What Was Lost, What Remains
Sapelo Island, Georgia, in the 1920s. An old woman recites something in Arabic for her granddaughter. Then she switches back to Gullah English and says: “Now we go play.” The child remembers it for a lifetime.
The Grandmother On Sapelo
You have to picture Cornelia Walker Bailey as a little girl. Sapelo Island, off the coast of Georgia, twenty-four kilometers by boat from the mainland. An island of thirty thousand acres of sand, mossy oaks, brackish creeks. On a hill in the southernmost part of the island lies Hog Hammock, the Black village of the Geechee — African-American descendants of the enslaved whom Thomas Spalding had on his plantation in the early nineteenth century.
Cornelia was born in 1945. Her great-grandfather had still been a slave. Her grandmother spoke the old language. One afternoon in the 1920s — Cornelia would later, recalled through family storytelling, write it down — this grandmother sits with a younger generation on the porch. And she recites, as if of itself, a sequence of Arabic words. Al-hamdu lillahi rabbil-'alamin. The opening of al-Fatiha.
She probably no longer realizes exactly what it means. She knows that her own grandmother recited it that way. She knows that it was said at a certain hour of the day. She knows that it is a prayer. And then she switches, without pause, back to Gullah English: “Now we go play.”
That is the transmission. That is what got through. Not the full five salawat. Not Ramadan in its sharp form. Not the mosque, not the imam, not the hajj. But one verse, passed on among three or four generations of women, like a breath rhythm.
In her book God, Dr. Buzzard and the Bolito Man (2000) Cornelia Walker Bailey tells this. She was, when she wrote the book, one of the last people on Sapelo who could still carry that family line directly. She died in 2017. What she preserved, she preserved just in time to pass on to us.
This is what this article is about. What was lost under Atlantic slavery, and what — despite everything — has remained.
Bilali Muhammad ﵀ And His Children
The grandmother on Sapelo had a predecessor. Four generations back, on the same ground, lived Bilali Muhammad ﵀.
He was born around 1770 in Futa Jallon, the mountainous Fulani sultanate in what today is Guinea. Futa Jallon was, like Futa Toro further north, a reformed Islamic state — founded in 1725 by Karamoko Alfa. Bilali grew up with the Risala of Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani ﵀, with Qur’an memorization, with Maliki fiqh. Around 1800 he was captured, transported to the Bahamas — probably Middle Caicos — and around 1802 bought by the American planter Thomas Spalding. Spalding brought him to Sapelo Island (~31.47°N, -81.29°W).
Within a few years Bilali Muhammad ﵀ was driver — plantation overseer — over nearly four hundred enslaved people. During the British invasion in the War of 1812, Spalding gave him eighty muskets to defend the plantation. An enslaved African with firearms. That is a sentence you have to read twice.
He wrote, sometime between 1820 and 1850, a thirteen-page Arabic manuscript. It has been held since 1931 in the University of Georgia Libraries in Athens (MS 2826, ~33.95°N, -83.37°W). Nineteenth-century readers thought it was “African gibberish”. Twentieth-century Arabists — among them Muhammad al-Ahari and Ronald Judy — have deciphered it as a Maliki fiqh compendium written down from memory. Largely rules about wudu, salah, adhan. From the Risala. Sometimes complete, sometimes skipping, sometimes incomplete. Like a man writing out from memory a textbook he had learned as a boy and never seen since.
And on the plantation itself Islam was visible. Not as public mosque — there was none. But as pattern. His daughter Phoebe prayed on a prayer rug all her life. His grandchildren bore Arabic names: Medina, Yarruh, Bentoo, Charno, Fatima. Visitors to Sapelo noted that certain enslaved people did not eat in certain months until sundown. Ramadan, on a Georgia plantation, without a single person able to confirm the cycles of the lunar calendar from Mecca. They counted it themselves.
That practice faded. We must say so honestly. In the 1870s, after Emancipation, there were still living witnesses. In the 1900s they were memories. In the 1930s it was the saraka rice ball that Cornelia Bailey’s grandmother still baked — a derivative of sadaqa, almsgiving, made the way your mother had done it, without most of those who made it still knowing the origin.
But Bilali’s children prayed. His grandchildren knew that they prayed. His great-grandchildren had a vague feeling of it. And his great-great-granddaughter Cornelia wrote a book about it. That is how transmission works when there is no mosque. Through the women. Through the kitchen. Through the porch. Through one line of Arabic between “Good evenin, child” and “Now we go play”.
Ayuba ﵀ And The London Ambiguity
Let us zoom back a generation, to a man whose story was cut by the Atlantic machine in another way.
Ayuba Suleiman Diallo ﵀ was born around 1701 in Bundu, a Fulani-Muslim sultanate in eastern Senegal. His father was imam and qadi. He received the classical education. By his thirties he was imam himself, had three wives, four children. In February 1731 he was captured by a Mandinka raid, brought to a British slave fort, taken across the Atlantic, sold in Annapolis to a tobacco planter. He worked on Kent Island in Chesapeake Bay. He fled. He was caught. And in the jail of Kent County he wrote Arabic letters with a finger in the sand.
As with Omar ﵀ this drew attention. A visitor saw it. The news traveled. A letter was drawn up to Ayuba’s ﵀ father in Bundu. That letter passed through London, through Oxford Arabists, into the hands of Sir Hans Sloane, director of the Royal African Company. In 1733 the RAC bought his freedom. They shipped him to England.
And there the rift begins.
Ayuba ﵀ was lionized in London. He was introduced to royal courtiers. He was painted by William Hoare — the painting, with the Qur’an around his neck, hangs today in the collection of the Qatar Museums Authority. Thomas Bluett published in 1734 Some Memoirs of the Life of Job, the Son of Solomon, the High Priest of Boonda in Africa. The book became a European bestseller. It was translated into French and German. Ayuba ﵀ returned to Bundu in July 1734, resumed his imam function, and died in 1773.
But what did his story do in Europe?
It did two things at once. Early abolitionists used Ayuba ﵀ as proof that Africans were civilized, lettered, fully human, and that slavery was therefore unjust. And the Royal African Company — the same RAC that bought his freedom — used the same story to argue that the slave trade was humane, that exceptional Africans were brought back, that “see how we care for them”. The RAC in those same years shipped tens of thousands of others to Jamaica without a book being written about a single one of them.
That is the ambiguity. The same life, simultaneously deployed as ammunition by two contradictory agendas. Bluett’s book mentions Ayuba ﵀'s civilization in the same breath as the proposition that the ordinary African may remain a slave. The exception confirms the rule. That is the kind of reasoning that kept the slave trade running for decades.
Ayuba ﵀ himself was a victim of that, not its cause. He returned to Bundu with his Qur’an around his neck, with his faith intact, with the authority of someone who had passed through an Atlantic detour and resumed his imam position. But his life became, beyond him, an instrument in European hands.
We must not smooth that over.
The Malê Revolt Of Bahia, 1835
Come now with me to Brazil. To Salvador-Bahia. To the night of 25 to 26 January 1835. Ramadan.
In the port city of Salvador — at that time the second city of the Portuguese Empire after Lisbon — lived thousands of enslaved Hausa and Yoruba from the Bight of Benin. Their owners, their Portuguese neighbors, the archives called them “Malês” — a corruption of Imale, Yoruba for “Muslim”. They lived in their own neighborhoods, worked in the harbor, in the workshops, as house servants. Many could read Arabic. Some possessed — hidden — small Qur’an copies or prayer tablets.
In the weeks before 25 January they had planned.
The leaders were alufas and alimamis — imams in the Hausa-Yoruba jargon. Names we know: Ahuna, Dandará, Luís Sanim, Manuel Calafate. They met in the room behind a grocer’s shop on the Ladeira da Praça. They wrote in Arabic on small papers — patuás, amulets — prayers, Qur’an verses, plans. They chose the last night of Ramadan, so that the uprising could begin with fajr.
That night they put on white clothing — white abadá’s, wide garments that they recognized as ritual dress. They prayed together. They marched out. They tried to storm barracks, to open a prison, to mobilize other enslaved people and free Blacks.
They lost. Within one night. The Portuguese garrison was stronger, the city was better guarded than they had reckoned, and some of the enslaved they had hoped to mobilize — crioulos, born in Brazil — did not join. Some seventy died on the Malê side. Hundreds were arrested. A number of leaders were executed. More than five hundred survivors were deported back to Africa — ironically, without realizing it, back to the coasts from which they had been taken.
This is, in the estimate of João José Reis, the largest urban slave uprising in all of the Americas between the American Revolutionary War and Reconstruction. Reis’s Rebelião Escrava no Brasil (1986, English Slave Rebellion in Brazil, 1995) reconstructs it from court files. The Brazilian prosecutors had hundreds of patuás — the Arabic prayer tablets found in the rooms of arrested Malês — photographed and entered into the dossiers. Through this we know which Qur’an verses these men carried. Ayat al-Kursi. Al-Fatiha. Surat Yaseen. The verses of a Muslim ready for death.
The Malê revolt was theologically grounded. It was organized within a Qadiri-tariqa network that had crossed the Atlantic Ocean and been rebuilt in Bahia. It was not a blind act of despair. It was a Muslim uprising in the name of justice, prepared in Arabic letters, prayed over before it began.
And it lost. That too is true. But that it took place, four years after Omar ibn Said ﵀ wrote his autobiography, is a fact we may never again forget.
The Caribbean Underground
In the Caribbean the story is quieter, less spectacular, and therefore easier to skip over.
Jamaica had the “Mandingo” — Mandinka enslaved people from Senegambia, of whom it is known that some could read and write Arabic. Arabic manuscripts were found on various Jamaican plantations in the nineteenth century. One of them, Muhammad Kaba Saghanughu, wrote in 1820 an Arabic manuscript that lies in the library of Trinity College in Cambridge. He was Fulani, had studied in Futa Jallon, ended up in Jamaica.
In Trinidad in the mid-nineteenth century there were still Arabic-reading Mandinka Muslims who corresponded with each other in writing. They were partly bought free by other Muslims — their own emancipation network, exceptional in its self-organization. Maxwell Philip, the Trinidadian lawyer, wrote about them in the nineteenth century.
Suriname is more complicated. Among the Ndyuka maroons, anthropologists in the twentieth century have noted some patterns that seem to point to Islamic origin — the use of amulets with written signs that resemble Arabic, a particular form of corpse covering, orientation in prayer. But the interpretations are contested. Gert Oostindie and other Dutch historians have warned against overstating the Islamic thread in Winti — much that looks like Islam may also be West African pre-Christian tradition. We must be careful here. We may say that there are traces. We may not claim that there is a continuity.
Curaçao and Aruba had a smaller, barely documented enclave. Something of the residue. Not enough to build a story on.
And here we must draw one important line. The Muslim population of present-day Suriname (about fifteen percent) and of Trinidad (about six percent) is not primarily a slavery descent. It is, by far the largest part, a descent from nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century indentured labor — Javanese and Indian workers brought in after the abolition of slavery. That is a different story. A different chapter. A different register. The continuity thread we are following here — Fulani-Mandinka-Hausa Muslims of slavery — runs through the Caribbean but has scarcely remained visible there.
We must be honest about that. Not because it diminishes the value of the trace. But because we may not, out of sentiment, claim that there is an unbroken line where, visibly, there is a break.
The Ritual Memories
Where, then, is the trace?
Names. Karim, Bilali, Salih, Fatima, Medina, Yarruh, Mamadu appear to this day in Gullah-Geechee genealogies along the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina. Sometimes consciously preserved, sometimes by chance — a name sounds beautiful, a family naming tradition — but the pattern is not random.
Rhythms. On some Southern plantations, especially in the Sea Islands, it was recorded into the 1880s that certain enslaved people did not work on Friday afternoons — jumua, or what was left of it. Pinkney, a visitor to Sapelo in 1842, noted it.
Words. Gullah contains vocabulary from Mandinka and Hausa — “bene” for sesame, “guba” for peanut, “nyam” for to eat. Some researchers think that several hundred Gullah words trace back to West African Muslim language areas.
Food. The rice culture of Carolina — the Carolina Gold rice that carried the Southern plantation economy in the eighteenth century — was a direct transfer from Senegambia. Enslaved people from rice-growing regions had been deliberately selected for this. Their culinary traces — Hoppin’ John, red rice, okra stews, the basis of gumbo — are direct descendants of the cuisine of the Senegal River. Much of this goes back to Muslim families; rice with sadaqa symbolism, ritual breaking of fasts, sweet balls (saraka) at funerals.
The call. In 1853, on a Louisiana plantation, a visitor from the North recorded that he heard before sunrise a “singing, plaintive call” coming from a slave hut. He described it as “a kind of Arabic lament”. Modern historians reread that as the adhan.
That is the trace. Not a mosque. Not a madrasa. Name, word, rhythm, plate, call. Fragments. But the fragments are real. They have been written down. They can be pointed to. They are not invented.
The Twentieth-Century Return
In the 1930s something new begins in the Black ghettos of the American Northern cities. The Nation of Islam is founded in 1930 in Detroit. It preaches its own, non-orthodox theology. But it hooks its adherents onto what it calls “the original religion of the Black man”.
In the 1960s and 1970s, especially under the influence of al-hajj Malik el-Shabazz (Malcolm X ﵀ — though his exact status as shahid is for every reader to weigh) and later of Warith Deen Mohammed, a large group of African-Americans moves on to Sunni Islam. Imam W.D. Mohammed ﵀ integrates the Nation community into the worldwide Sunni umma in 1975. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, more than a third of the American Muslim population is African-American.
Is this direct continuity with Bilali ﵀ and Omar ﵀?
No. We must be honest about that. The members of the Nation in 1935 generally knew nothing of Sapelo Island. The imam W.D. Mohammed ﵀ in 1975 had no personal tie to Futa Jallon or Futa Toro. The genealogical thread had been stretched and partly cut by a hundred and fifty years of slavery and fifty years of Jim Crow.
But there is an echo deeper than genealogy. The African-American community that in the 1930s, under the pressure of segregation and economic exploitation, reached back to Islam was the same community that a hundred years earlier had lost its plantation Islam. It is not the same family that passed the line on unbroken. It is the same community that, under different pressures, twice made the same choice.
The circle is not closed. It rhymes. And in the rhyme there is something that is not coincidence.
Ahmad Baba’s ﵀ Shadow
Come back with me one more time. All the way back.
Timbuktu, 1615. An old scholar of fifty-nine, twelve years earlier released from Moroccan exile, writes at his desk. His name is Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti ﵀. The text he composes is called Mi’raj al-Su’ud ila Nayl Hukm Mujallab al-Sud — The Ladder of Ascent toward the Verdict on the Importation of Blacks.
In that text he sets down, point by point, in legal terms: skin color is no ground for slavery. The populations of Bornu, Kano, Katsina, Gao, Djenne, Timbuktu, the Fulani regions are Muslim. Enslaving them — even by other Muslims — is haram. He names the peoples by name. He indicts those who do it.
That was 1615. Twenty years before the Dutch West India Company established itself in Suriname. A full century before the peak of the Atlantic slave trade. Ahmad Baba ﵀ did not address the European slave merchants — he wrote within an Islamic legal framework, to Muslim addressees from Touat. But his fatwa traveled. Through Saharan manuscript circuits. Through Sankoré pupils who moved to Hausaland. Through copies that, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, circulated as far as Sokoto and — through Brazilian Malê networks — as far as Bahia.
That means something that, on first reading, hurts.
The books of Ahmad Baba ﵀ traveled along the same Atlantic routes as the people for whom he had written. The manuscripts that ruled that these people might not be enslaved came alongside these people — sometimes in the same harbors, with the same Portuguese and Dutch traders — across the ocean. Some reached Maranhão, Bahia, Havana. Some reached Sapelo Island via routes we can no longer trace. The theology that had condemned their wrong followed them.
That is heartbreaking. That is also: a conversation across generations. Ahmad Baba ﵀, from his library in Timbuktu, has reached out a hand over the heads of conquerors and traders to the Malê imams of Bahia. To Bilali Muhammad ﵀ on Sapelo. To Omar ibn Said ﵀ in Fayetteville. To everyone in whose bags, in whose memory, in whose teaching that fatwa — or only the idea of that fatwa — came along. And through them outward, to us.
Whoever in this hall tonight bends an ear can still hear that voice. It has never gone away. It is simply very quiet.
You Are Not Here By Chance
I want to say something to you. Directly. Without detours.
The Caribbean-Dutch Muslim sitting in this hall tonight holds a line in his or her hands that reaches further back than he or she sometimes thinks. That line does not run straight. It is broken, restored, broken, restored. It runs through plantations in Carolina where grandchildren prayed on cushions their mothers could no longer explain to them. It runs through Salvador-Bahia where seventy men in white clothing died for a prayer they had prepared. It runs through Sapelo Island where a grandmother said al-hamdu lillah and then said: now we go play. It runs through a cell in Fayetteville where a man of sixty wrote surat al-Mulk with charcoal on a stone wall. It runs through Timbuktu, where a scholar in a Moroccan cell had written that his peoples might not be enslaved, and that fatwa kept traveling through centuries and oceans like a signature beneath the dignity of a continent.
That line ends with you. Not for everyone via the same ancestor. Not via the same tariqa. Not via the same plantation. But as a Muslim descendant of Caribbean slavery — or of the indentured labor that followed it — you stand in a story larger than your biography. You walk in a shadow in which Ahmad Baba ﵀, Ayuba ﵀, Bilali ﵀, Omar ﵀, the Malê imams of 1835, the grandmothers of Sapelo, and all those nameless others who have carried their faith through under conditions designed to kill it — have gone before you together.
You are not here by chance.