Bilali Muhammad ﵀
A Fulani Muslim from Futa Jallon who, on Sapelo Island, Georgia, ran a plantation of four hundred enslaved people while at the same time writing an Arabic fiqh manuscript. Three generations after him, the Geechee on Sapelo still remembered the five prayers and the Ramadan fast.
Life
He was born around 1770 in Futa Jallon, the mountainous Fulani sultanate in what is today Guinea. Futa Jallon was a reformed Islamic state: founded in 1725 by Karamoko Alfa and Ibrahim Musa, two Fulani ulama whose movement was, half a century before dan Fodio ﵀, already a miniature foreshadowing of what would happen in Sokoto. This is important. Bilali came not from a peripheral Muslim region but from an intellectually active center of West African Islam. He received a scholarly education: Qur’an, Arabic, Maliki fiqh.
He was, probably as a young adult (1800-1803), captured and sold to the Caribbean. He spent some time in the Bahamas — most likely on Middle Caicos, on a plantation of the British colonial elite. There he learned to speak English. Around 1802-1803 the American planter Thomas Spalding bought him, together with a group of other enslaved people, and brought him to Sapelo Island in the Sea Islands of Georgia (~31.47°N, -81.29°W).
Spalding was an unusual planter. He was a pragmatic man who soon appointed Bilali as driver — the title American planters used for an enslaved overseer who had direct authority over a work gang. Within a few years, Bilali was effectively estate manager of the entire plantation: he coordinated the labor of about four hundred people across rice and Sea Island cotton fields, he traded with outside merchants, he managed the equipment. During the British invasion in 1815, Spalding entrusted him with eighty muskets to defend the plantation. An enslaved African, with firearms. That this was possible says something about the exceptional position Bilali occupied.
He lived on Sapelo until his death around 1857. He was buried on the island, in a grave that — according to tradition — was oriented with his face to the east, toward Mecca. He had nineteen children. His community on Sapelo was family-based and Islamically colored in a way that was not preserved elsewhere in the Deep South.
Faith and culture
At a certain moment — the dating is contested, probably between 1820 and 1850 — Bilali wrote an Arabic manuscript of thirteen pages. He wrote it on paper that was available on the plantation, with ink that he probably mixed himself. The document has been the property of the University of Georgia Libraries in Athens (~33.95°N, -83.37°W) since 1931.
What does it contain? Nineteenth-century readers thought it was superstition — “African gibberish”. Only in the late twentieth century was it decoded by Arabists. It turns out to be an incomplete but recognizable Maliki fiqh compendium, largely from Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani ﵀'s Risala — the standard textbook for beginning Maliki students in West Africa. It treats the conditions of wudu (ritual purification), the forms of salah, the rules around adhan and iqama. It is incomplete; large parts are missing, others run into one another. Some researchers (Muhammad al-Ahari, Ronald Judy) think that Bilali wrote from memory, sometimes jumping from page to page — a book he had studied in Futa Jallon but had never been able to consult again.
That makes the manuscript more moving, not less. A man at eighty-five years of age, in Georgia, on an island where no other Arabic text existed, writes from memory the rules he had lived by as a boy. Not for his master — who could not read it. For someone else. For himself, for his children, for whoever after him might be able to decipher the letters.
And on the plantation itself the faith was visible. Bilali and the group of Futa-Jallon Muslims around him prayed the five salawat. They fasted Ramadan — visitors to Sapelo noted that a group of enslaved people in certain months did not eat until sundown. They gave their children Arabic names: Yarruh, Fatima, Medina, Bentoo, Charno. His daughter Phoebe spoke to her grandchildren still about the Allahu akbar and the prayer toward the east.
Legacy
Bilali Muhammad ﵀ is, alongside Omar ibn Said ﵀, the most documented Muslim slave in the United States before Emancipation. His Bilali Document lies in Athens. But his deeper legacy lies in the Geechee community of Sapelo itself — in Hog Hammock (~31.45°N, -81.27°W), the Black village on the island that exists to this day. Cornelia Bailey (1945-2017), Geechee historian and direct descendant, recounted in interviews and in her book God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man (2000) the family tradition: the saraka rice balls that her grandmother still made (a remnant of sadaqa, alms); the amen that was ameen; the custom of kneeling on a cloth for prayer; the name “Bilali” — the muezzin of the Prophet ﷺ — passed down through the family line.
As with Ayuba ﵀ we must here be honest about instrumentalization. Bilali’s exceptional position — trusted driver, literate, pragmatic administrator — was used by Spalding and by later Southern mythology to argue that slavery was not so cruel, that “good” slaves could carry responsibility, that certain Africans were “civilized” (and the rest therefore not). This framing stood entirely apart from Bilali’s own self-understanding. He was a man who preserved his faith and his literacy through a system that tried to erase both, and who left enduring traces of that to his children and grandchildren. The interpretation that turned his life into a defense of slavery was not his. It was the construction of people who could never read him.
On the map
Futa Jallon (~11.3°N, -12.3°W) as source: the reformed Fulani sultanate of Karamoko Alfa. Middle Caicos (~21.8°N, -71.75°W) as way-station in the Bahamas. Sapelo Island, Georgia (31.47°N, -81.29°W) as the plantation where he lived for forty-four years. University of Georgia Libraries, Athens (33.95°N, -83.37°W) where his manuscript lies. Hog Hammock (~31.45°N, -81.27°W) where his Geechee descendants still live. Together with Omar ibn Said ﵀ — Futa Toro to North Carolina — he forms the trans-Atlantic West African Islamic arc on our map: Senegal/Guinea on one side, the Carolinas/Georgia on the other, and the Bahamas in between.
Primary sources: Bilali Muhammad ﵀, Bilali Document (Arabic manuscript, c. 1820-50, University of Georgia Libraries, MS 2826). Cornelia Bailey, God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man (2000) — Geechee family tradition. Charles Colcock Jones, The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States (1842) — contemporary mention of Sapelo Islam. Muhammad Abdullah al-Ahari, Bilali Muhammad: Muslim Jurisprudist in Antebellum Georgia (2005).
Stage pronunciation: “Bilali” as bi-LA-li (stress in the middle, as with the muezzin Bilal ibn Rabah ﵁); “Sapelo” as SA-pe-lo; “Geechee” as GIE-tsjie; “Futa Jallon” as FOE-ta DJAL-lon; “Hog Hammock” as HOG HA-mok.
Uncertainties:
- Birth year “c. 1770” is an estimate based on his stated age at death; precise year unknown.
- Order Bahamas→Sapelo and dating of acquisition by Spalding (1802-1803) are given slightly differently by different sources. “Middle Caicos” is the most accepted Bahamian location but not definitively proven.
- Dating of the Bilali Document “between 1820 and 1850”: paleography gives no narrower window.
- Tradition that he was given eighty muskets during the War of 1812 (British invasion 1815) is confirmed by Spalding family sources but not by independent archives.
- The figure of “about 400” enslaved people on Sapelo is a peak estimate; at any given moment a smaller group worked under Bilali.