With a documented presence of five hundred years, Islam was, after Catholicism, the second monotheist religion introduced into the post-1492 Americas. It preceded Lutheranism, Methodism, Baptism, Calvinism, Santeria, Candomble, and Vodun to name a few. All these religions are alive today and are followed by the vast majority of the Africans’ descendants, but not one community currently practices Islam as passed on by preceding African generations.
Islam brought by the enslaved West Africans has not survived. It has left traces; it has contributed to the culture and history of the continents; but its conscious practice is no more. For the religion to endure, it had to grow both vertically, through transmission to the children, and horizontally, through conversion of the “unbelievers.” Both propositions met a number of obstacles.
The transmission of a religion to one’s progeny presupposes, of course, that there is a progeny. Yet the very structure of the slave trade, with the disproportionate importation of men, the physical toll that enslavement took on the Africans, and the selling off of family members, placed tremendous obstacles in the path of the constitution and perpetuation of families.
There was, to begin with, a significant imbalance between the number of African males and females deported from Africa. In the eighteenth century, for example, among the Senegambians, 66 percent were males. The figures for the Central Sudanese are even worse, with about 95 percent men.1 On any given plantation the demographics could be even more slanted, with some planters buying males exclusively when they needed sheer strength and adding a few women over the years for reproductive and domestic purposes. Because of this policy, a large number of African men could not form families. Language barriers and differences in cultures and religions among the Africans added another layer of difficulty in the finding of a mate. Among the native-born population, the sexual distribution was natural, and the sexes tended to be of equal numbers; but there are indications all over the slave world of a tendency to endogamy, with native-born men and women marrying and living among themselves and the Africans who could doing the same.
For both African and native born, the low fertility rate and the high infant and adult mortality rates were another hindrance to the development of families. And at the end of this obstacle course loomed the ever-present possibility of the sale of family members, which could forever destroy the unit and any possible cultural continuity. Therefore, the chances for a Muslim man to find a Muslim spouse, have children, and keep them long enough to pass on the religion were indeed slim. Muslim women fared better in the first and second parts of this process, but the third was out of their control. If the lives of the well-known Muslims are any indication, about half did not have children. By choice or out of necessity, it appears that Omar ibn Said, Abu Bakr al Siddiq, and Ayuba Suleyman Diallo did not have descendants in the Americas.2
In contrast, Ibrahima abd al Rahman, John Mohamed Bath, Salih Bilali, and Bilali Mohamed did have children. There is no indication that Ibrahima’s children, who had Christian names like their mother’s, were Muslims; but one of Salih Bilali’s sons, named Bilali, apparently was a Muslim and kept alive the female West African tradition of the distribution of rice cakes as an Islamic charity (saraka). He married the daughter of a marabout, but their descendants, who grew up seeing Muslims around, nevertheless had no understanding of Islam, at least as recorded by the WPA. In general, the grandchildren of Muslims recalled the exterior manifestations of Islam, such as prayers, but do not seem to have had precise ideas about the religion and, as far as can be ascertained by the published interviews, did not mention the religion by its name. It is not impossible that they knew more about Islam and the Muslims than they revealed but did not wish to confide in white Christian strangers—some of whom were the grandchildren of former slaveholders—asking them personal questions in Jim Crow South.
For the Muslims who had children, conformism on the children’s part and difficulties with literacy may have coincided to prevent the passage of Islam from generation to generation. As a minority religion, Islam was surrounded by religions with a much larger following that may have been more appealing to youngsters in search of conformity and a sense of belonging. To be a Muslim was to singularize one’s self. Moreover, it was an austere religion that manifested itself through rigorous prayers and additional privations, propositions that may have handicapped its acceptance by a second and a third generation. The lack of interest of the youngsters in the religion of their parents, who had gone to great lengths to preserve it, was deplored by the Muslim clerics of Trinidad. A religious leader regretted that their youngsters “were in danger of being drawn away by the evil practices of the Christians.”3 The laments were the same in Bahia, where the clerics complained of the ungratefulness of the children who turned to “fetishism,” Candomble, or Catholicism.4 After the repression of 1835, the malés became extremely discreet, private, and secretive, and this forced isolation was probably not appealing to the younger generations. In Bahia, al-Baghdadi noted in 1865, “The majority of Muslim children turn out to be Christians because as they come to this world, they see the festivals of the Christians in the churches, with the abundance of patriarchs, clergymen, music, the beauty of dances. The child sees that only his father is different. He thinks that his father is a liar and joins the majority.”5 And if the passing on of Islam was difficult when both parents were Muslims, it must have proved an even more daunting task to the Muslim who had a non-Muslim spouse.
In addition, as much as literacy in Arabic was a force and an anchor for the faith, it was also most likely a hindrance to its propagation in the particular circumstances of American slavery. African children were educated in Islam through the Qur’anic schools, which were much more than the Sunday schools of the Christians. Islam demanded study and dedication on the part of the children every day of the year, for many years. In the Americas, the most parents could do was to teach their children in an informal way or, where possible, send them to the more elaborate secret schools that functioned in some urban settings. Further, it is one thing to maintain one’s literacy in Arabic, but it is quite another to acquire it from scratch in the absence of time, adequate structures, and tools, as was true in most cases. Even if a book or Qur’an in Arabic was available, doubtless an enslaved child could not have found the amount of time necessary to learn how to read it.
The only alternative Muslim parents had to teaching Arabic and the Qur’an through schools and written media was to pass on orally what they knew. This mode of transmission works for Christians because images, icons, statues, woodcarvings, stained glass, and wall paintings act as support and explanation. They are the illiterates’ books. But iconography does not exist in Islam. Whatever was passed on may have been close enough to orthodoxy for the second generation, but by the third, the risks of approximation and misinterpretation would have been high and finding a reference person difficult. With the definitive end of the transatlantic slave trade by the late 1860s and the passing away of the African-born population, the number of people who could actually read and write Arabic, who were knowledgeable in the religion and could interpret it for the novices, was very much reduced. With some variation in time depending on the country, by the first or second decade of the twentieth century, there were no more African Muslims who could read and write Arabic in the Americas.
If passing on their “religion of the Book” to their progeny was an arduous task for the Muslims, then spreading the faith among their companions proved equally daunting, if the Muslims even tried. In Africa, proselytizing was mostly done through example, by the mystic Sufis, the merchants, and the teachers who settled among the “infidels.” Active recruiting was usually not part of their activities. Proselytizing in the Americas would certainly have followed the same unobtrusive pattern, only it would have met with more difficulty, because while Africans from different parts of the continent shared the same fate in the Americas, their customs, education, and culture were alien to one another. Their languages were mutually unintelligible and their mastery of the colonial languages only acquired over time. To hold religious discussions and to successfully convert under those conditions would have been improbable. The Central Africans had had no contact with Islam in Africa, and their linguistic and cultural differences with the West African Muslims in the Americas may have been an insurmountable barrier. The West Africans constituted a group that might have represented a source of potential recruits, as they had already been in contact with Islam in their homeland. But those who had refused conversion in Africa were probably not likely to change their minds in the Americas, particularly if they had been sold by Muslims.
Some proselytizing did occur, as the cultural make-up of the men and women condemned for the 1835 uprising in Bahia seems to indicate. Some Central and West Africans who were certainly not Muslims in Africa took part in the revolt and may have been converts. Undoubtedly there were some conversions, but indications are strong that conversion was far from being a priority for the Muslims. It is remarkable that among the thousands of slave testimonies recorded in the United States, there is nothing but silence concerning the Muslims: no description of their particular rituals, comments about their habits, mention of their religion or of their eagerness to share it. When references to Islamic rituals emerge, as in the Sea Islands interviews, the believers are said to have been praying to the sun and the moon. The practitioners of Islam obviously had not told their non-Muslim companions who reported these observations anything about the religion. Charles Ball noticed this lack of communication: “I knew several,” he wrote about the Africans, “who must have been, from what I have since learned, Mohamedans; though at that time, I had never heard of the religion of Mohamed.”6 Clearly, the “Mohamedans” he knew were not involved in proselytizing. Ball talked at length with one, “the man who prayed five times a day,” but at no point in the narrative did the Muslim mention the particulars of his religion, which is never quoted by name. Given Ball’s precise descriptions of the Africans’ state of mind, in which traces of Islamic philosophy concerning life and death can be detected, he must have had extensive talks with more than one Muslim. Yet none, not even his own grandfather, tried to impress his religion on him. Nor is there any indication that Salih Bilali, Ibrahima abd al Rahman, and Bilali Mohamed, for example, were involved in proselytizing. Preserving their faith, respecting its exigencies, maintaining a religious community, and trying to pass on their beliefs and knowledge to their children must have proved challenging and absorbing enough to the Muslims, who may have preferred to devote their time, resources, and energy to these tasks rather than to getting involved in missionary work. Reaction to external forces, such as fear of retribution from slave owners, who would not have accepted seeing Islam spread, may also have played a role.
Islam survived in the Americas due to the continuous arrival of Africans—including the recaptives and the indentured laborers after the abolition of slavery in the British and French islands—and not to conversion. There was thus little opportunity for its “creolization.” Unorthodoxy and tolerance of foreign elements, in contrast, are characteristic of the successful African religions that are still alive today. They became creolized, borrowing features from a diversity of religions and synthesizing them. Even though, in Africa, Islam and traditional religions are not exclusive, there are limits to what Islam can absorb. Syncretism is not acceptable; or as historian Lamin Sanneh explains, Islam “is syncretist only as a phase or for want of knowing better, not as a permanent state.”7 In the Americas, it could hardly accommodate such elements as the concept of multiple deities, considered heresy. Shirk, the belief that God’s divinity may be shared, is, according to the Qur’an, the most heinous and unforgivable sin. As far as Christianity was concerned, orthodox Islam had already stated quite clearly what was acceptable in it and what was not. To introduce other crucial beliefs, such as the Trinity or that Jesus was the son of God, would have been sacrilegious. Since syncretism was not an option and the possibilities of transmission of the orthodoxy were limited, only one avenue was left for African Islam in the Americas: it could only disappear with the last Africans, enslaved, recaptives, or indentured laborers.
Abd al-Rahman al-Baghdadi’s experience in Brazil sheds light on the last decades of Islam and its believers. A group of men had come to him in Rio, arguing, “We just want you to teach us the right religion, because we thought that we were the only Muslims in this world, that we were on the right path, and that all the white communities were Christians. Until, Allah almighty bestowed his gifts and we saw you and realized that the possessions of the Creator are large and not uninhabited but full of Muslims.” They acknowledged that it would be difficult for them to immigrate to Muslim lands because they would have to leave all their property to the state. It was the same reason that had pushed some Trinidadian Muslims to abandon their repatriation effort. Al-Baghdadi ended up teaching a group of five hundred people who had been duped by a man, Ahmad, who presented himself as a Muslim from Tangier, Morocco. Many Muslims had been deported young and did not have a deep knowledge of the religion, so not knowing better, they had followed his lead. But, according to al-Baghdadi, he “started teaching them the Jewish religion gradually.” He also convinced them that to convert to Islam one needed to pay. Ahmad acknowledged to al-Baghdadi that his goal had been “to harm the Muslims.” This episode shows how much knowledge could be lost by some Muslims, depending on their age at capture; but as significant was their eagerness to go back to orthodoxy.8
In various places, some Muslims read the Bible and were active in the church, but, as noted earlier, they were also using their Arabic literacy to discreetly write religious and secular manuscripts in which they clearly identified themselves as Muslims. Others, in Brazil, were members of black Catholic fraternities. In Bahia, for example, Gibirilu (from the Arabic Jibril, Gabriel), also known as Manoel Nascimento de Santo Silva, belonged to the Sociedade Protectora dos Desvalidos (Society for the Protection of the Destitute). His father was Alufa Salu, an imam born in Ife, Nigeria. His maternal grandfather, also a Muslim, was born in Brazil, the son a Nupe Muslim deported from Nigeria.9 Despite his Catholic affiliation, Gibirilu, who died in 1959, was considered one of the last “orthodox” Muslims in the city.
A similar phenomenon was recorded in the Sea Islands. According to one of Bilali’s descendants, a great-granddaughter of Bilali Mohamed, Harriet Hall, was a Muslim at least until 1866, when the First African Baptist Church came to Sapelo Island.10 Information given by her descendant suggests that she may have remained a Muslim secretly while being active in the church until her death in 1922. Being overtly a Christian had distinct advantages. In Brazil in particular, belonging to the church black associations distracted the attention of the authorities, which had become actively anti-Muslim after the 1835 rebellion. In the United States, black churches started to blossom and recruit forcefully after Emancipation, and everywhere in the Americas, the church and its associations created and strengthened solidarity in the black population as a whole—an important outcome in a hostile environment. After Emancipation, adherence to Christianity on the part of the Muslims may have been a way of disguising and protecting their true faith while taking advantage of positive and useful structures.
What is striking in all these cases is that the Muslims did not mix Christianity and Islam; their activities in the church and their Islamic faith remained separate. As Pierre Verger perceptively remarked, “This juxtaposition of two religions that were so intransigent and exclusive … had nothing to do with syncretism between two religions.”11 As exemplified in the communities visited by al-Baghdadi, some Islamic beliefs and rites could be denatured, but it was the result of ignorance, not of a conscious, deliberate attempt at syncretism. This willingness to keep the religion “pristine” in the most difficult circumstances participated in its disappearance.
Islam practiced by the children of African Muslims was still Islam, but this situation soon became exceptional, for orthodox Islam died out. Yet it did not wholly disappear; parts of the religion survived as a number of its traits were incorporated into other African religions with which it had existed side by side. For various reasons, such as concentration of followers, ongoing contact with Africa, adaptability, and tolerance of syncretism, a number of African-based or African-derived religions have remained. They have expanded and stopped being the religion of a particular ethnic group to become the religion of peoples of different origins, all of whom brought something to the new creed and liturgy.
No systematic research has been conducted yet on Islam’s contribution to the African-derived religions of the Americas, and how some of its elements found their way into Candomble, Santeria, Vodun, and other rites is not known. But the observation of similar phenomenon in Africa may shed light on what happened in the Americas. In Africa, in the contact zones between Muslims and non-Muslims, where they share the same villages and towns, for example, interaction and a definite interdependence between the groups have always existed. Non-Muslims, as already mentioned, from the early days of Islam have made great use of Islamic amulets. Village chiefs—and in earlier times, rulers—are acknowledged by the Muslims, who are part of their inductions and give their benedictions. The asantehene Osei Tutu Kwame, the non-Muslim king of Asante in early nineteenth century, testified to the efficiency of Islam and the usefulness of the Muslims, saying, “I know that book [the Qur’an] is strong, and I like it because it is the book of the great God, it does good for me, and therefore I love all the people that read it.”12
Even though there is interaction between Islam and other African religions, each group of believers remains faithful to its creed, with the non-Muslims appropriating with pragmatism whatever they find useful and efficient in the Islamic practices. The borrowing of Arabic words, perceived as words of power, is widespread, and sometimes Allah is considered one of the deities in the polytheist pantheons. There is an Allah Bango (Allah of the writing board or slate) among the Gwaris of Northern Nigeria and another deity called Mamman (Muhammad).13 As in some cases the contact has been going on for several centuries, a number of Islamic traits have made their way into these religions and are permanent fixtures that would remain with or without the presence of Muslims. Muslims have kept pre-Islamic practices that they resort to in certain circumstances, and some consult non-Muslim healers or diviners when the marabout has not been able to help them.
In the Americas, as traditional African religions were being reconstructed, adapting to local conditions, they integrated Islamic and Christian features as well as tenets from a diversity of African religions. There was no fusion but rather coexistence, juxtaposition, or symbiosis. In some religions, Islamic traits are recognized as such by the believers, who make direct references to Allah, the Muslims, or Arabic. In others, the origin of such traits seems to have been forgotten, but they are present and almost as visible.
Religions that have integrated Islamic traits in an overt manner are the Bahian Candomble and the Cuban Santeria, introduced by the Yoruba. The Yoruba religion had begun to integrate Islamic elements in Africa. Its first deity, Orishala or Obatala, is said to be Oba-t-Alla, or “Lord Allah.”14 His day is Friday, the Muslim Sabbath, and his color is white. The Ifa divination system used by the Yoruba was introduced by the first babalawo (master of divination), whose name was Alaba or Araba. He is said to have come from Arabia. The system itself is viewed by some scholars to be partly derived from Islamic geomancy.15
The Yoruba religion was not merely transposed to Brazil and Cuba; it adapted to a new set of conditions—the enslavement of the adepts and their forced conversion to a foreign religion in particular. In the Americas, it incorporated Christian elements and more Islamic references into its liturgy. Allah was called on, as is attested in the following two songs heard, at least until the 1930s, in some Bahian terreiros (places of worship):
Allah!
Allah! de Deus!
Allah!
Allah!
Olo Allah!
Baba quara da!16
Allah himself found a place in the Candomble pantheon, not under the name Obatala but under his own. Given the prestige of Islam and the high regard that Islamic divination, healing, and protection making enjoyed among non-Muslims, to invoke the God of the Muslims was an attempt to attract efficient benedictions and divine interventions.
Islamic elements in Candomble can also be seen in the description of a religion active in the state of Alagoas, Brazil, in the first decade of the twentieth century. The principal god was orixa-alun or orixa-allah. The priest was not called pae (father) de terreiro, as in Candomble, but alufa (from alfa, a Muslim leader). The faithful wore mandingas, and the walls of the place of worship were decorated not with representations of the orishas and their corresponding Catholic saints but with what a witness described as “arabesques.”17 In addition, a chant contained this verse:
Edure, edure, alilala
which probably derived from the shahada: La-ilaha ill-Allah, or “There is no God but God.” The presence of these Islamic traits notwithstanding, orishas such as Oya, Oxun, and Shango were honored.
The Muslims themselves appear in some of the rituals and creeds of the non-Muslims. A Candomble song recorded in 1934 stated that the orisha Ogun, the bellicose god of iron and war, was somehow linked to the malés:
Ogun menino e de male
(Little Ogun is of the malés)
Nu-e, nu-e!
Ogun menino e de male
Nue-e, e-re-re-re!18
The Muslims are acknowledged further in an African-derived Carioca religion, the Macumba, that mixes Yoruba, Bantu, Gege (Ewe, from ancient Dahomey and Togo), and Native American beliefs. They are called Mussurumin, Mussuruhy, or Massuruman. The linha de Mussuruhy, or “line of the Muslims,” is made of gunpowder that encircles pins, bottles, cigars, and chickens. As the powder is lighted and explodes, the angry and vengeful spirits come down. In keeping with their Islamic origin, the paes de santo of the Muslim lines are called pae alufa or tio alufa.19
The memory of the Muslims is also kept alive in Umbanda, a spiritualist religion that developed from the Macumba. It arose in the 1920s and counts about 20 million followers. Its ritual language is “la lingua Angola,” but it has integrated a number of Arabic words. Among them are alcali, “judge” (from the Arabic al-qadi, “judge”); alijenu, “diabolical spirits” (from jinn, “bad spirits”); assumi, “fast” (from sawm, the month-long fast of Ramadan); abaricada suba, “God bids you a good day” (from allah barakati la, “may God bless your day”); and ali ramadu li lai, “praise to the Lord of the universe” (from al-hamdu lillahi, “praise be to God”). In Umbanda, the spirits of the black and Indian ancestors form armies, led by orishas. The orisha Omulu, god of medicine and smallpox, leads the line of the skulls, souls, Indian sorcerers, and Muslims (called variously Mussurumin, Massuruman, Massurumin, Mussuruhy, or simply malés).20 This line of spirits of the dead represents the souls of the native and Muslim medicine men. The association of Muslims and medicine is not fortuitous. Popular Islam has a long tradition of herbal, faith, and religious medicine performed by marabouts, who use herbs, amulets, animal sacrifices, prayers, and incantations to treat their patients. Their reputation transcends their Muslim communities, and they have always been consulted by non-Muslims.
Generally speaking, the Brazilian syncretic religions are made up of—according to a classification proposed by anthropologist Arthur Ramos—Gege, Yoruba, Muslim, Bantu, Indian, spiritist, and Catholic elements, all of which can be readily identified.21 Some combine all these elements, while others use only three or four. Out of seven such combinations, only two do not contain Islamic features.
In Cuba, the greetings of the Paleros, followers of Palo Monte Mayom be, also known as Regla Conga—a Kongo religion whose vocabulary is mainly Kikongo—is sala malekun malekun sala, which his the customary Islamic salutation, assalamu aleikum, waleikum salam, but there is no indication that the believers know where that expression comes from.22
Medicine and occult powers that appear to be linked to Islam are at the center of a religion in the Dominican Republic. The Morenos (the blacks) family, who are recognized as having special healing powers, trace their roots back to Isidro, a Haitian born at the turn of the century. With his father and three brothers, he left for Santo Domingo around 1830. The others eventually went back to Haiti, but Isidro remained. Starting with Isidro and continuing to this day, the leaders of the Morenos use supernatural powers to cure their followers and wear a trademark white turban.23
In neighboring Haiti, Islam and the Muslims appear in Vodun. This religion came to the island of Saint-Domingue from Dahomey, carried by the Fon and Ewe. Vodun, in Africa, had already assimilated elements of other peoples’ beliefs, including those of the Yoruba. In the Caribbean, it absorbed the contributions of still other religions and cultures. The Vodun pantheon has one supreme god, called Mawu in Benin and Papa Bondieu (Father God, in French and patois) on the island, and deities or spirits, called loas. The loas serve the same function as the orishas. Most loas come from Africa, but many are creoles, having originated in the island. The African deities are called loas Guinin and are divided into nanchons (nations) that represent the different African ethnic groups. There are loas Congo, loas Ibo, loas Nago, and so forth.
When the loas are called by the houngan (priest) and the assembly, they descend on the participants and “ride” them, expressing themselves through the believers in the manner specific to their nation. Tellingly, the loas Senegal speak Arabic: they say, “Salam! Salam Malekoum! Salay’ salam ma salay,” or “Peace! Peace be with you! Prayer, peace, prayer.”24 To this day, in some houmfors (Vodun temples), when a particular loa appears and is recognized by the congregation and the houngan as being a loa Senegal, the houngan greets him with the words Salam, salam, then kneels and raises his hands above his head, as Muslims do when they pray.25 In addition, the name Allah can sometimes be heard in the prayers.26
Islam and the Muslims are thus acknowledged and invoked by the followers of the most successful neo-African and African-derived religions in the New World and are integrated into their rituals and creeds. Their belief in one God, their Arabic literacy, their combative spirit, and the efficiency of their learned men are the traits that seem to have most impressed their non-Muslim companions. Their acknowledgment is another indication of the important place they held in the enslaved community, in disproportion to their numbers. It is also an indication of the positive manner in which the non-Muslims perceived them. Contrary to Christianity and its saints, Islam was not imposed on them. They freely chose to integrate some of its elements. In their own indisputable way, the non-Muslims rebuked the assertion that they had strained relationships with the Muslims in the Americas. In addition, these religions confirm that Islam was a unifying force that regrouped different nations into one global community. In effect, the Muslims entered the non-Muslim rituals as Muslims, not as Hausa, Mandingo, or Fulani. In Vodun, for instance, the Arabic-speaking loas are not designated by their ethnic origin; they are called collectively “loas Senegal.” They are the only ones grouped under a geographic terminology, whereas the other loas were integrated on an ethnic basis.27
Islamic elements also appear in religions that do not seem to have retained a conscious memory of the origin of these borrowed rituals. One example can be found in Toco, a village at the extreme north of Trinidad. Officially outlawed in 1917, the religion and its manifestations were observed by anthropologists Melville and Frances Herskovits in the 1940s.28 The scholars never linked what they were studying to Islam, which has typically been the case with researchers of Africanisms in the Americas. The fact that there is no reference to Islam and the Muslims in their work may mean that the congregation itself was not aware of the origin of some of its rituals, or it may have been but did not mention these origins to the Herskovitses.
The faithful, called “Shouters,” are Spiritual Baptists, part of a Protestant revivalist movement that spread throughout the British islands between the late eighteenth century and the late nineteenth century. Their clergy is composed, among many officiants, of a preacher; a teacher who, like a marabout, interprets dreams and visions; a divine healer who, also like a marabout, has the power of faith healing; a prophet who see things in the past and in the future through astrology; a fortune-teller, whose function is to “read” the faithful; and a judge. Many of the functions that the marabout normally holds seem to have been redistributed among the clergy.
Other Islamic traits can be detected. The faithful are barefoot in the church, as the Muslims are in a mosque; they kneel on a piece of fabric in the same manner as the Muslims do on a rug when they pray; and they use a particular ceremonial handshake. This ritual handshake consists of three downward shakes of the right hand, followed by the elevation of the hands above the head as in a Muslim prayer. Next comes the touching of the left breast by one, then the other participant—a typical trait of the handshake exchanged by Muslims the world over. Further, as noted in chapter 2, the Shouters turn around a special altar built in the center of the church, different from the regular one located at the front of the building. This may represent another example of Lorenzo Dow Turner’s theory that the “shout” is, in essence, an Islamic survival linked to the shaw’t, or circumambulation of the Kaaba in Mecca.
In other parts of Trinidad, saraka is an important ritual—still very much alive today—that consists in making offerings to ancestors who have manifested themselves in a dream or because one wants to give thanks following a positive event. Hausa had their own way of offering saraka. According to family members interviewed in the 1970s, a Hausa man who was a practicing Muslim made his saraka by killing an animal in the halal manner (by letting it bleed to death) and demanded that the ritual be performed, after his death, by a Muslim cleric. Another said “bismillah” (in the name of God) as he gave away the food. His saraka, as is still the case in Muslim West Africa and the Sea Islands, consisted of sweetened rice.29 This dish is called sansam on the island, chanmchanm or sanmsanm in Haiti, shum-shum in Jamaica, and sham-sham in the rest of the Caribbean.30 The etymology of the words may be simsim, “sesame” in Arabic. But it may also be zamzam, the sacred well located near the Kaaba in Mecca, whose water is said to be curative. In contrast, when saraka is described among other groups, it is associated with the pouring of rum, among other beverages; there is no mention of halal butchering, and the sacrificed animal is sometimes a pig.31 Alcohol, non-halal slaughtering, and pork are forbidden in Islam.
In the islands of Carriacou and Grenada, people of African origin give offerings of food to the spirits of their ancestors during a dance called the Big Drum Dance, the Nation Dance (African nations), or saraka.32 In Carriacou, the participants who know the ethnic origins of their ancestors say they were Temne (Sierra Leone), Mandingo (Senegambia), Chamba, Moko and Igbo (Nigeria), Kongo (Congo), Koromantin (Akan from Ghana), and Arada (Fon from Benin). Only the Temne and Mandingo were Muslims in Africa, and their presence may indicate that it is in part from them that the other groups learned of almsgiving in the form of saraka. Food and drumming are prevalent in the Nation Dance just as they were in a sadaqah witnessed by a British traveler in Sierra Leone in the 1830s. It included the sacrifice of eighty bullocks and other cattle, as well as drumming. The traveler noted that another “sataka [sic] was perform[ed] at Robumsar for a child accidentally shot in the bush; and the travelers were much annoyed with the noise of tom-toming.”33
Arabic vocabulary can be detected in some of the songs specific to each nation performing the saraka. For example, in Carriacou, the Koromantin conclude one of their saraka songs with “salamani-o,” which most likely derives from assalamu aleikum. Another Koromantin song goes, “Anancy-o, Sari Baba.” Sari, in Mande, Yoruba, and Hausa, is a gruel made of cereal and milk that people eat, in particular, early in the morning during Ramadan. The word comes from the Arabic sahur, the predawn sweet dish eaten during the annual fast. In Mande languages as well as in Hausa, baba is a term of respect for a father or an older man. Throughout the West Indies, baba has retained this meaning and is used to designate a father, grandfather, or senior member of a household. Sari baba could thus refer to the giving of a rice dish associated with the Muslims to an elder, which is precisely what the West Indian saraka is meant to be. There is at least one other retention of the word sari among people who practiced sadaqa in the West: in Gullah terminology, it describes “boiled rice pounded.”34 Although other etymologies have been offered for sari baba, only one, by linguist Ousseina Alidou, seems valid. The expression could come from the Hausa tsari (protection) baba (father) and would mean a father’s protection.35
Saraka seems to be linked to what is generally referred to as the “cult of the ancestors,” but the connection is only indirect. As no such celebration exists in Islam, it is clear that the communities that perform these rituals would not have adopted the name as part and parcel of a Muslim ceremony. One explanation for the survival of the word is that the Muslims in Trinidad, Grenada, Carriacou, and other areas impressed the rest of the population with their almsgiving. Islamic precepts demand that sadaqah be given to the needy irrespective of religion, and it is probable that non-Muslims, too, were the recipients of the Muslims’ charity, which expresses itself in food, money, cloth, or whatever the donor can afford. In a situation of abject deprivation, the Muslims’ gesture would have created positive feelings and made a lasting impression on the community, which would have associated offerings with the Muslims. As the non-Muslims developed their own rites, they adopted the word—which was not connected with any particular ethnic group—to describe offerings. Since most offerings given by the followers of traditional religions are directed toward the ancestors or the deities, saraka in the Americas became identified with the “cult of the ancestors,” even though such a ritual is unknown in Islam. Another, explanation for the survival of the word is that the non-Muslims attributed a special strength to the offerings made by the Muslims. In Africa, the Bambara of Mali, for example, use the word sadaqah to describe offerings to their gods.36 They borrowed it from the Muslims, and just as they use the word bismillah (in the name of Allah) in their religious invocations, they attribute a special power to the word sadaqah, linked to the supposed effectiveness of the Muslim rituals.
Another connection between Islam and a non-Muslim ritual was observed at the end of the nineteenth century in Penedo in the state of Alagoas, Brazil, where a feast of the dead that took place twice a year contained numerous Islamic features. This particular ceremony, held by “Africans,” was preceded by a period of abstinence from meat, cereals, and alcohol. The male participants wore a white cap and white clothes, and the priest and his aides had garments “similar to the costume of the Sahara desert and the sands of Oman.”37 They spent the first night praying and reciting incantations. At dawn, they slaughtered sheep in the Muslim manner, by letting the animals bleed. The women, wearing head wraps and fabrics from Africa, placed food on the ground and under rocks for the departed souls who would come and eat during the night—an un-Islamic rite. The feast ended with music and dance for the community at large. The religious group, however, did not take part in this segment of the ceremony. What took place in Penedo was probably a common ritual involving Muslims and non-Muslims, with each group performing its part according to the precepts of its religion.
This association of Muslims and non-Muslims in a particular event meant to reinforce the cohesion of the community as a whole is evident in a festivity that took place on the Sea Islands, during slavery. Elderly men and women have described it as an important affair that marked harvesttime. Its function was to “thank for the crops”; it was a propitiatory rite as exists in most agricultural societies. Formerly enslaved men and women mentioned to the WPA that the festivity included prayers and dance, and that the celebration lasted all night. Though everyone agreed on this framework, some variations can be detected in the recollections of the respondents.
Rachel Anderson, whose great-grandmother was a Muslim, remembered that people did the shout all night, and at sunrise, they prayed and bowed low to the sun. Another descendant of Muslims, Rosa Grant, whose grandmother Ryna prayed three times a day and offered saraka, also said that they shouted all night, and at sunup they sang and prayed.38 Harvesttime for the Muslims appears to have been spent chanting all night, a widespread Muslim tradition, and to end with a prayer at sunrise as is customary in all Islamic celebrations.
People who were not associated with Islam gave a different version of the feast. Nero Jones of Sapelo Island remembered that they prayed and sang all night, and when the sun rose, they got out and danced. Hettie Campbell and Henry Williams of Saint Marys both said that the people shouted and sang all night and started to dance when the sun rose. Catherine Wing stated that they went to church with their first crop, prayed, and danced.39
The three versions of the same event attest that even though the community as a whole commemorated harvesttime, each group did so in its own way. The Christians went to church, the followers of traditional African religions celebrated with prayers and dances at daybreak, and the Muslims chanted and prayed to the east at sunrise. Despite differences in the celebrations, all shouted, a rite that may have been created by the Muslims and borrowed by the others. They may also have appropriated another Islamic feature: the First African Baptist Church on Sapelo Island is built so that the congregation prays turned toward the east.40 In addition, the dead are buried with their head to the west and their feet to the east, therefore “looking” east, a practice not restricted to the Sea Islands but found among other African American communities. Muslims bury their dead lying on the right side, their hands under their head, their eyes facing east. There is a possible Islamic retention or loan in the American practice, but east may also symbolize Africa, not Mecca.
An Islamic tradition that has survived the demise of the African Muslims and made its way into other communities is the talisman. In Cuba, the followers of the African-derived, or neo-African, religions wear leather or fabric pouches containing protections around their necks, along with Catholic medals. In Brazil, the mandingas worn by the Catholics are called patuas. Exactly like their Islamic counterparts, they consist of prayers and cabalistic signs written on a piece of paper that is inserted into a leather or cloth pouch.41 In both Cuba and Brazil, black and white Catholics influenced by the Muslims write prayers on pieces of paper that they glue to their windows or doors to protect their house from thieves.42 The Brazilian figa may also be linked to Islam. It is a small hand, worn around the neck to protect against evil spells. In Islamic numerology, the number 5 is of particular significance: it refers to the Five Pillars, the five prayers, and the five holy persons (Muhammad, Ali, Fatima, Hasan, and Useyn). Their names are often written on a talisman shaped like a hand with its five fingers, to protect the bearer from the evil eye.
African Islam has left traces in other ways. A Gullah song, for example, carries the memory of the saraka into the twentieth century:
Rice cake, rice cake
Sweet me so
Rice cake sweet me to my heart.43
It is, fittingly, a children’s song, since they were the beneficiaries of the Muslim women’s charity. Their Islamic gesture of goodwill and community spirit clearly made a lasting impression. Other songs in South America and the Caribbean also relate to the Muslims and Islam. The expression Salam ualekum appears in a song sung by the Peruvian blacks.44 Another song, part of the folklore of the black Peruvians of the coast, contains the words moce male, which, according to linguist Fernando Romero, could be a corruption of voce male, meaning “you are a malé [a Muslim]” in Portuguese.45 The song may have been brought to Peru by Africans sold by the Portuguese or by immigrant freed Africans.
Cuban Tapa or Nupe speakers sang in “languages” well into the 1950s, and being Muslims, they undoubtedly used Arabic terminology.46 Similarly, in Trinidad, informants interviewed for a research project in the 1960s were familiar with songs and phrases in a few African languages, including Arabic.47 Another research project has shown that prewedding songs collected from an eighty-two-year-old Hausa woman in Gasparillo, Trinidad, in the 1970s contain Arabic words.48
Arabic words and expressions appear in almost all songs the Muslims in Africa sing, including the nonreligious songs. Expressions such as La-ilaha ill-Allah Muhamadu rasul Allah (There is no God but God and Muhammad is his Messenger), Allahu Akbar (God is the Greatest), or “It is Allah’s will” are found routinely in Wolof, Tukulor, Hausa, Mandingo, and Fulbe songs of praise or love and in historical pieces. These songs were transported to the Americas and sung on the plantations, just as other songs from other cultures were remembered and kept alive.
Besides these secular songs, Muslims have a repertoire of religious songs and recitations from the Qur’an, consisting of the chanting of the surahs. Both the secular and religious genres constitute an important part of the musical creations of West African Muslims.
Islamic-influenced music is quite distinctive. The traits that distinguish it are found in the call to prayer, which the muezzin sings five times a day, every day of the year. It is a simple melody with long, decorated, swooping notes. Musical recitations of the Qur’an have the same characteristics and use falsetto, trembling of the voice, and pauses. This style has influenced the traditional music of West African Muslims, who have incorporated these techniques and the melodic element particular to Islamic music into their creations. Naturally, much cross-pollination has occurred between the music of West and of North Africa: free and enslaved sub-Saharan Africans lived among the Arab and Berber populations of the Maghreb, and their musicians were particularly valued. The music of the Maghreb has thus been influenced by the music of sub-Saharan Africa, and this new type of music in turn went south of the desert to be absorbed by the Muslim populations, who brought it with them to the New World.
Music, which is viewed as a means to bring an individual or a group closer to God, is an integral part of Sufi life, following the injunction of the Hadith: “Adorn the Qur’an with your voices.” The members of the Sufi orders routinely chant the Qur’an and religious hymns in a group during secular ceremonies and religious feasts, funerals, holy days, pilgrimages, and at night during Ramadan. Sufi dhikr, in contrast, are always performed solo. Supplications are also a genre, consisting of prayers chanted in an emotional way. Another genre is the high art of tilawat, the musical recitation of the Qur’an, performed by specialists who follow strict rules of pronunciation and intonation and always chant solo.
The music of the African Muslims in the Americas was markedly different from the musical styles carried over by the non-Muslims, with their strong reliance on rapid drumming, polyrhythm, call and response, group singing, and short melodic lines. In contrast, the typical song coming from the Sahel was a solo, moaning kind of song that blues expert Alan Lomax called a “high lonesome complaint.”49 George Washington Cable, whose description of Congo Square in nineteenth-century New Orleans has remained famous, had already noted this singularity. As he was strolling the square, he spotted a girl, tall and straight, “a Yaloff [Wolof]. You see it in her almost Hindoo features, and hear it in the plaintive melody of her voice.”50
The ornamented, unaccompanied, lonesome complaint is, according to Lomax, emblematic of the kingdoms and empires where absolute power reigns. It is found, among other places, in the Middle East, the Mediterranean, North Africa, and Islamic West Africa. The American South, Mississippi in particular, having a long tradition of absolute tyranny, was fertile ground for the blossoming of the style. Other musicologists have seen in the Islamic-influenced music of the West Africans the origin of the quintessential African American musical creation: the blues.51
Blues expert Samuel Charters recalls in his study The Roots of the Blues: An African Search that when blues was first introduced to European audiences, comments were made about similarities between this African American music and Gypsy flamenco music from Spain. Flamenco certainly did not influence the blues; but when the musicologist listened to Muslim Mandingo musicians in the Gambia, it became clear to him “that the West African musicians had already been influenced by Arabic music just as gypsy singers and instrumentalists had been along the Mediterranean. The influence hadn’t come from the Gypsies to the Mississippi blues men. There had been earlier Arabic music that had influenced them both.”52
In the American South, even though Africans from Senegambia and the rest of the Islamic belt were outnumbered by men and women from the forest area, their music had a better chance than that of other Africans of being preserved. Because drums were outlawed in the South following the Kongo uprising of 1739 in Stono, South Carolina, musicians who traditionally relied less on them and more on string and wind instruments were at an advantage. Moreover, as musicologist Paul Oliver points out, the slaveholders used these musicians, who could easily adapt to fiddles and guitars, in their own balls, so they could continue to exercise their talents openly.53 They were usually exempted from work in the fields and had time and the necessary instruments to continue developing their skills. Drummers and percussionists, in contrast, had few opportunities to keep in practice. Sahelian Islamic-influenced music, through its musicians and their knowledge of string instruments, thus had a good chance to survive in the South.
A close study of the musical particularities of the blues confirms the hypothesis of an African Islamic-derived music. The string-playing techniques of the savanna are similar to the techniques used by blues guitarists. The kora, a twenty-one-string harp, the Mandingo instrument par excellence, is “played in a rhythmic-melodic style that uses constantly changing rhythms, often providing a ground bass overlaid with complex treble patterns, while vocal supplies a third rhythmic layer,” states musicologist John Storm Roberts, who concludes that “similar techniques can be found in hundreds of blues records.”54 The same holds true for the vocals. The “long, blending and swooping notes” of the blues, explains Roberts, are “similar to the Islam-influenced styles of much of West Africa.”55 In addition, the “bending of notes”—which produces quarter tones at the third, fifth, and seventh of the scale—a major feature of vocal blues, is another characteristic of Islamic-influenced music, as is producing a note slightly under pitch, breaking into a vibrato, or letting the note trail off and finishing it above what is expected. These techniques used in the blues are present, notes Roberts, “in Islamic African music and hardly at all in other styles.”56 Melisma, or singing one syllable over several notes, commonly used in the Islamic world, is also widespread in the blues.
Complete songs seem to have been transported from one side of the Atlantic Ocean to the other. The holler “Tangle Eyes,” for instance, has been found to have a match in Senegal. “As one listens to this musical union,” stressed Alan Lomax, “spanning thousands of miles and hundreds of years, the conviction grows that Tangle Eye’s forebears must have come from Senegal bringing this song style with them.”57 One basis for this “song style” is the recitation of the Qur’an, an art form in itself. An incident that occurred in Sierra Leone in the eighteenth century may well describe what ultimately participated in the birth of the blues. In the slave yard on the coast was a Muslim man of thirty-five years, who could read and write Arabic. He was in irons, awaiting departure, and “sometimes he would sing a melancholy song, then he would utter an earnest prayer.”58 The melancholy song was in all probability the recitation of the Qur’an. Muslims like him would sing in the same manner, time and again, on the plantations of the South, and their lonesome “song” probably became one ancestor of the blues.
Even an untrained ear can recognize the similarities that exist between the blues and Islamic-influenced West African music; but parallels are as strong between the hollers that preceded the early blues and the adhan, the call to prayer, an area that has not been explored by musicologists. Contrary to the participatory work song, with its call and response, the field holler was always sung solo. It was thus described by traveler and author Frederick Law Olmsted, who in 1853 heard a man in South Carolina raising a “long, loud, musical shout, rising and falling and breaking into falsetto his voice ringing through the woods in the clear, frosty night air, like a bugle call.”59 The holler, as Oliver explained, “replaced the group work song, and became in the process a constituent of the blues.”60 Like the call to prayer, the holler is characterized by the use of melisma, a declamatory style, and a simple melody. To non-Muslims the adhan would have sounded just like another song.
Perhaps the perfect example of the similarities between the call to prayer and the holler can be found in a recording from a penitentiary in Mississippi, made by Alan Lomax. The cut “Levee Camp Holler” is almost an exact match to the adhan “sung” by a West African muezzin: it features the same ornamented notes, elongated syllables sung with wavy intonations, melisma, and pauses. When both pieces are juxtaposed, it is hard to distinguish when the call to prayer ends and the holler starts.
With time, Africans from non-Muslim areas, and people born in the United States, became familiar with and used the styles brought by the Muslims, adding their own mark. Still, as musicologist and blues expert Gerhard Kubik emphasizes, “most of the blues tradition in the rural areas of Mississippi has prevailed as a recognizable extension in the New World of a west central Sudanic style cluster.”61 It is one of the most familiar but also the most hidden and forgotten contributions of African Muslims to American culture.
Although they have left a mark on the religious and cultural landscape of the Americas, the Muslims for the most part have disappeared from collective consciousness and have been overlooked by scholarly research. An obvious reason may be that Islam and the African Muslims died out, and having thus completely disappeared from sight, they also disappeared from awareness. In the British and French possessions, the last African Muslims must have passed away in the 1880s or 1890s, and the indentured laborers shortly thereafter. In the United States, Brazil, and Cuba—where the slave trade (legal and illegal) and slavery lasted longer—the last Muslims probably disappeared between 1920 and 1930. The followers of Vodun, Santeria, and Candomble, in contrast, still exist, and their religions therefore cannot be forgotten.
The decades after Emancipation were difficult times for the newly free population, who had to adapt to new and disappointing circumstances after the euphoria that freedom brought, while trying to fit in a larger society that looked down on them, their history, and their customs and that ultimately rejected them often violently. In the United States, descendants of Muslims who could have kept their memory alive were engaged in mainstream religions that had little tolerance for other faiths. Their forefathers’ religion seems to have been of no relevance or particular significance to them. In addition, there are indications, if the Sea Islands are taken as an example, that these descendants related their family’s religion to sun and moon worship, because the Muslims prayed at sunrise and sundown. A determination to distance oneself from “primitive” African practices, a lack of understanding and knowledge, a desire to conform, and fear of retribution from the Christian establishment all may explain why the Muslims’ descendants remained silent about the religion of their parents and grandparents.
In the United States, this silence of the “humble” was paralleled by the silence of the elite. Some famous African Americans may have been the descendants of Muslims, but none ever claimed such a filiation. Martin Robison Delany, a Harvard-educated physician, the first black major in the U.S. Army, an abolitionist, and a black nationalist, was the grandson, through his mother, of a man who has been described as an African “captured when young, during hostilities between the Mandingoes, Fellatahs [Fulani], and Houssa,” and a Mandingo grandmother.62 As the three groups cited were Muslims, it would seem probable that Delany’s grandfather was indeed Muslim. His name, however, was not Mandingo, Fulbe nor Hausa: he was called Shango, like the Yoruba orisha. Delany’s grandmother said she was born near a “great river called Yolla Ba.”63 It is evidently the Niger, or the Djoliba (great blood), as the Mande people—and not the Yoruba—call it. To complicate matters, she used to sing a song whose first verse was oja batta batta, or “the rain falls down,” but the language is Yoruba (ojo kata kata).64 Her name, Graci, is neither Mandingo nor Yoruba. Thus evidence suggests that Delany’s maternal grandfather was Yoruba, and not Mandingo, and that his grandmother was either a Mandingo whose family settled among the Yoruba or a mixed Yoruba-Mandingo. From the available information, it is difficult to assess what their religion was.
In Haiti, Brazil, Jamaica, and Trinidad, the Muslims and Islam were integrated into the religious life of the black population just as any other African religions were. They were not accorded a special status but were not forgotten either; they just became another component of the religious and social world. Whereas in the United States the Muslims’ lack of visibility developed from omission, in the rest of the Americas it stemmed from their being taken for granted. Yet the memory of the Muslims has lingered on in some of these areas, and some families can still trace their origins to a particular Muslim ancestor or population. There are families in Colombia and Cuba, for example, whose last name is Mandingo, Mandinga, or Mina. There seems to be only one such case in the United States: in southwestern Louisiana, a Creole family bears the name Senegal and evidently had ancestors who were Tukulor or Wolof—and thus may have been Muslims—shipped from Saint-Louis in northern Senegal.
In contrast to the remnants of Islam in religions in Latin America and the Caribbean, there is no evidence in the United States of any Islamic continuity in the twentieth century. Though there were still Muslims and their children alive in the early 1900s, and though African American Muslims today represent a quarter of the American Muslim population, no hard evidence so far shows any direct connection between the two groups.
The emergence of twentieth-century Islam among African Americans can be traced to 1913.65 That year, Timothy Drew, who was born in 1886 in North Carolina, took the name Noble Drew Ali and founded the Moorish Holy Temple of Science in Newark, New Jersey. He recruited mostly among recent immigrants from the South in Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Chicago. Little is known about the man and how he acquired some notions of Islam. He is said to have worked in a circus with a “Hindu fakir” and, given the success of the show, may have decided to start his own order, which was a mixture of beliefs drawn from systems ranging from Freemasonry to Buddhism to Islam.
Noble Drew Ali’s teachings were essentially the basis of a black nationalist movement that extolled black pride and a sense of confidence by linking a disfranchised, humiliated, and exploited people to the conquering and cultured Moors of the Middle Ages. He portrayed himself as a prophet ordained by Allah. The claim was in total opposition to a crucial tenet of Islam, which considers Muhammad the last prophet. Ali, who also called himself Mohammed III, wrote a sixty-four-page Qur’an. Such a creation, as well as his assertion that before a people can have a God, it must have a nationality, ran contrary to the most basic beliefs of Islam. He died in 1929 in unclear circumstances, as his movement was suffering serious internal strife that had led to the killing of one of its leaders. The few African Muslims who were still living in the early years of his movement would not have recognized what Noble Drew Ali presented as Islam.
The Ahmadiyah movement, founded in India by Mizra Ghulam Ahmad in the last decade of the nineteenth century, sent missionaries to the United States in 1920. After having tried in vain to convert white Americans, they concentrated their efforts on the black community. Many of their recruits were nationalists and Garveyites.
The Ahmadiyah probably influenced the founder of the Nation of Islam, Farad Mohammed, also known as F. Mohammed Ali, Wallace D. Fard, Waly Fard, Wally Farad, and W. D. Fard. His origin has remained unknown. He claimed to have come from Saudi Arabia and to have been a descendant of Muhammad. However, some believed he was a Syrian Druze, an Iranian, or a Turk. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the police suspected he was born in Portland, Oregon, or in New Zealand, from British and Polynesian parents.66 Having served three years in San Quentin Prison for drug dealing, Fard first made his appearance in the black community of Detroit in the summer of 1931, as a silk peddler. While selling his wares, he preached to the Southern immigrants what he presented as Islam and sold them his books, The Secret Ritual of the Nation of Islam and Teaching for the Lost-Found Nation of Islam in a Mathematical Way. After he disappeared—quite literally, as nothing is known of his whereabouts—in 1934, Elijah Muhammad, his trusted lieutenant since 1931, succeeded him. The new leader had been born Elijah Poole in 1897 in Sandersville, Georgia. Fard had claimed that he was God and Elijah Muhammad was his prophet.
According to Islam, nothing is more unforgivable and heinous than shirk, the association of others—such as Fard—with the worship of God. Likewise, to believe that other prophets—such as Noble Drew Ali and Elijah Muhammad—follow Muhammad cannot be reconciled with orthodox Islam. These affirmations are not differences of interpretation; they are contrary to the most fundamental teachings of the religion. For that reason, it is improbable that the last African Muslims would have been involved in these organizations. There is no documented continuity between the Islam brought by the African Muslims and the early twentieth-century movements that claimed to be Islamic. Neither Noble Drew Ali nor Elijah Muhammad mentioned that he was an heir to an Islamic tradition passed on by his parents or grandparents; in fact, Muhammad’s father, William, was a Baptist preacher. For their part, the religions of the West Indies and Latin America that incorporated Islamic elements taken from the African Muslims are not and never claimed to be Islamic. In contrast, religious movements in the United States that mixed some Islamic tenets with elements drawn from other philosophies, some of which were in opposition to orthodox Islam, were proclaimed by their founders to be Islamic, thereby calling upon themselves the label of heresy and, by the same token, demonstrating that they are not part of the heritage left by the African Muslims. Yet from a basis of heterodoxy, according to some, or heresy, according to others, one widespread orthodox movement has emerged over the years. The United States, where the concentration of African Muslims seems to have been the largest in the Americas but where the consciousness of a Muslim past is quasi-nonexistent, is also a country where Islam is the fastest-growing religion among African Americans. Interestingly, some manifestations of Islam continue to live, on a personal level, in the memory of a few Muslims’ descendants. Some African Americans remember that their southern grandparents or great-grandparents instructed them to wash their feet before praying. Among them, Cornelia Walker Bailey, a descendant of Bilali Mohamed of Sapelo Island, recalled, “We were brought up to wash our feet before we said our prayers and went to bed and … in Papa’s time, when people walked to church, they carried their shoes to keep them clean and when they got to the church the first thing they did was wash their feet and put their shoes on. They did not enter the church with dirty feet.”67 Much later in life Bailey linked this habit to the Muslims’ ablutions. The memory was there, but the ritual had been transformed. Muslims do not wear shoes in mosque, and since Christians do in their places of worship, the people of Sapelo acted in accordance with their religion but still kept in mind the principles (clean feet) learned by observing their Muslim forebears.
Other indications exist of hidden Islamic rituals and traditions inherited from earlier times. The oldest member of New York’s black Hebrew community, who was born on the island of Montserrat in 1904, mentioned that in the place she grew up in people did not eat pork or carrion but only animals that they killed themselves by cutting their throats and letting the blood drip. She also affirmed that men were circumcised. After she moved to New York and worked as a domestic for a Jewish family, she established a connection between her culture and Judaism and “reverted.”68 It is more plausible that her people were Muslims, who indeed are circumcised, follow the Qur’anic injunction “Forbidden to you are: dead meat (carrion), blood, the flesh of swine” (5:3), and bleed their animals to death.
Islam in the Americas has been the religion of some people of African origin in an almost uninterrupted manner for the past five hundred years. Through the determination of its enslaved practitioners, the religion took hold in the New World and was actively practiced.
Over the course of many centuries, African Muslim men and women wrote a story of faith, fortitude, and fidelity to their culture, religion, and social values. Their achievements are not a proof that slavery in the Americas was somewhat lenient and accommodating. If the Muslims succeeded in establishing far-ranging networks, forming strong communities, maintaining their intellectual stamina, and preserving their dignity and identity, they owed it to their solid sense of self, cultural self-confidence, organizational skills, discipline, frugality, and strong communality. They took advantage of whatever avenues they could find and used the contradictions and the cracks in the slave system to their benefit.
Although part of the African Muslims’ legacy is tangible, much cannot be counted. Yet the intangible is probably the most inspiring. They pursued education at all costs, rejected limited and justifiable self-indulgence as a hindrance to advancement, insisted on preserving their physical integrity even in abject circumstances, and strove to retain their identity in order to survive. While they were working inside as well as outside the system that exploited and attempted to dehumanize them, they also worked against it. The Muslims were the first to rebel; they played a role in the only successful slave revolution and organized and led the most threatening uprising in Brazil. Though individuals of different persuasions attained similar results, the Muslims were the only group that consistently, on a large scale, pursued these objectives with tenacity and achieved a high degree of success.
Their story also unveils some truths that have not been acknowledged. Much too often, the enslaved Africans are presented as uneducated peasants by some, kings and queens by others, and culturally “pristine” by all. The intellectual dimension of the deported populations is never taken into consideration. Yet the story of the African Muslims shows that there were school children, high-level students, scribes, scholars, poets, lawyers, judges, and teachers among the people who toiled on the plantations. What they brought to the West was an authentic African culture that had absorbed a number of foreign elements over the course of many centuries and had, in turn, influenced the neighboring cultures in several ways. They also brought a passion for knowledge and self-improvement and a hunger for social and cultural respectability.
The African Muslims made decisions, exercised choices. They shaped their own world, re-created their culture as best they could. By the same token, they did not participate in the creolization process that commingled components of diverse African cultures and faiths with that of the slaveholders. By their dress, diet, names, rituals, schools, and imported religious items and books, they clearly indicated that they intended to remain who they had been in Africa—be it emir, teacher, marabout, alfa, charno, imam, or simply believer. Their education, social background, family history, personal choices, social connections, political convictions, and religious beliefs did not become irrelevant in the New World; on the contrary, they shaped their response to enslavement, defining how the Muslims lived it and reacted to it. The people they had been in Africa determined the people they were in the Americas.
The Middle Passage and enslavement were not an equalizing process that regurgitated a mass of men, women, and children with a set of similar attitudes and behaviors intended to help survival. Besides the realities of American slavery, the personal stories of the Africans, their ethno-cultural backgrounds, their religions, and how and why they were deported constituted major criteria that defined and conditioned their new existence. There is little doubt that a teacher of Arabic grammar who had traveled to Egypt and Arabia and had made a conscious decision to participate in a religious war, whatever the outcome, responded differently to his enslavement than did a young man who had already been enslaved by somebody from another ethnic group in Africa, who was cut off from his religion, and who ultimately had been kidnapped for the American plantations on his way to the fields. The two men would have had different reactions to issues of adaptation, acculturation, conversion, identity, and preservation or re-creation of a beloved past.
To understand the communities of the African Diaspora, therefore, it is essential to search for the African story of the uprooted men and women who peopled the Americas, as evidenced by the study of the Muslims. To recognize the African Muslims and to delineate their contribution is indispensable if one is to make sense of some of the unexplained features of the cultures of the people of African descent in the New World.
Turbaned men and veiled women, their prayer beads around their necks, chopped cotton, cut cane, and rolled tobacco from sunup to sundown. Like other slaves, they were beaten, whipped, cursed, raped, maimed, and humiliated. They saw their families torn apart and their loved ones killed. In the midst of abuse and contempt, they continued to pray, fast, be charitable, read, write, help one another, sing their lonesome tunes, and display pride in themselves, their religion, and their culture.
The African Muslims may have been, in the Americas, the slaves of Christian masters, but their minds were free. They were the servants of Allah.