Introduction

                         To God, in gratitude for those who came before.

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Introduction

I am not a Muslim. In my books I say that I am simply a person in search of the truth -- the truth about myself, my people, my country, my world, and God.  In my search for truth, I have discovered that there is much that I once believed to be true that is certainly not the total truth and, indeed, may not be true at all. 

It was a search for truth that led me to write about my African heritage and in my search for truth about my African heritage, I found myself confronted with the fact that my heritage also included Islam.  

On almost any day of the week, in schools, churches, and the halls of power throughout the land, one can hear pronouncements being made concerning the "Judeo-Christian" heritage of America.  However, as a person of African descent, I found increasingly that there were other religious traditions which have obviously had some bearing on the individual that I am today.  In addition, to my "Judeo-Christian" heritage, there are also lingering influences of the tribal religions of the African and Indigenous American peoples and, perhaps more significantly, there is the ongoing influence of Islam.

In discovering the truth about my African heritage.  I was frequently confronted by the role that Islam played in developing African society and in initiating the African diaspora.  After all, it was Muslim Arab merchants who took African slaves and companions with them as they traversed the then known world. 

China, Malaysia, India, and Spain all came to be the home of Africans because of the peripatetic Arabs.  It was the Muslims who spread their religion to both the West and East coasts of Africa and through persuasion and intermarriage converted the African people to the Islamic faith.  And it was African Muslims from the West coast of Africa who frequently were the slave cargo of the European ships that came to the Americas, speaking such Muslim languages as Hausa, Mandingo, and Fulfulde.  It was these forefathers who played such an integral part in the bold experiment which eventually made me what I am.

In telling my story -- in telling my Pan-African history, I ultimately felt compelled to learn about and tell my Muslim history and heritage.  I wound up writing the first two volumes of The Muslim Diaspora and when I finished my The Creation book in 2003, my publisher asked that I prepare a Who's Who in Islam.  Being naive, I said "Yes".

Over the next ten years, I compiled over 3,000 biographical entries for Who's Who in Islam and it is from that compilation that I came to compile my list of the 100 Greatest Muslims of all time.  

As Salaam Alaikum,

Everett Jenkins

Fairfield, California

March 18, 2022

 

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