Being Muslim. Sylvia Chan-Malik
the meeting from others who saw the advertisements on the “Woman’s Page.”
The ads most certainly ran at the behest of Sadiq, who carefully cultivated the AMI’s publicity efforts and managed every aspect of its outreach and communications. From all accounts, it is apparent that Dr. Mufti Muhammad Sadiq was a quick, and extremely insightful, study—a highly educated, articulate man who recognized and mobilized the political and social landscape around him to advance his work as the first Ahmadiyya missionary in the United States. Sadiq arrived in America on February 15, 1920, landing in the port of Philadelphia on the ship SS Haverford from London. Upon arrival, Sadiq was immediately detained by U.S. immigration officials under suspicion of polygamy, owing to the assumptions of the immigration officials that any and all “Moslems” were engaged in polygamous practices. When in prison, the missionary noted the very real affects of racism, in particular, anti-Black racism, in his newfound place of work—an understanding that would indelibly shape his proselytization efforts and the racial composition of those he believed would be most amenable to his message.43
Sadiq came to record many of his understandings and observations about race in the United States in the Moslem Sunrise, the bimonthly publication Sadiq began after setting up the AMI’s headquarters in Highland Park, Michigan (a suburb of Detroit) in 1921. In Highland Park, he connected with a small community of Lebanese and Syrian Muslims, publishing his newsletter in the living room of Muhammad Karoub, a Lebanese businessman who established the first mosque in the Detroit Area.44 While their denominations differed—Karoub and his community were Sunni Muslims—Sadiq was welcomed into the small immigrant Detroit Muslim community, where they bonded over the shared nature of their Islamic identities. Yet Sadiq felt many of the Muslims he encountered in the United States had lost sight of the true meaning of their faith, which he addressed in the October 1921 issue in the essay “My Advice to the Muhammedans in America.” In it, he addressed the “many Muhammadans in this country who come from Syria, Palestine, Albania, Serbia, Bosnia, Turkey, Kurdistan, and India,” which he estimated numbered “in thousands.” He observed that for many of these immigrant Muslims, Islam was “not playing practical part in your everyday life [sic]” and lamented that they were forgetting their daily prayers, forgoing the study of Arabic, marrying non-Muslim women, and not passing on their religion to their children. He especially disdained the practice of adopting “American” names: “Retain your Moslem names—Muhammad, Ahmad, Ali, and so forth, and don’t become Sams, Georges, James, Mikes, etc.”
In addition, despite his mutual respect and cooperation with Karoub and the Highland Park Sunni Muslim community, Sadiq was constantly trying to convince others of the superiority of Ahmadiyya Islam. In the United States, Sadiq realized he could find a far more receptive audience to Ahmadiyya than in his homeland; most in America knew nothing or little about Islam, of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, of the political and cultural debates that fueled varying interpretations of Islam. In particular, Americans were unaware that in Sadiq’s native South Asia, the orthodox Sunni Muslim establishment viewed the Ahmadiyya as a heretical movement. While Ahmadiyya religious practices were largely identical to those of orthodox Sunni Islam in basic ceremonial duties, such as prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, Ahmadis diverged from the majority of Sunni Muslims in regard to the notion of Prophecy and their interpretation of Jesus, according the teachings of their movement’s founder, Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad.45 Thus, perhaps because of doctrinal differences, or simply because his mission outgrew the space of Karoub’s living room, in early 1922 Sadiq set his sites on Chicago, purchasing the property on South Wabash with the strong awareness that the movement’s message would resonate forcefully with the neighborhood’s Black American inhabitants.
Sadiq’s Chicago mosque opened to the public in June 1922, and in July the missionary published the first issue of the Moslem Sunrise from his new headquarters. Of the move, he wrote in his monthly “Brief Report of the Work in America,”
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