American Muslims: A History Revealed airs Mondays at 7PM beginning July 6

Across six half-hour episodes, journalists Asma Khalid (BBC), Malika Bilal (Al Jazeera English), and Aymann Ismail (Slate) uncover stories drawn from archives, photographs, and personal histories that place Muslims in key chapters in American history, from slavery and the founding era to the Civil War, early immigration, the Great Migration, and the rise of modern border enforcement. 

 The series tells the stories of an enslaved African Muslim who gained his freedom in the early republic; a founding father who imagined Muslims as future citizens; a Muslim soldier who fought for the Union in the Civil War; pioneers who built one of the nation’s earliest mosques on the Great Plains; Black American women shaping Islamic life in 1920s Chicago; and a South Asian migrant caught in the first wave of border policing. 

Filmed on location across the country at places where American history took shape, from the Great Plains and Chicago to Washington, DC, Civil War battlefields in Virginia and Pennsylvania, and the U.S.–Mexico borderlands of California and Arizona, the series links archival evidence to the landscapes where these lives were lived. 

Together, these stories show how Muslims have been part of American life from the beginning, navigating exclusion, building cross-cultural solidarities, establishing communities across difference, and working to close the gap between America’s promises and its practices.