States and he would help try to get them to teach about Islam. He had not a mosque, but a library and lecture hall in New York where he hosted people, and he had several speeches down there. Now, the people that became involved in the Webb's movement, interestingly, many of these people had been involved with esotericists before they've been spiritualists, they had been theosophy, and they all had this very little perspective.
They all came from different backgrounds, however, and several of them were older than when much more experienced in alternative religions in Webb and felt like maybe he wasn't doing things. There were some disagreements in the letters that we have about whether Webb used money from the mission to go out and buy beer and drink, and out of them, whether he managed funds, whether he was a liar, their web accused other people buying and stealing to work for him, and we don't know if that was actually the case, but they did that. There seems to be a lot of inability to find common ground and work together, and I feel like this is attributable mostly to Webb's experience as an actual leader in the esoteric movement or non-mainstream movement. He had been somewhat involved in the internalism, but he wasn't a real leader.
He didn't have a leadership background, and he had failed in a lot of his previous business enterprises. This may have been a flaw, however, Webb also wasn't really connected to the alternative religious milieu. As some of the people who were supporting him, some of people had been high-ranking spiritualists as satirists, and had even gone to prison. John Lant was one of the biggest supporters in the convert to Islam, had gone to prison for expressing liberal views, and John Lant happened to be a person who printed a paschal Beverly Randolph document that talked about Muslims and the Mississuses in the 1870s.
So he had gone to prison. He had been dedicated to liberal religious views, and Webb had a lot of disagreements. So within about three years, everything collapsed, and this is after people's schizming, John Lant started a mosque. In fact, in my 1893, that only lasted for a few months.
Multiple schizans happened, people tried to reunite, people looked up with white Muslims in England and different international Muslim organizations across the world, but eventually they couldn't really come to terms, and everything fell apart by early 1897. Now, there are so much, you've really written two books here in this one book, and even though we've just been focusing on Webb and some of his intellectual influences, this is nearly half the book, and we really have only scratched the surface here. I want to move on to the second part of the book, which focuses from 1910 up to 1974. And part of this transition has to do with some significant changes that are happening in the social landscape.
What was different about the 20th century in terms of why white Americans were now converting to Islam? The main difference is that we start to see thousands, tens of thousands of Muslim immigrants in the United States, and these are for the most part Arab speakers and Arab people who are lighter skin and can often blend in with white society, or their children can, and they are interacting with Americans. And this is what leads to conversions. These are no, the white Americans who are interested in alternative religions, liberal religion, esotericism, become, and then go from there to Islam, become just a minor part of the broader white American convert community, because so many Muslims are coming from out of country.
And they are a friendly people becoming their co-workers, and sometimes marrying them. So this is the core reason. Now we can talk about some differences between the immigrants and their effects on converts over the years, who went immigrants first started coming in the largest numbers, in the early 20th century. They were largely working class people.
They married and befriended other working class people. Usually people who were from ethnic white background, so a lot of times Polish people, Jewish people, a lot of times Latinos who are mentioned in the book a little bit, and we're sometimes considered white depending on the people who are interested in the people who are interested in the book. And then we're sometimes considered white depending on where they were and where the person was, and they married these people. Later after World War II, with immigration rules changing, and students being allowed to come in large quantities to the United States from the Muslim-majority world.
We start to see a lot of educated meal class immigrants, and this reduces educated meal class friends and spouses of those immigrants, white friends and spouses, who some of them become converts. So fundamentally, the difference between the 19th century conversions and 20th century conversions up to 1975 is the conversions in the 19th century were primarily motivated by liberal, non-mainstream religious interests. In the 20th century they're primarily a function of immigration, even if the particular people who do convert, which is a relatively small number, even if these people have liberal inclinations. And so, there's a lot of people who have a background in serious involvement with liberal movements or non-mainstream religious movements.
So during the 20th century we have the increase of immigrants, and part of your argument is that this then leads white converts to discussions about Panasonic movements, through institutions and through new forms of national or transnational organizations. The nature of conversion also transforming during this period. What did white Muslim converts look like? What were they interested in in these new network-set relationships?
Okay, they were, as I kind of hinted at in my previous answer, these were people who were less, I say in the book, religiously mature, I don't know if that's a best expression that's the way to put it, but these were people who maybe had resentments towards religious backgrounds or religions, but had not yet generally sought out conversion or joining other religious organizations, and were not mainstream. A lot of times they had read a lot of literature, for instance, and the literature usually does not convert people. For the most part people need, this is well known in the studies of conversion, religious conversion that people tend to need to be involved with the community, at least one or two other people before they decided to convert. So what happens is with influence immigrants, we have people who might have read different things, but because they're not religiously mature, that's what my use is.
These people are going to try to do things that are not based on experiences or intricate knowledge that they have of how religious organizations grow for non-Christian movements in the United States. So they experiment, and they do a lot of big a lot in this room, but they experiment a lot, so contact each other and ask to be, you know, if they're involved in Islamic organization, they will, they start setting up some of their own institutions. They want some white converts, want to lead their own institutions, they have negative experience with immigrants who, for instance, might not think that the convert can never be a real true Muslim, or the immigrants might think, well, what we are true Muslims and you are just a baby in this religion. You don't really know what you're talking about, and they have negative experiences or immigrant people might be more focused on trying to get by on a day-to-day basis to provide for them and their families.
And they are not as interested in, this is especially true for pre-war Muslims who were not as interested in hand Islamic movements, who are interested in improving their lives. And while converts, especially framed converts who are not married to Muslims, they are very passionate oftentimes. They're spreading Islam because they see it as a cure for humanity. And so their clashes over the level of community they think people, Muslims should be put into these kind of Islamic organizations.
So a lot of white Muslims start creating organizations and connecting with the handful of immigrants who are interested in working with them to promote the spreading message of Islam to try to bring in other converts, and they work with them. The most notable in the pre-war war two period is Louis Celine Blick, the son of two Jewish immigrants in Chicago. After joining the army, he goes to New York where he meets all sorts of Islamic organizations. And he becomes frustrated in the early 1930s with their inability to proselytize as much as he would like.
So he connects with an international British-led white convert led from England Organization Western Islamic Association, and he creates the American Islamic Association in the United States and connects with immigrants, and converts using surprisingly a Sunni magazine that was being produced on England and was the most popular Sunni magazine at the time in the United States. They connect with this other white people from the United States are reading this and they start connecting with each other through this magazine. So they conform their local organizations, the national organization, not even in this, the formal American Islamic Association collapses. In the mid 1930s, these groups, this network is able to survive and into the 1940s, and people who had been affiliated with this network become inspired and help other groups.
In the 1940s, we see Glick as well as other white Americans who are connected with this, the former American Islamic Association. As well as immigrants who have been connected with that network, they need to start connecting with African American Sunnis and Lahori and Gadiani Akmadias. And there is an interracial network across the United States of white Americans, African Americans, Latinos, and immigrant Muslims, and they're connected to international movements. It is almost an unknown part of history.
I don't believe I've ever read about this because we've been finding these records for it. And what we see is even after World War II, things like this continue to happen with the U.S. in 1961, but other white converts start to rise in the Federation of Islamic Associations. And the Muslim Student Associations, and they are frequently interested in connecting with all of this overcoming sectarian differences in Islam.
And they want to unite people. And because of this desire, a lot of times they'll start their own organizations. One other distinguishing feature of white American Muslims before 1975, particularly after World War II, is there seems to be a desire to have Islam be what is often called a way of life, and not just a philosophy, not just a community, as a practice that has been made. As a practice that encompasses the way they think about themselves, the way they think about God, the way they interact with everyone, the way they dress.
It becomes a discipline, a order that is used to bring peace into their lives and into the rest of the world. Now, Islamic mysticism played an important role still during the 20th century in new formulations. Can you talk about how the particular Sufi masters or how imagined readings of Islamic mysticism shaped different groups of white converts during the 20th century? One of the most fascinating discoveries I came upon doing this research was that Alexander Russell Webb had been in contact with the Sufi quarter of 1887, and was also a theosophist, and he was also a member of the Martinist's order.
Now, interestingly, after Webb's movement collapsed, another member of the Martinist's order came to the United States and apparently converted to Islam. He contacted the way of contacting the British white Muslims, and he helped spread this connection between Islam and Martinist and the United States. So he believed in this message. Well, it turns out that this is one of the most influential Sufi teachers in the United States, a Nikon, who came in 1910 and found his first student, a white American woman named Robbie Martin.
Robbie Martin was probably a Martinist. He had a consultation with us. And when a Nikon starts his group, the first group he ever starts is in the United States, and he calls it the Sufi quarter. So we don't know for sure that it was connected at all to the original Sufi quarter of 1887.
But some of the people who were in that, who were contacted and contacted with Khan, were also original members of the Sufi quarter that created a group called the Order of Sufi's. CHA, your regard, wrote a book about Sufi who wrote two books about Sufi's and one with the influence of Nikon, was a member of a Nikon's group for a brief period. Another member was Seagold, or another contact person was Seagold. So there's a network of people who are interested in Nikon Sufi's, which is, he makes non-Islamic over the course of a few years.
Initially, supposedly non-Islamic, it seems that he has some Islamic influences at the beginning. He makes it over the course of a few years. And this is the most popular form of Sufism in the United States in the Chinese-centric non-Islamic Sufism as taught by a Nikon. And this form of Sufism actually breaks off into several different branches, and Robin and Martin leaves her own group, which takes on the life of its own after Nikon dies.
And then his son, Deliette, starts a group in the 1950s, which again is huge adherence among 1960s hippies into the 1970s. So this is the most influential, but there are other movements as well. And I was very fortunate to talk with some individuals, most notably Daniel Abil-Haimur, who were involved with one of the first Muslim Sufi communities in the United States, which was initially led by Al-Pokadra Sufi, the former Ian Dallas Scotsman, the converted in North Africa. And while traveling back to the United Kingdom, he ran into a hippie from the Bay Area in California, who was friends with other hippies who were artists in the early 1970s.
Daniel Abil-Haimur tells them about Sufism, and they all respect him because he had been an avant-garde filmmaker. So Abil-Haimur comes to California to work on a movie, and he connects with these Berkeley hippies and teaches them and introduces them to Islamic Sufism, which they start establishing in California, and they go back and forth between England and North Africa and the United States, and they start spreading it in the early 1870s. This is a hippetia Sufism. There are other forms of Sufism as well of various Islamic mysticisms.
There are some teachings that we know of people teaching in the 1940s, 1950s, 1940s in New York, 1950s in Michigan. But the real blossoming of Sufism, this comes after 1974, but it's important to note that there are great varieties. There's also a number of white Americans who were introduced to the Morissians Temple, which is African American-Sictorian organization. And they start incorporating the Nikon's teachings and other alternative religion teachings.
And they call themselves Morissor Sufism, have a small group that is people in New York, in Maryland, Pennsylvania, out to California. So there's a great variety, especially after World War II of Islamic mysticism among white Americans. We'll just have to wait to the second and third volume to hear more about that. As I mentioned earlier, there's really two books in this one book that you're doing with.
There's so much information, very detailed historical narratives about these different movements and individuals. And again, it's theoretically rich as well, and I think you provide interesting models for those of us working in as long as I have to think about why transformations and transitions happen within particular communities. Since we weren't able to cover everything, I just want to give you the opportunity. Is there anything you want potential readers and your listeners here to know as kind of a final word on white conversion during this period?
Sure. I mentioned in my introduction book, there is no evidence of any act of violence in the name of religion being perpetrated by a white American convert to Islam, or it's an ex-semitment, which is the time period I say. And that might surprise a lot of people. I have a chapter where I discuss why I believe my be the psychology of Islam, Ophilia, the love of Islam.
And I don't believe that this is universal or anything that it might help account for conversion somewhat. And I propose this idea that a lot of people have embraced Islam or embraced brotherhood with Muslims. With the notion that the awareness that Islam has long been seen as the Christian West's greatest enemy, and they have knowingly embraced that very religion as an act of tolerance. And it seems to me that for many people, many sympathizers of Islam in the pre-1975 period have had this idea that world peace is their main goal.
That their main goal is to show other people that they can have love and tolerance for their potential greatest enemy. And if they do that, great things can be achieved. And it's something that I did not expect going into this research. It seems to me a consistent thing from white Americans Muslims from 1975.
Patrick, congratulations on this wonderful volume. Thank you. Can you tell us a little bit about the things you're working on? You kind of alluded to and give us a little bit of detail about the volume 2 and volume 3.
Do you know, do you have expectations of when those will come out? Are you working on other projects as well at the moment? Yes, thank you. I think that volume 2 will hopefully come out early 2017, which was the term in the manuscript here next month in February.
We'll see if I get that done. And then volume 3 sometime after that. In addition, hopefully this February, we will be releasing the main transcriptions of the letters found at the Johnson Library Museum. So dealing with the OSPE from my brotherhood and even now we tend to wrestle with.
That will be in a book entitled Letters to the Sage. This is like the correspondence of Thomas Moore Johnson, Volume 1, that long title. It's co-edited by K. Paul Johnson.
And people Johnson and I came together and we are currently getting some reviews right now. And hopefully the book will be out under Tiphone Press in February, or maybe March, but we're open February. So those are the main projects I'm working on. I hope everyone looks to get those.
That volume will have the letter that announces the formation of the Sufi Quarter in 1887. This is something that people I think will be very interested in. Patrick, congratulations on all the success and thanks for making some time to talk to me. Thank you very much, Chris.
Yeah, that was my conversation with Patrick Bowen about his great new book, A History of Conversion to Islam in the United States, Volume 1. White American Muslims before 1975 published with Brill in 2015. Thanks again for listening to new books in Islamic studies.