The Muslims Among The Enslaved: Three Names Against Oblivion
One in every five. Sometimes one in every three. Such was the ratio. Among the ten million Africans who survived the Atlantic, hundreds of thousands of Muslims walked. Most disappeared without a trace. But of three men — Omar ibn Said ﵀, Bilali Muhammad ﵀, Ayuba Suleiman Diallo ﵀ — we possess documents in their own hand, in Arabic, written on American soil. This scene names their names.
One In Every Five
One in five. Set that down properly first.
Of every five Africans loaded into a WIC ship’s hold, or onto a British slaver, or into a French négrier, there was one who knew the Qur’an. Not all by heart. Not all learned. But one in five had, at some moment before he came aboard in chains, recited Al-Fatiha. Had said bismillah before he ate. Had washed his head before prayer. Had heard that there was One, only One, and that Muhammad ﷺ was His messenger.
Sylviane Diouf — Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas — gives the estimate of fifteen to twenty percent for the Atlantic as a whole. Michael Gomez, in Black Crescent (2005), goes further, with peaks of thirty to forty percent for specific Senegambia shipments in the second half of the eighteenth century. Paul Lovejoy places it more conservatively, around ten to fifteen percent on average, but emphasizes the regional skew.
Look at the regions:
- A ship from Albreda or Bance Island (Gambia mouth) in 1780 carried in great likelihood forty or more Fulbe and Mandinka Muslims per loading. These were sometimes talibs, sometimes malams, often ordinary villagers with elementary Islamic schooling — children of a world that had been Islamic for nine centuries.
- A ship from Ouidah (Slave Coast) in the same period carried a mixed loading: Yoruba and Ewe with traditional belief, but also Hausa Muslims who had been captured by Oyo cavalry in raids in the north. The Hausa component was often literate — they could read and write Arabic. It is no coincidence that the most organized slave revolt in Brazil — the Malê uprising in Bahia in 1835 — was led by precisely this group.
- A ship from Cabinda or Luanda (Central Africa) carried virtually no Muslims. These regions were Christian or traditional.
Multiply these percentages by the millions. Then you see the scale. It is no footnote. It is a whole cross-stream of Atlantic slavery that bore an Islamic character, and that on American soil within one or two generations was murdered by the system — but not without leaving traces.
Those traces have names. Let us name three.
Omar ibn Said ﵀ — Carried Off From Futa Toro, Imprisoned In Fayetteville, Continuing To Speak In Arabic
He was born around 1770 in Futa Toro, on the Senegal River in present-day Senegal. Futa Toro was a Fulani reform state, founded in 1776 by Sulayman Bal and Abdul Kader Kan: a small theocracy of almamys, Fulbe scholars, Maliki fiqh, Qadiriyya tariqa. A world in which highly learned Islam and daily pastoral life fell into one rhythm.
He studied for twenty-five years. Let that sink in. Twenty-five years. A study period that exceeds in length a Dutch academic career. He later named, in his own manuscript, the names of his teachers. He learned Arabic as a second language after Fulfulde. He memorized the Qur’an. He studied tafsir, Maliki fiqh, tawhid, sirah. By his thirty-fifth year he was a formed scholar.
Around 1807, at the age of thirty-seven, a war fell upon his region. The details in his own account are sparse — he did not want to dwell on the shame, or perhaps the shame consisted in the fact that he himself was carried off by the same state that had been founded in 1776 (internal Fulani conflicts in this period were sharp). He was carried off, put on a ship, six weeks across the sea. He set foot on land in Charleston, South Carolina — the largest import harbor for the enslaved in the United States. He describes Charleston in his manuscript simply as “a great house in the Christian land”.
He was bought by a man he calls “Johnson”, who mistreated him. He fled. He walked two hundred kilometers northward — we must take a moment to breathe here, for a man of nearly forty, who had never lived in a wooded landscape, who had never heard of the Appalachians, who knew nothing of the climate or road structure of North Carolina, walks alone two hundred kilometers over unknown ground. He was caught in Fayetteville, North Carolina and thrown into a prison cell.
And there begins the story we have come to tell tonight.
In that cell he began to write on the walls with charcoal. In Arabic. His guards did not understand it. They thought at first that they were magical signs, devilish inscriptions. A local clergyman came to look and understood no more than his guards that this was a language, not magic. The news spread. This was no ordinary fugitive slave. This was a man with letters.
He was bought by James Owen, a planter in Bladen County, North Carolina, whose brother John would later become governor of the state. There Omar ibn Said ﵀ spent the rest of his life — fifty-seven years — until his death in 1864, one year before the Thirteenth Amendment. He did not see Emancipation. But he wrote.
In 1831, at roughly sixty-one years of age, he wrote his autobiography. Fifteen pages, Arabic, with calligraphy that shows his Futa Toro schooling. It is the only surviving Arabic slave narrative from the antebellum US. It exists. It lies today in the Library of Congress in Washington DC, digitized, readable.
Listen to how it begins. Not with his name. Not with his date of birth. But with Surah al-Mulk — “Al-Mulk”, The Sovereignty, chapter 67 of the Qur’an. What Muslims have traditionally read over the dead. What in the Nubian and West African tradition is recited over those who have lost their way.
﴿تَبَارَكَ ٱلَّذِى بِيَدِهِ ٱلْمُلْكُ وَهُوَ عَلَىٰ كُلِّ شَىْءٍ قَدِيرٌ﴾
“Blessed is He in Whose hand is the Sovereignty, and He has power over all things.”
That is the opening. Not a Christian conversion. Not an appeal to his master. A Qur’an recitation — over his own buried life, his own lost sovereignty.
Ala Alryyes, in the edition A Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar Ibn Said (2011, Yale University Press) — the authoritative English translation with Arabic reproduction — and after him Diouf and Ghada Osman have shown that the text works on two levels. On the outside he writes about Jesus, about Christian prayer, about his “conversion”. On the inside he cites surah after surah: al-Fatiha, al-Nasr, al-Mulk. He mentions his twenty-five years of study in Futa Toro with pride — a pride that no genuine convert would show over his “pagan past”. The interpretation that is now scholarly consensus: Omar pursued a taqiyya strategy. Outward conformity; inward continuity.
He wrote in total some fourteen Arabic manuscripts during his slavery. Some are partial Qur’an copies, others short personal texts. Once he wrote down for a visitor the Christian Lord’s Prayer in Arabic — but paleographers note that the cadence is that of a qasida. His faith was his secret country.
Ronald Judy’s (Dis)Forming the American Canon: African-Arabic Slave Narratives and the Vernacular (1993) places Omar in the American literary canon as the first Arabic-writing slave author. This is no posthumous elevation. Omar was throughout his life a man of letters whose masters could not read him. That is, in the context of the Deep South of 1830, a form of inner sovereignty that has few parallels.
He died in 1864. His grave is in Bladen County. His manuscript is in Washington. His name we have spoken aloud here tonight.
Omar ibn Said ﵀.
Bilali Muhammad ﵀ — Carried Off From Futa Jallon, Remaining On Sapelo, Writing From Memory
The second name comes from Futa Jallon, the mountainous Fulani sultanate in present-day Guinea. Futa Jallon was — like Futa Toro — a reform state, founded in 1725 by Karamoko Alfa and Ibrahim Musa: one generation before Sulayman Bal, two generations before Usman dan Fodio ﵀. An intellectual center. A world in which fiqh instruction was given at an adult level.
Bilali Muhammad ﵀ was born around 1770 in Futa Jallon. As a young adult, probably around 1800, he was captured. He was first shipped to the Bahamas — most likely Middle Caicos, where he worked some years on a British colonial plantation and there learned his English. Around 1802-1803 the American planter Thomas Spalding purchased him and brought him to Sapelo Island, one of the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia.
Spalding was no ordinary planter. He was an intellectual, an experimental farmer, and — this is unusual for his time — a man who could place pragmatic trust in African competence. Within a few years he appointed Bilali as driver — the position of enslaved overseer. Within ten years Bilali was in practice the estate manager of the entire plantation. He coordinated the labor of roughly four hundred enslaved people over rice and sea-island cotton fields. He negotiated with outside merchants.
And in 1815, during the British invasion of the sea-island coast (the War of 1812 ran into that year), Spalding entrusted him with eighty muskets to defend the plantation. An enslaved African with firearms to defend his master against another European power. This episode alone justifies a separate book. Bilali led the defense; the British were repulsed; not a single one of the eighty muskets was turned against the white inhabitants of the island. Let this fact alone breathe for a moment.
What made Bilali? He had not lost his deen. On Sapelo — and this is why his story matters for us tonight — he organized a small Islamic community. Enslaved people from Futa Jallon, later also others he recruited from new shipments, performed the five salawat. They fasted Ramadan — nineteenth-century visitors to Sapelo note how a group of enslaved people in certain months did not eat between sunrise and sunset, and that Spalding accepted this as a productivity-neutral peculiarity. Bilali gave his children Arabic names: Yarruh, Fatima, Medina, Bentoo, Charno, Hestor, Yaruba.
And somewhere between 1820 and 1850 — the precise dating cannot be paleographically pinned down — he wrote an Arabic manuscript of thirteen pages.
The document remained in private hands until 1931 and was then donated to the University of Georgia Libraries in Athens, Georgia. There it lies today, catalogue number MS 2826, available to researchers. Visitors into the 1980s thought it was babble, weighty-looking pseudo-Arabic. Only late twentieth-century Arabists — Muhammad al-Ahari, Ronald Judy, Joseph Greenberg earlier — identified what it was.
It is an incomplete Maliki fiqh compendium, largely consisting of fragments from the Risala of Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani ﵀ (922-996 CE, Kairouan, Tunisia) — the standard textbook for beginning Maliki students, with which to this day every madrasa curriculum from Futa Jallon to Mauritania begins. The Bilali Document contains fragments on wudu (ritual purification), on the conditions of salah, on adhan and iqama. It is incomplete. Passages run into one another. Some parts can no longer be placed in the Qayrawani tradition.
This is why it is important: Bilali wrote from memory. He had no book to copy from. There was no Risala on Sapelo Island. There was no other Arabic text within a thousand kilometers. He sat in his fiftieth or sixtieth year on a Georgia island and wrote down from his memory the rules he had learned as a boy in Futa Jallon — sometimes jumping from page to page, sometimes confusing half-sentences with others. He rebuilt the structure of his scholarship out of the inner space where no one could disarm him.
And after his death, somewhere around 1857, he was, according to tradition, buried with his face toward the east, on Sapelo. Toward Mecca. His grave is still there, unmarked according to some sources, in a small family burial ground near Hog Hammock — the black community on the island where his descendants live to this day.
Cornelia Bailey (1945-2017) was a direct descendant. Geechee historian, storyteller, author of God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man (2000). Into the 2010s she spoke about the oral tradition: the saraka rice balls that her grandmother still made (a corruption of sadaqa, alms, given as a rice offering to deceased ancestors); the ameen that became “amen”; the custom of kneeling on a cloth before prayer; the name “Bilali” — the muezzin of the Prophet ﷺ — that was passed down through the family line. She died in 2017. Parts of the Geechee community on Sapelo, confronted with developers who threaten the island, are still fighting for the preservation of this heritage line.
Three generations after Bilali ﵀ his grandchildren still remembered what Ramadan was. That is the line we are drawing through.
Bilali Muhammad ﵀.
Ayuba Suleiman Diallo ﵀ — Carried Off From Bundu, Imprisoned In Maryland, Returned To London
The third name is the earliest, and also the only one who came home.
Ayuba Suleiman Diallo ﵀ was born around 1701 in Bundu (Boundou), a Fulani Muslim sultanate between the Senegal and Gambia rivers, in present-day east Senegal. His family belonged to the Toronkawa Fulbe scholarly caste. His father was imam and qadi of a village. By his thirtieth year Ayuba was himself imam, with three wives and four children.
In February 1731 his father sent him with two servants and a herd to the Gambia River to trade — ironically, also to sell two slaves on his father’s behalf at the English factory (this immediately makes him a complicated figure for us: he was no innocent victim in a general sense; he was complicit in the system that seized him). On the return journey he was captured by a Mandinka raiding party. The robbers shaved his head bald as a sign that he had been a free man (a public humiliation). They sold him to the British fort at Joar. From there onto a slave ship. Eight weeks Atlantic crossing. Ashore in Annapolis, Maryland.
He was bought by Alexander Tolsey, a planter on Kent Island in Chesapeake Bay. He worked there in the tobacco fields, a labor unknown to a Fulani imam of thirty and at which his body broke down. He fled. He was caught in Kent County and locked up in the county jail.
And there — this is the scene that saves his life — a visitor saw him write Arabic signs in the sand. The visitor knew an old jurist, who knew an Oxford Arabist, who worked for the Royal African Company. Ayuba ﵀ wrote a letter. In Arabic. To his father, in Bundu. The letter traveled via Annapolis, across the Atlantic, to London, to Oxford where it was translated, to the desk of Sir Hans Sloane — director of the Royal African Company, also known as president of the Royal Society and library founder of what would later become the British Museum.
Sloane read it. The RAC decided to buy Ayuba free — a decision driven partly by genuine astonishment, partly by propaganda value. In 1733 Ayuba ﵀ arrived in London. He was lionized for a season. He was introduced to King George II and the royal family. He was portrayed by the painter William Hoare — the painting, with Ayuba in Fulani dress and with the Qur’an hung around his neck, is today in the Qatar Museums Authority collection (purchased 2009 for £554,000). He was interviewed by Thomas Bluett, an English educator who in 1734 published his biography: Some Memoirs of the Life of Job, the Son of Solomon, the High Priest of Boonda in Africa.
Bluett’s Some Memoirs became the first European bestseller about West Africa. It was translated into French and German. It formed, together with Francis Moore’s Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa (1738), the image that eighteenth-century Europe developed of West Africa.
Ayuba ﵀ prayed his five prayers in London, openly, in high company. He refused pork and alcohol — a social courage that should not be underestimated in the London of 1733. He recited Qur’an from memory for Oxford scholars — several times he wrote out complete Surah al-Fatiha without error, which left the British Arabists, who would have had to spend a year studying Arabic grammar to manage this single feat, dumbfounded.
In July 1734 he returned to Bundu. He found at home that his family had thought him dead; that his father had died; that one of his wives had remarried. He resumed his imam function. He died in 1773, seventy-two years old.
And here comes the uncomfortable truth that makes Ayuba’s story sharp for us tonight.
Ayuba ﵀'s history was simultaneously instrumentalized by two camps. Abolitionists — from the end of the eighteenth century — cited him as proof that Africans, given the chance, were fully human and therefore could not be enslaved. The Royal African Company, which had bought his freedom, used his case at the same time to defend the slave trade in general: “we are humane; look how we bring exceptional Africans home” — while the same RAC was itself shipping tens of thousands of others to Jamaica. Bluett, his biographer, was himself enmeshed in the RAC networks. His book mentions Ayuba’s civilization in the same breath as the argument that the ordinary African may remain enslaved.
This “exception proves the rule” logic we see again and again in the history of Atlantic slavery. It was the intellectual lubricant that kept the trade running for decades: there are exceptional Africans, and we recognize them, and that is precisely why we may enslave the rest. Ayuba Suleiman Diallo ﵀ was not the cause of this reasoning. He was its earliest raw material.
But he brought back from London something the English could not see: he was confirmed in his scholarship. His Qur’an handwriting stood at Oxford level. His faith had survived an Atlantic double-fork without letting itself be bent. He returned as imam — not as an English monument, not as a converted exotic, but as the same man who in 1731 had gone down the Gambia River. Family oral tradition in Bundu preserved his story into the nineteenth century, when French researchers still recorded it there.
Ayuba Suleiman Diallo ﵀.
The Literacy That Remained
Three names are enough to make a whole point, but the point becomes stronger when we place them in a wider network.
There was a West African Arabic literacy on American plantations, documented in diaries, court records, travel accounts. A handful of examples alongside our three:
Salih Bilali (c. 1765 – c. 1859) was an enslaved Fulbe Muslim from Massina (central Mali), captured as a boy, ending up on St. Simons Island in Georgia under owner James Hamilton Couper. He became, like Bilali Muhammad, driver. He signed official documents in Arabic script, including bills of sale preserved in the Couper family archives. Couper corresponded about him with Theodore Dwight, who in 1844 published fragments of Salih’s autobiography. Salih fasted Ramadan. He died a few years before Emancipation.
Yarrow Mamout (c. 1736 – 1823) was an enslaved Fulbe Muslim from West Africa, brought to Maryland around 1752, manumitted around 1796, and afterwards a free man in Georgetown, Washington DC who bought his own house — one of the first black homeowners in the federal capital. He maintained a halal diet his whole life: no pork, no alcohol. He prayed his prayers openly. He was portrayed in 1819 by Charles Willson Peale (the painting hangs today in the Peabody Institute, Baltimore) and again in 1822 by James Alexander Simpson. He died in 1823 and was buried in Georgetown, by tradition with his face toward the east. Archaeological excavations in 2015 at the suspected gravesite are still working on identification.
Job ben Solomon is the English nickname Bluett’s audience used for Ayuba ﵀. His London lectures on the Qur’an — informal presentations in coffee houses and at private evenings — were the first public introductions to Islam to an English audience since the English Reformation. They were received by some as exotica, by others with serious interest.
And within the enslaved communities themselves there existed Arabic amulets, Qur’an passages on paper or parchment, secretly kept prayer times, birth names of Islamic origin. Diouf catalogues dozens of examples in Servants of Allah. In Jamaica, after the slave revolt of 1760 (the so-called “Tacky’s War”), amulets with Arabic script were found. Some historians — among them Sultana Afroz — read this revolt explicitly as a Muslim co-organized rebellion, although this point is contested.
The Malê Uprising: Bahia, 24 January 1835
One moment deserves separate mention, because it shows what Muslim literacy on plantation soil was capable of in its rare collective form.
In the night of 24 to 25 January 1835 — a Laylat al-Qadr in Ramadan, by some readings consciously chosen — roughly six hundred enslaved and freed Africans rose up in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. The leaders were Hausa and Yoruba Muslims, known under the local name Malês (probably derived from “imale”, the Yoruba word for Muslim). They attacked barracks, police posts, and plantation houses, with the plan of taking over the city.
They wore Arabic amulets sewn into their clothes — portions of the Qur’an for protection, in the African sufi tradition that is much older than slavery. Some had school notebooks with Arabic texts on them. The police found in the aftermath teachers (malams) who had kept clandestine Qur’an schools on plantations around Bahia.
The uprising was put down — within one day, with great bloodshed. Between seventy and a hundred rebels were killed in the streets. Several hundred were arrested. In the subsequent trials — the Brazilian authorities found dozens of Qur’ans, prayer mats, and Arabic writings — nine executions were carried out (Brazilian law did not yet allow mass executions). Thousands were deported back to Africa — a bizarre consequence: they were “sent back” to a continent they had sometimes left decades earlier.
João José Reis, in Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia (1993, English translation 1995) — the standard work on this uprising — shows that the Malê based their uprising on a network of plantation madrasas, a sense of jihad duty (not against Christians per se but against the specific injustice of slavery), and a political vision in which a free Muslim Bahia was at least a temporary feasibility.
This is important for us tonight. Not because we romanticize 1835 — the uprising was crushingly put down. But because it shows that the Muslim component of the Atlantic slave population was, in its collective form, capable of political organization. That deen under the most suffocating pressure was not only an inner refuge ship, but in rare moments also a public claim on the city.
The Malê were defeated. But they were defeated as Muslims, with Qur’ans in their hands.
The Power Of Ahmad Baba In The Americas
There is one thread that I do not want to let slip tonight. It connects scene 28 with scene 29, and it connects West Africa with Bahia.
Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti ﵀'s Mi’rāj al-Ṣu’ūd — the Maliki fatwa of 1615 against the enslavement of Muslim Africans — was no text that only circulated in Timbuktu. Copies descended via Mauritanian and Sahelian networks to Hausaland. From Hausaland they traveled — in Arabic manuscript form, carried by captives or migrated ulama — to Bahia. The Mauritanian Arabist Mohamed Diagayeté has identified in Bahian archives fragments that go back to the Sahelian Maliki fiqh tradition in which Ahmad Baba is central. Not one-to-one, but as legal raw material.
What does that mean? A Hausa Muslim who in 1835 in Bahia took up a musket against the Portuguese police had behind him — not as a conscious citation, but as transmitted tradition — the fatwa of a scholar who in 1615 in Moroccan exile had written that his own peoples could not be enslaved. This is not a merely symbolic line. It is a legal inheritance that survived through two centuries, four continents, and an Atlantic crossing, enough to provide an uprising with moral grounds.
We may acknowledge that without exaggerating it. The Mi’rāj al-Ṣu’ūd saved no one from slavery. But it gave the enslaved Muslim something that the enslaved Christian-converted often missed: a legal language in which he could say this is injustice according to my own tradition, not according to a borrowed one. That sovereignty is not nothing. It is, in fact, the core of what we wish to honor tonight.
Three Names Against Oblivion
We are at the end of this scene. Let us be precise about what we have proved and what we cannot prove.
What we can prove:
- Among the ten million Africans who survived the Atlantic, hundreds of thousands of Muslims walked.
- Of three men we possess documents in their own hand, in Arabic, written on American soil: Omar ibn Said ﵀, Bilali Muhammad ﵀, Ayuba Suleiman Diallo ﵀.
- Their children and grandchildren preserved in some cases — Bilali’s family on Sapelo is the best documented — fragments of Islamic practice over three to four generations.
- The Malê uprising of 1835 in Bahia shows that Muslim organization at plantation scale was possible, with madrasa infrastructure and a legal-religious framework.
What we cannot prove:
- How many Muslims on Curaçao, on Bonaire, in Suriname held to their faith. The Dutch Caribbean archives are there; they have not yet all been read on this question. This is work that can yet be done — and that part of this hall may have to do.
- How the question-about-the-qibla scene precisely went for most captives. We have indirect indications, no direct accounts.
- How many families today in the Netherlands, in Paramaribo, in Willemstad, can trace their line back to one of these Muslim ancestors. Some know it; many do not.
But we know in any case these three men. We know their names. We know that Omar ﵀ wrote Arabic with charcoal on a Fayetteville wall. That Bilali ﵀ at eighty wrote out the Risala from memory on Sapelo. That Ayuba ﵀ in a Maryland prison wrote a letter that bought him free and brought him home again to Bundu.
Each name is a refusal to be forgotten. Each name is a line drawn through an ocean that was designed to burn it. Each name is an invitation to us tonight — to those of us in this hall who know their line and to those still to find theirs — to continue what these three men did: to carry our faith through places where it cannot be read, and to wait for the hall in which it may be spoken aloud again.
In the next scene — scene 30 — we remain with Omar ibn Said ﵀ alone. Long. Slow. Without haste. We read his handwriting. We let the hall breathe.
These were three names. There were millions. But we know, in any case, these three.
And that is, for tonight, enough to go on.