Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas

1 African Muslims, Christian Europeans, and the Transatlantic Slave Trade

20 > 21 the Muslims became known as Malé, or people coming from Mali—in the fourteenth century.1 In contrast to its arrival in North Africa, where it had been brought by the invading Arabs, the spread of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa followed a mostly peaceful and unobtrusive path. Religious wars or jihad, came late—in the eighteenth and especially the nineteenth century— and Islam was diffused not by outsiders (except in the early years) but by indigenous traders, clerics, and rulers. These carriers of the faith were natives and therefore identified culturally and socially as well as ethnically with the potential converts. Some fundamental features of traditional religions and customs, such as the ritual immolation of animals, circumcision, polygamy, communal prayers, divination, and amulet making, also were present in Islam. Such affinities facilitated conversion as well as accommodation and tolerance of others’ rituals and beliefs. Africans themselves considered Islam an African religion. Islam and Islamic populations quickly became an integral part of the West African landscape; but Islam was not the religion of the majority, and its followers coexisted with non-Muslims. Some Muslim rulers governed largely non-Muslim populations, while polytheist kings often had Muslim subjects. Muslim minorities could be found in practically every town, Muslim majorities in many. Islam was initially the religion of traders and rulers, but depending on the time and place, it also became the religion of the masses in opposition to their “pagan” leaders. As with any religion, Islam in Africa had a variety of followers—the devout, the sincere, the casual believers, the fundamentalists, the lightly touched, and the mystics. Starting in the fifteenth century, Islam in West Africa gradually became associated with the Sufi orders. The Sufis stress the personal dimension of the relationship between Allah and man, as embodied in surah 2:115: “Wherever you turn, there is Allah’s Face.” They emphasize rituals and devotional practices such as the recitation of the Qur’an, incantations (dhikr), music to attain spiritual ecstasy (sama), meditation , acts of devotion, asceticism, retreats (khalwa), and fasting as techniques to get closer to God. Their leaders offer a mystic path (tariqah) to 22 > 23 introduced new ideas, perspectives, and goods, the Muslims were the catalysts of change and modernization in West Africa. Literacy among African Muslims One invaluable innovation these Muslims brought, which would later be important to the Muslims of the New World, was literacy. Islam emphasizes literacy, though Muhammad himself could not read or write, and the Qur’an is very explicit about the need to study. The second surah, “The Heifer,” states: “Those to whom We have given the Book study it as it should be studied” (v. 121). In West Africa, literacy and the spread of Islam went hand in hand, as John Hunwick stresses: Wherever Islam spread encouragement was given to the learning of Arabic and to the foundation of both small schools for teaching the reading of the Koran and higher schools for deeper study of the Arabic language and the literature of Muslim peoples—more especially the theological and legal literature which was to form the basis of both the spiritual and temporal life of the new converts. Once established in an area as the language of the religion, Arabic was soon put to other more worldly ends, for purposes of trade, politics and family records.3 Literacy in Arabic is of primary importance in Islam, because believers rely on the Qur’an not only to understand the religion but also to guide them in their daily life, to provide them with the right prayers for different circumstances, and to instruct them on legal matters and proper social behavior. Contrary to the norm in Europe at the time, both peasants and girls were taught how to read and write. Concerning female literacy, French slave dealer Theophilus Conneau mentioned in his memoirs that while he was visiting the region of Timbo (Guinea), at the beginning of the nineteenth century, he saw “many elderly females . . . soon in the morning and late at evening, reading the Koran.”4 Lamine Kebe, 24 > 25 learning. It is telling that European visitors were quite surprised by the number of schools in West Africa compared to the norm in their own countries. Mungo Park, for example, noted that the Fulani of Bundu in Senegal had established little schools in every city. A director of the French trading company, La Compagnie du S...