Muslims of Early America
This theme presents an overview of the early presence of Muslims in North America. While the focus is often on Africans who are victims of the transatlantic slave trade, these individual profiles describe multiple other ways that Muslims arrived here. These articles and profiles use credible records and artifacts of Islamic practice among early Muslims, from the years of Spanish exploration in the Caribbean (1530-1625), the colonial period in the American South (1619 to 1775), the Revolutionary War (1776-1812) and beyond, extending into the Antebellum (1820-1859), Civil War (1861-65) and Post-Civil War periods of 19th-century America.
The topics of discussion include: 1) the legacy of Sapelo and St. Simons Islands, two early 19th Century Muslim communities with traces still evident in the mid-20th century, 2) the role of Islam and its practitioners in the Founding Fathers’ vision of American pluralism, and 3) profiles of charismatic and notable Muslims over three centuries.
These presentations have a common goal: to replace stereotypes and legends with facts. They all have a reasoned interpretation by gifted teachers and communicators, which brings these humanities themes to a wide audience.
Background on the Slave Trade
The online databases, maps, and charts of the Trans-Atlantic and Intra-American slave trade at http://slavevoyages.org are the result of decades of research by scholars using data found in libraries and archives throughout the Atlantic world. The SlaveVoyages website features work by a team of historians, librarians, curriculum specialists, cartographers, computer programmers, and web designers. They worked together with scholars of the slave trade from universities in Europe, Africa, South America, and North America to provide an overview of the historical issues, numbers of people who were transported from Africa to the Americas between the 1500s and 1860, the conditions of their transport, and ports of embarkation and debarkation. Original sponsors of the project included the National Endowment for the Humanities, Emory Center for Digital Scholarship, the University of California at Irvine, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and The Hutchins Center of Harvard University. The website is currently hosted at Rice University.
Story of the Beginning of the Atlantic Slave Trade
Most Americans have learned something about the transatlantic slave trade between Africa and the Americas. However, the magnitude of this damaging enterprise, which persisted for more than 300 years and brutally affected large populations on both sides of the Atlantic is not widely understood. The development of accurate numbers of the victims of the slave trade has required a vast collaborative effort in the archives of many countries. To summarize the most recent research, more than 12.5 million men, women and children were transported from Africa to the continents of North America, South America, and the Caribbean region on nearly 35,000 voyages made by vessels from more than a dozen European and American countries and colonies. Almost 1.8 million captives perished on the crossing. The survivors were sold for their labor in agriculture, mines, crafts, and domestic work.
The primary focus of this portion of the Pathways Website is on the East Coast and American South which would later be called the United States. Between 1601 and 1860, at least 472,000 Africans were sent to this region and 388,000 survived the voyage. They represented about 4% of the 4.7 million people sent to the Caribbean and 4.8 million sent to Brazil during that time. Of course, the overall number of people subject to forced labor in the United States was ultimately much higher. In 1860, the official U.S. government census counted four million enslaved human beings. After the Civil War, that total fell to zero in the 1870 census.
There are many remaining demographic questions about the slave trade. This includes the percentage of Muslims who were transported to the New World. Based on the latest research, Muslims represented about 5% of the 12.5 million victims of the transatlantic slave trade, or a total of 625,000. This translates for the 388,000 people who arrived in the United States, to 19,400 individuals. However, since 24 percent (93,120) of the Africans who landed in the United States were originally from Senegambia, which had long-established Muslim communities, the actual numbers, added to those of Muslims from Mali and Guinea, were most likely higher.
Survivals of Islamic Heritage & Culture Under Enslaved Conditions
Given the harsh conditions of enslavement in the American South, it was hard for early Muslims to pass down the practice of Islam to their descendants. Clear examples of continuity are very rare across generations.
Oral histories gathered on remote islands off the coast of Georgia have yielded some credible exceptions. Those descendants interviewed in the 1930s, many of them Black elders in their 70s and 80s, offered childhood memories from the 1860s and 1870s of aged grandparents and neighbors who dressed, ate, and prayed in Islamic ways. Among the following profiles, the two Bilali’s, Salih and Muhammad, knew each other and worked separately and together to maintain Islamic practices on two of these islands. Bilali Muhammad produced a 13-page manuscript in Arabic, part of a work by the 10th-century Tunisian Ibn Abu Zayd al Qairawani.
Among the recollections of these descendants are interesting details concerning Muslim women. They were even less well represented than men in the literature of these all but forgotten people. Sea Island Muslim women were described as wearing white veils, praying with beads, and uttering words recognizably drawn from the Muslim liturgy. They were also remembered for giving children rice cakes, called “saraka”, on special occasions. The term comes from the Arabic sadaka for freewill offerings or voluntary charity. These cakes are still the traditional offerings of West African Muslim women. The act of giving them is called saraka or sara. Dozens of female Islamic and Arabic names were recorded on several islands of Georgia and South Carolina. Muslim women were among the runaways and maroons advertised in newspapers.
The last Muslim woman to land in the United States was Arzuma (from the Arabic al-juma, Friday) originally from the north of present-day Benin or Nigeria. She arrived in Mobile, Alabama, in July 1860 on the Clotilda, the last slave ship to come to the United States. She passed away in the late 1910s.
The communities of the Sea Islands lasted for several generations. However, they were the rare exceptions in the American South. Muslims may have tried hard to maintain their traditions. However, the trauma of expatriation, the low number of Muslim women vs. men, and the sale, resale, separation, and disruption of families and groups formed during enslavement made sustained Muslim communities all but impossible. Evidence of persistent brutality and forced conversion to Christianity frequently worked against the transmission of Islam. Over the centuries, pervasive oppression occurred in almost every individual narrative presented here and in the other American Muslim Pathways lectures on this website.
The Islam which Africans arrived with was likely not in practice among most of their children, or grandchildren. The growth of a Muslim population in the early 20th century United States was the result of other factors.
Key Figures
Timeline
1521/1527
Mustafa Azemmouri (Estabanico) was enslaved to Spanish nobleman Andres Dorantes de Carranza, and was taken on the Narvaez Expedition to North America, where they were shipwrecked on the Gulf of Mexico.
1607
Anthony Jansen van Salee was born to Jan Jansen, a Dutch privateer who was captured and converted to Islam.
1629
Anthony Jansen van Salee arrived in New Netherland with the Dutch West India Company, becoming a landowner in what is today Brooklyn.
1664
The Dutch surrender New Amsterdam to the British, and the territory is renamed New York.
1730
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Ayuba Suleiman Diallo of Futa Toro in present-day Senegal, was kidnapped on a trip to the coast to purchase paper, was kidnapped and sold into slavery, landing in Annapolis, Maryland.
1733-34
Ayyuba Sulaiman Diallo sailed to England and became notable in English society. In 1734, he and translator Lamine Ndiaye were returned to the Gambia, arriving after his father had died.
1736
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Yarrow Mamout, kidnapped and enslaved in Guinea at 16, arrived in Maryland on the slave ship Elijah in 1752, and was purchased by land-owner Samuel Beale and served him on Beale’s Tacoma Park tobacco plantation for 44 years.
1740
Salim the Algerian was born in Algiers; after being captured by pirates on the Mediterranean while returning from studies in Istanbul, he was sold in New Orleans, but escaped into the frontier.
1752
Yarrow Mamout, kidnapped and enslaved at 16, arrived on the slave ship Elijah, and was purchased by Samuel Beall on his Takoma Park plantation.
1796
Yarrow Mamout was freed at the age of 60 and worked in Georgetown to earn his own money to purchase property on Dent Place NW, where he built a house.”
ca. 1762
Abdurrahman ibn Sori was born in Timbo, Futa Jallon, in present-day Guinea, son of the ruler. At 26, he was captured and sold into slavery, landing at Natchez Mississippi.
1762 - 1795
Salim spent time with native American Shawnee people, was found near death in the wilderness, and traveled to Williamsburg, where it was discovered that he read Greek. He lived as an eccentric member of colonial Virginian society until he died in 1795.
ca. 1790
Salih Bilali was born in Messina, in modern Mali, on the Niger River. Captured and sold into slavery, he became the driver and prominent leader among those enslaved on James Couper’s cotton plantation on St. Simon’s Island, Georgia. Salih led the defense of the plantation against the British in the War of 1812, as recorded by James Couper.
ca. 1800
Lamine Kebe was born in Mali and migrated 1000 miles to become a Quran teacher in Futa Jallon, also the home of Bilali Muhammad and Abd Al-Rahman Ibrahima, in today’sGuinea. Like Ayub Suleiman Diallo, Kebe’s enslavement began when he was captured while on a long journey to buy scarce paper.
1819 - 1823
In 1819, Yarrow Mamout sat for his portrait by Charles Wilson Peale, painter of famous Washingtonians. Four years later Yarrow died in his Georgetown home at the age of 87. In 1823, Yarrow Mamout died in Georgetown at the age of 87 after working to earn money for a property on Dent Place NW, and building a reputation among the residents of Georgetown.
ca. 1824
Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua was born in Djougou, Benin to a prominent Muslim family. He, too, was kidnapped and sold into slavery, arriving in New York in 1845. He escaped, was caught and lost an appeal for his freedom to the court. He again escaped to Boston.
1827-1829
Abdurrahman Ibrahima was freed after his status as an African prince and his literacy in Arabic brought him to the attention of PresidentJohn Quincy Adams. In 1829, he and wife Isabella crossed the Atlantic to the American colony ofLiberia, where Abdurrahman died of a fever. Isabella was joined there by two of their sons. Their story became the basis for the book Prince Among Slaves by historian Terry Alford (1977) and a film with the same title by Unity Productions Foundation, (2007).
1834
In Georgia, Lamine Kebe was enslaved but then freed and sent to the AmericanColonization Society (ACS) in New York City, to return to Africa as a Christian missionary. In New York he provided the abolitionist Theodore Dwight (1796-1866) a list of teaching texts and methods used in his homeland Futa Jallon, and he created a glossary of his own Serrekuleh language. Kebe returned to Africa with the ACS but never seems to have converted or acted as a missionary.
ca. 1837
Nicholas Said (Mohammmed Ali ibn Said) was born in Bornou, West Africa )or in Chad), and was educated by a relative after his father’s death. At about 14, he was captured and brought across the Saharan route to North Africa.
1849-1857
Baquaqua traveled to Haiti and converted to Christianity, becoming a Baptist missionary after attending New York Central College. He wrote his autobiography with co-author Samuel Moore, and is believed to have been sent to Africa in hopes he would bring Christianity to the interior. He may have reverted to Islam, but nothing more is known of his life after 1857. Like Lamine Kebe and Abdurrahman Ibrahima Ibn Sori he may have reverted to Islam, but nothing more is known of his life after 1857.
1855-1882
Nicholas Said traveled with prominent Turkish and European masters, learned languages, and arrived in North America probably in the 1850s. He converted to Christianity, became a teacher, served in the Union Army until 1865, and wrote the longest autobiography attributed to an enslaved African, published in 1873.
1856
Phillip Tedro was an Ottoman subject of Greek and Syrian parents born in 1828. He converted from Greek Orthodoxy to Islam, and in the American Southwest became known as Hadji Ali. He arrived there as a camel driver with a shipment of camels in 1856 in a program started by Secretary of War Jefferson Davis to introduce a camel corps to explore the AmericanSouthwest. He stayed on as a surveyor for segments of the Route 66 highway, where a memorial to him was built at Quartzite, Arizona.
1857
Bilali Muhammad died, leaving a leather-bound manuscript in Arabic on Islamic beliefs, guidance about prayer and purification of the soul. A rare example of resilience and the persistence of Islamic beliefs and practice in slavery, the manuscript survives to the present day in the Georgia State Library.
1864
Omar bin Said, “Uncle Moro,” born in 1770 in Futa Toro, died in Wilmington North Carolina. The freed slave of Muslim background After escaping and being imprisoned, he came to the attention of John Owen, governor of NC, and later, abolitionist Theodore Dwight, because of his literacy in Arabic. He was freed and maintained for the rest of his life. Omar bin Said wrote his autobiography in Arabic, which is housed in the Library of Congress.