Islam in Early America
Stolen from Africa, brought to America
Certain unpleasant folk like to create the impression that Islam is an alien presence in the United States. In fact, there have been Muslims in America since the earliest days of European settlement, and though we don’t have hard data on the number of practitioners, it was probably the 2nd largest religion in the US from the time of independence until the early/mid-19th century. So this week, let's shine a light on the story of these American Muslims who have been completely ignored in most American history curriculums:
Some of the first Muslims in America came with the Spanish explorers. Christian Spain had only recently concluded their reconquest of the Iberian peninsula when the voyages of exploration began, and some of the Spanish crews who explored North America were converted Muslims. One of the first we know about was a baptized slave named Estevanico, he was described by the Spanish as an Arabic-speaking man originally from Morocco. Estevanico was shipwrecked on the coast of Texas in 1528. He and the other shipwreck survivors spent years wandering through the American interior, only reaching Mexico City in 1536. We only know about Estevanico from a second-hand account, but if his baptism was just a perfunctory ceremony (often the case for Spanish and Portuguese slaves), it is possible that he was the first ever Muslim to set foot on the continent of North America, decades before the English settled there.
Muslims in early America did not come here willingly: almost all of them were African slaves. Circa 1770-1810 there was a series of major wars between expansionist Muslim states and non-Muslim kingdoms in West Africa, these wars generated large numbers of captives who were sold into slavery and sent across the Atlantic. One historian estimates that about half the slaves imported to America came from regions where Islam was prevalent. There are no exact numbers here, they didn’t do surveys of people as they were being dragged onto the slave ships, but the best estimate is that tens of thousands of the approximately 400,000 total slaves taken to America were Muslims.
Slave owners were typically not interested in the culture of their slaves, which they invariably dismissed as primitive. Sociology and academic anthropology developed later in the 19th century after slavery ended, so there was never any contemporary effort to methodically survey the cultures or religious beliefs of American slaves. As far as the historical record goes, we’re left with slave memoirs (representing an infinitesimally small fraction of the enslaved), various notices like newspaper advertisements for runaways, and the chance observations of white Americans who took notice of individual Muslim slaves. But from what we can piece together, Muslims were quite common in early America.
If a slave ran away, the slaveowner usually put a notice in the newspaper describing them and offering a reward for their return. We can tell from some of these advertisements that the slaves in question were probably Muslims, like one 1805 advertisement that described a man “of grave countenance who writes the Arabic language”. Names from other colonial-era runaway slave advertisements include Mustapha, Mamadou, Muhammad, Musa, Ahmad, Ibrahim, Wali, & Fatima, all of which are Muslim names. In the records of Revolutionary War soldiers, there are several Arabic names such as Bampett Muhamed, Yusuf ben Ali, and Joseph Saba. There are a couple of others that may indicate Arabic-speakers such as Peter Salem and Salem Poor (“salaam” in Arabic means “peace”). We know very little about the lives of these individuals, but they seem to be the free descendants of African slaves living in Northern states who fought for American independence.
1786 South Carolina runaway slave advertisement for a “likely wench” named Fatima, almost certainly a Muslim name.* Fatima was “country born”: born in America, indicating that some Muslim slaves passed on Islamic traditions to their American-born children.
A few people who escaped from slavery wrote books about their experiences, which provide an insider view of the culture of slaves. Charles Ball, one such escapee, wrote in his 1837 memoir that he met people “who must have been, from what I have since learned, Mohamedans; though at that time, I had never heard of the religion of Mohamed,” including “one man on this plantation, who prayed five times every day, always turning his face to the east, when in the performance of his devotion.” Again, these are just Ball’s observations and not precise census-type data, but these recollections show that Islam was being practiced on American plantations.
Some notable Muslim slaves caught the attention of outsiders. Ayuba Suleiman Diallo was an educated Muslim from an aristocratic family in Senegal who was kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1730. In Maryland, he ran away but was recaptured, he spoke no English and his captors had trouble understanding him, but a passing lawyer happened to take an interest in him: “Upon our Talking and making Signs to him, he wrote a Line or two before us, and when he read it, pronounced the Words Allah and Mahommed; by which, and his refusing a Glass of Wine we offered him, we perceived he was a Mahometan.” Diallo’s case elicited sympathy among well-connected Englishmen who bought his freedom and sent him to London, and eventually he returned to his homeland. It’s interesting to consider that the story of a well-educated slave from an aristocratic background would move people to sympathize with him, while thousands of his countrymen toiling in the fields were ignored.
Portrait of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, National Portrait Gallery, London
There is another account of two Muslim men from the early 19th century whose descendants we can trace to modern times. Salih Bilali and Bilali Mohammed lived on neighboring plantations on the coast of Georgia. The two men were from the same ethnic group, so they spoke the same language and were apparently close friends. Salih Bilali, according to the plantation owner, “reads Arabic, and has a Koran (which however, I have not seen) in that language,” and Bilali Mohammed was, “buried with his Koran and praying sheep skin.” Since slaves didn’t exactly have access to Amazon to buy books, it’s an intriguing question as to where they obtained these Qurans. In England, Diallo, the aristocratic slave from Senegal, is said to have copied out the Quran in Arabic from memory. There’s a longstanding Islamic tradition of memorizing the entire holy book, and the honorific “Hafiz” is applied to people who are able to perform this remarkable feat of memorization. Diallo was clearly a Hafiz, and presumably there were others we don’t know about who were brought to America. When you consider that - almost universally - slaves were stripped naked prior to transport and not allowed any personal belongings on the slave ships, it seems logical that these American-made Qurans were written out by Hafiz slaves.
Manuscript written by Bilali Mohammed (not a Quran, but containing some Quranic verses)
Both Salih Bilali and Bilali Mohammed were given supervisory roles on their plantations. When Georgia was threatened with invasion during the War of 1812, Bilali Mohammed was given weapons by the plantation owner and tasked with defending the area. He told the slaveowner he would do so, saying, “I will answer for every Negro of the true faith, but not for the Christian dogs you own.” This seems to imply there was a larger group of Muslims in coastal Georgia than the two people we know about by name, and they viewed themselves as a distinct community in contrast to non-Muslim slaves.
During the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration sent writers to interview survivors of slavery (the last verified person born into slavery died in 1972. The past is not as distant as we think) and their descendants who could remember enslaved parents and grandparents. In Georgia, they spoke with Ben Sullivan, age 88, who was the grandson of Salih Bilali. Sullivan, who had been born into slavery, remembered other enslaved people who used Islamic prayer mats and a man who “prayed with a book he have what he hide”, probably a Quran. Another descendent of Bilali Mohammed interviewed for the project remembered that her grandmother used to “pray on the bead,” and that “they was very particular about the time they pray and very regular about the hour…they bow to the sun and have a little mat to kneel on.” Another descendant of slaves on the Georgia coast remembered that for her grandmother, “Friday was the day she called her prayer day.” All of these anecdotes indicate that Islam had survived long enough that people in the 1930s still remembered traces of it from their own lifetimes.
We don’t know how long Islam persisted in America after the original generations brought from Africa passed away. It would have been very challenging for people to practice the requirements of their religion under the restrictions of slavery. Copies of the Quran would have been very rare, it would have been extremely difficult to provide a traditional Islamic education for the younger generations, and adhering to Islamic dietary requirements would have been a serious challenge. Without a coherent community to pass these practices on, it seems like the descendants of Muslim slaves eventually converted to Christianity: the people interviewed in Georgia in the 1930s were not Muslims themselves. But these interviews do confirm that Islam was practiced for several generations after the original ancestors were brought to America.
It's often assumed that slaveowners were diligent in converting their slaves to Christianity right from the get-go, but this is not actually the case. Writers in the colonial period observed that most slaveholders didn’t bother trying to convert their slaves, and many whites in the colonial era South were not particularly devout. In 1779 an observer who had spent time among slaves in Georgia & South Carolina wrote that the slaves “are to this day as great strangers to Christianity and as much under the influence of Pagan darkness, idolatry and superstition, as they were at their first arrival from Africa.” Most Euro-Americans would have considered Islam as part of this “darkness, idolatry, and superstition.” Charles Ball, the escaped slave who wrote about his life, described the state of slave religion in the early 19th century: “Christianity cannot be, with propriety, called the religion of these people…They have not the slightest religious regard for the Sabbath-day, and their masters make no efforts to impress them with the least respect for this sacred institution.”
People who have studied this subject believe that free people of color living in cities and house slaves who had the most contact with whites were the earliest converts to Christianity. The majority who worked in the fields continued to speak their own languages and practice their traditional religion, but since most documentation we have from this time was written by whites, there's a large gap in our historical knowledge. Many aspects of slave life occurred away from the gaze of white observers and was thus not written about. It was only Nat Turner’s religiously-inspired slave revolt in 1831 that made whites take notice of slave religion and attempt to control it. There was an increased focus at this time on attempting to convert slaves to a form of Christianity that taught obedience to masters as a key tenet. As a mass-movement, the Black Church started in Northern cities and arrived rather late in the rural South.
Historians have moved on from the earlier point of view that saw African culture as primitive and not worth studying. More people are now investigating the persistence of African languages, religions, and culture in American life, but as mentioned above, there are huge gaps in our knowledge due to lack of documentation. Most of the people who practiced Islam during slavery did so away from the prying eyes of slaveowners, and they never had the chance to write about their life, so much of the story has been lost. We have a few stories of individuals like Salih Bilali and Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, but there’s precious little of that material. From what we can tease out from the historical material, we know that these documented individuals were really the tip of the iceberg. The story of Islam in America was ignored or treated as a minor curiosity for a long time, but now we have a better understanding that Muslims have been here since the beginning.
If you have a question or topic you want me to write about next, email distilledhistory@substack.com
Further reading:
This was a really interesting subject, thanks for writing about it!