AHC: Make a country in the Americas be majority Muslim

Any country, the larger the better. If you can do it without it being the direct result of a muslim nation colonizing, even better.
 
We must ask ourselves why the Atlantic facing Christian nations turned towards the west and why the Atlantic facing Muslim nation (Morocco) didn't. Would a Muslim moving to the Americas be able, in 16th/17th centuries, to make the pilgrimage to Mecca?

Perhaps if the caliphs held in to parts of the Iberian peninsula they may also send explorers west. However that would probably fall under colonialism which isn't allowed by the OP.
 
Mali establishes colonies on the Amazon river and eastern Brazil, funded by gold and the trans-Saharan trade. Mali imports slaves to this colony which is the catalyst for revolts down the road during times of instability and leads to the first Muslim colony becoming independent.
 
The Ottoman Empire sides with the Coalition in the Napoleonic Wars and gets Suriname from the Dutch. A gradual level of Ottoman immigration ensues for nearly 200 years.
 
As stated by Sevarics, Surinam is the most likely candidate. Perhaps importing more labourers from Islamic regions of India instead of Hindu could give Muslims a plurality in the population.
 
an independent country descended from African slaves could work; iirc, that was how Islam first came to the Americas, through West African Muslims who were imported there through the slave trade. the proposed state of New Afrika is the obvious answer, but it could easily be that some kind of "reparation state" is organized after the abolition of the slave trade as a geographically American equivalent to Liberia--some kind of Caribbean/Antillean state comes to mind
 
We must ask ourselves why the Atlantic facing Christian nations turned towards the west and why the Atlantic facing Muslim nation (Morocco) didn't. Would a Muslim moving to the Americas be able, in 16th/17th centuries, to make the pilgrimage to Mecca?

Perhaps if the caliphs held in to parts of the Iberian peninsula they may also send explorers west. However that would probably fall under colonialism which isn't allowed by the OP.

Many people back in the day could not go on Hajj, I highly doubt that was their primary reason to avoid it. But let's see why some countries did go to the Americas...

Spain: Originally wanted to go to the Indies but rediscovered the continent, they remained there and discovered later it was not the Indies as Columbus hoped

Portugal: Discovered Brazil in the routes to India. They decided to stay there as it was a great place to stop when going to India.

France: Wanted to challenge the Spanish and get their share of the Americas and had a large population (15+ mil in 17th century)

England: Started as privateers, raiding Spanish Shipping then followed by religious refugees on the Eastern Coast of North America and trying to get trade goods which they could get rather than buying it and avoiding the middle men

Dutch Republic: As the English, they started out as privateers against the Spanish but focussed on the potential of getting trade goods

The Spanish, Portuguese and the English religious refugee reasons are not applying to the Moroccans. Neither does Morocco have the population of France (being 10% of the total French population). They could get a situation just as the Dutch. Start as privateers in the Caribbean and slowly get their share of the Americas. What prevents them from doing this is the lack of a great Central Authority in the early 17th century in Morocco. Had they have this they could have made certain attempts. Getting immigrants to their colonies is not hard as other North Africans and Moriscos could join them.
 
The Songhai Empire takes the jollof coast and avoids collapse. In the early 1500s, they start landing settlers on great Inagua. Songhai collapses in the 1800s, leaving a Muslim majority island in the Caribbean.
 
Highest OTL Moslem %ages in New World countries:

Guyana 6.8%

Suriname 13.8%

Trinidad and Tobago 5%

Which means that any PoD has lot of work to do.

Actually, the most plausible mechanism I can think of would be an influx East Indian Moslems to one of the very small island "countries", which requires much smaller numbers. However, AFAIK all those colonies had overwhelming numbers of blacks. And AFAIK, very few Moslem blacks were exported as slaves from Africa. Most came from the coast, which was pagan. Also, where Moslems were dominant, they were the on-shore suppliers and sold non-Moslems by preference. (I'm thinking Senegal and Gambia, which today are 95% Moslem.)

So two possibilities:

Some small colony happens to import most of its slaves from Senegal and Gambia, at a time when the dominant Moslem tribe there wants to get rid of a rival Moslem tribe.

Some small colony has a particularly ugly slave rebellion, leading to the death or expulsion of most of the black slaves and their replacement with Moslem indentured servants from South Asia or the East Indies. Then perhaps a lot of the remaining blacks convert to Islam, to escape the repression applied to them.
 
For whatever reason, a buttload of South Asian Muslims (Bengalis maybe?) move from British India to some very lightly populated Caribbean nation and end up the ethnic majority. Basically Fiji, but with Muslims in the Caribbean.
 
For whatever reason, a buttload of South Asian Muslims (Bengalis maybe?) move from British India to some very lightly populated Caribbean nation and end up the ethnic majority. Basically Fiji, but with Muslims in the Caribbean.
*starts humming Pirates of the Caribbean theme* :p
 
St. Kitts is used as a penal colony for Muslims and Hindu rebels in the British Raj, and the number of Muslims ends up slightly more than the number of Hindus.
 
There was a revolt of Muslim slaves in Brazil during the Chaotic Regency of the 1830s, their objective was to create a Islamic State in Bahia. Maybe they win for some miracle.
 
Any country, the larger the better. If you can do it without it being the direct result of a muslim nation colonizing, even better.


Wasn't there a timeline around here involving Al-Andalus surviving and colonising the Americas ?

I believe it's this : https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...-moorish-america.428842/page-21#post-19225550

Great timeline and it has mostly Muslim colonization in the Carribean and parts of Latin America. The POD is around in 1212 with a failed Christian Reconquista
 
Top