When the history of Africans in the West is considered, horrific images are routinely conjured up of about 100 million hapless souls being ripped from their homes, forcibly marched to the coast, quartered like beasts, stacked like sardines into the bottom of ships, transported across the Atlantic Ocean (Middle Passage), and compelled to labor as chattel slaves in the Americas. Whether due to ignorance or selective amnesia, little reference is made to Africans in the Western hemisphere and their role in spreading Islam hundreds of years before the subsequent voyages of Columbus and other European plunderers.

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