Resurrecting Islam

Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas, by Sylviane A. Diouf. New York, NY: New York University Press, 1998. 254 pp. $20.

This past weekend I participated in an akika, a naming ceremony for the newborn child of a Muslim family. This family, like so many in the United States, is ethnically mixed: the mother is American and the father is Senegalese. As the ceremony progressed, the guests acclimated to the many languages that were being spoken and to the explanations that had to be provided for each aspect of the akika. Everyone's understanding of the application of this aspect of Islam was being enhanced. The father recited the Quran and made dhikr over his son, the Muslim call to prayer (adhan) was made in one ear and the takbeer (God is Great!) recited in the other. A friend of the father shaved and collected the baby's hair (its weight in silver would be given as charity [sadaqa] to the poor by the parents), the father sacrificed two sheep and a family friend from Egypt helped cook the meat. I was given the honor of holding the baby, little Muhammad Al-Mustafa, while his head was shaved. I cried as I contemplated the significance of the occasion. We were practicing our Islam in North America. We were the answer to the prayer of the slave.

Over eleven million Africans were forcibly transported to the Americas in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, deprived of their human rights, and severed from their traditional familial and cultural ties. How did these Africans survive, retain their humanity, and manage to transmit parts of their cultural heritage to future generations? Most historical reports on this tragic period gloss over the unique responses of African Muslims enslaved in the Western hemisphere. Too frequently, their voices are muted, their stories untold. Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas by Sylviane A. Diouf addresses the struggles of these early Muslims in America given the political and cultural constrictions that rigidly defined their lives in the Western hemisphere. Diouf provides a historically balanced exploration of the religious and political-economic relationships of African Muslims, Christian Europeans, and the Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans. Her book is unique in that, unlike most texts on the subject, it tracks the evolution of the African Muslim into the African American, from the perspective of the African Muslim, and then makes the connection with contemporary American Muslims.

Servants of Allah is organized into six chapters with additional notes, selected bibliography, index, and brief information about the author. The book presents the central topic, African Muslims enslaved in the Americas, as an understudied aspect of American, African, and Islamic histories. Diouf then goes on to discuss the status of African Muslims just before and continuing through the height of the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans. She also explores the interrelationships of African Muslims with non-Muslim Africans and with Christian Europeans. In laying the foundations for later discussions of the transformation of Islam in the Americas, she identifies the various scenarios on the African continent that contributed to the capture and export of immense numbers of Africans, many of them Muslims, to the Americas. We learn of the diversity among these Muslims: some were scholars of the Islamic sciences, others were more recent converts to Islam. Many had memorized the Quran and had already made the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca before being subjected to bondage. Many had fought in the wars of jihad against enslaving non-Muslim African tribes. Others were themselves enslavers. Most were either active or passive victims of the many African wars that spread in the wake of economic disruption, political insecurity, demographic relocation, and physical enslavement.

Diouf skillfully reconstructs the major challenges faced by these African Muslims. First, we travel with these captive prisoners across the transatlantic Middle Passage, on crowded, dank, and disease-infested slave ships. We then track them as they struggle with the restrictive options of the New World upon...