⛵ Dhow Dispatch │ America's 250th: This land is our land (too)

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As America turns 250, we went looking for the oldest Muslim-owned businesses in the country. What we found was not in Silicon Valley. It was on a Georgetown bank ledger, a New Orleans peddling route, and a North Dakota wheat field.

We talk a lot in this newsletter about Muslim founders raising venture rounds today. But the story did not start with Databricks or Chobani. It started with enslaved Africans who could read Arabic, Syrian peddlers with heavy packs, and Bengali sailors who jumped ship. This week, in honor of the semiquincentennial, we are rewinding all the way back. Here are six Muslim-owned or Muslim-founded American businesses, all before 1959, ranked roughly oldest to newest.

Yarrow Mamout was a Fulani Muslim from Guinea, enslaved and shipped to Maryland in 1752 at around age 16. He could read and write Arabic. After 44 years in bondage, he was freed in 1796 at roughly age 60. Then he built wealth. He worked as a brickmaker, charcoal burner, and basket weaver, and twice saved $100 only to lose it to merchants who went insolvent. Finally, he saved $200 and became one of the first investors in the Columbia Bank of Georgetown. He bought property at 3324 Dent Place NW in 1800, lived on his bank dividends, and loaned money to local merchants, including $170.85 to a white merchant in 1821 to help buy a warehouse. He prayed openly and never ate pork or drank alcohol. Two artists painted his portrait: Charles Willson Peale in 1819 (now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art) and James Alexander Simpson in 1822 (held by the DC Public Library and exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery). His story is told in James H. Johnston's book "From Slave Ship to Harvard." [1][2][3]

Free land pulled a wave of Syrian and Lebanese Muslim immigrants to the northern prairie. The first Muslim family filed for a homestead near Ross in 1902, and dozens more followed, with names like Juma, Omar, and Abdallah on the deeds. Mary Juma and her husband Hassen arrived in 1902, "proved up" their claim, and raised wheat and cattle while her husband peddled goods across Minnesota and eastern North Dakota in the off-season. These were working farms and small trading routes, self-made from nothing in 40-below winters. In 1929 the community built a small mosque with a coal stove and prayer rugs, widely called the first structure built specifically as a Muslim place of worship in the United States. We even have Mary Juma's own voice: she told her story to a WPA interviewer in 1939. [4][5]

Here is the most obscure gem. Beginning in the late 1800s, Bengali Muslim traders from the Hooghly district sailed to Ellis Island each summer with bags of embroidered silks and "Oriental goods," then worked the New Jersey boardwalks and the segregated South. Moksad Ali was one of the earliest Bengali traders to settle in New Orleans. He married a local African American woman, Ella Blackman, in May 1895, and on their first child's birth certificate he listed his occupation as "silk merchant." One of his sons, born Bahadour Ali, became Bardu Ali, the bandleader who convinced Chick Webb to hire an unknown singer named Ella Fitzgerald. This history was recovered by MIT scholar Vivek Bald in "Bengali Harlem." [6][7][8]

The second Bengali wave were sailors who jumped ship from British steamers and settled in Harlem. They became cooks and restaurateurs. Habib Ullah co-owned the Bengal Garden restaurant, doing the cooking while his partner Ibrahim Choudry managed the money. Choudry became the community's go-to leader and the two co-founded the Pakistan League of America in 1947. Eshad Ali opened the Bombay India restaurant right on 125th Street in the 1950s, running it with his wife Ruth. These were small but real immigrant businesses feeding a multiethnic, multiracial community decades before "halal cart" was a New York institution. [9][10][11]

Cedar Rapids is home to the Mother Mosque, the oldest surviving purpose-built mosque in America (opened 1934), but the business story is just as good. Syrian Muslim immigrants started as peddlers, then opened dry goods and grocery stores. Hassen Sheronick owned a dry goods store and was a US citizen by 1903. Hassan Igram ran a grocery. And the Aossey brothers, well known locally as grocers and merchandisers, show the ceiling: a 1927 Cedar Rapids Gazette article reported that William Aossey "came here as a penniless boy from Syria some eighteen years ago" but "had prospered and is proprietor of a $30,000 business." That is real money in 1927. Even through the Depression, the community's grocers prospered, sending remittances back to Lebanon and Syria. This history is documented in Edward E. Curtis IV's "Muslims of the Heartland." [12][13][14]

By the mid-1950s the Nation of Islam had built a network of Black-owned businesses rooted in a "do for self" philosophy. The Chicago temple's grocery store, restaurant, and bakery together employed about 45 Muslims. The Shabazz Restaurant and Shabazz Bakery on Chicago's South Side became neighborhood institutions. By 1975 the NOI ran hundreds of businesses employing over 11,000 people, with estimated annual revenue near $30 million. For accuracy: the NOI's theology sits outside mainstream Islam, and we present it here as a historical Black Muslim economic movement. [15][16][17]

Muslim American entrepreneurship is not new. It is 250 years old, and older. Long before the venture era, Muslims in America were bank shareholders, homesteaders, peddlers, grocers, and restaurateurs. They built where they were allowed to build, often inside communities of color that welcomed them when the law did not. That is the deeper story behind the founders we cover every week. The faces change. The hustle does not.

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