The Muslims Among The Enslaved: Three Names Against Oblivion

No one counted them, and no one can now, but among the ten million Africans who survived the Atlantic, hundreds of thousands of Muslims walked. Most of them disappeared without a trace, but of three men, Omar ibn Said ﵀, Bilali Muhammad ﵀ and Ayuba Suleiman Diallo ﵀, there survive documents in their own hand, in Arabic, written on American soil. It is their names that are set down here.

The Qur’an In The Ship’s Hold

Among the Africans loaded into a WIC ship’s hold, or onto a British slaver, or into a French négrier, there were many who knew the Qur’an, in the holds that sailed from Senegambia dozens at a time, though not every one of them knew it by heart or had studied it. Yet each of them had, at some moment before he came aboard in chains, recited Al-Fatiha and said bismillah before he ate, had washed his head before prayer, and had heard that there was One, only One, and that Muhammad ﷺ was His messenger.

Sylviane Diouf, in Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas, declines to give a percentage and speaks of hundreds of thousands of Muslims in the Americas; Michael Gomez counts them in the thousands, if not tens of thousands, for North America alone, and notes that slightly over half of the Africans landed there came from regions where Islam was at least a minority religion; Allan Austin’s estimate of ten to fifteen percent is the most cited but, as Gomez notes, unsubstantiated. What all of them emphasize is the regional skew.

That skew shows at once when the regions are set side by side:

• A ship from Albreda or Bance Island (Gambia mouth) in 1780 carried in great likelihood forty or more Fulbe and Mandinka Muslims per loading: 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, able to read and write Arabic, and 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, since these regions were Christian or traditional.

Multiplied by the millions, these numbers show the scale, and what appears is no footnote but a whole cross-stream of Atlantic slavery that bore an Islamic character, one that on American soil was murdered by the system within one or two generations, though not without leaving traces. Those traces have names, and three of them follow here.

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, a Fulani reform state founded in 1776 by Sulayman Bal and Abdul Kader Kan: a small theocracy of almamys, Fulbe scholars, Maliki fiqh and Qadiriyya tariqa, a world in which highly learned Islam and daily pastoral life fell into one rhythm.

He studied for twenty-five years, and the figure bears repeating: 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, memorized the Qur’an, and studied tafsir, Maliki fiqh, tawhid and sirah, so that 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, since internal Fulani conflicts in this period were sharp. He was carried off, put on a ship, and taken six weeks across the sea, and he set foot on land in Charleston, South Carolina, the largest import harbor for the enslaved in the United States, which he describes in his manuscript simply as “a great house in the Christian land”.

He was bought by a man he calls “Johnson”, who mistreated him, and he fled, walking two hundred kilometers northward. That fact deserves a pause: a man of nearly forty, who had never lived in a wooded landscape, who had never heard of the Appalachians, and who knew nothing of the climate or road structure of North Carolina, walked alone two hundred kilometers over unknown ground, until he was caught in Fayetteville, North Carolina and thrown into a prison cell.

And there begins the story that this article set out to tell.

In that cell he began to write on the walls with charcoal, in Arabic, and his guards did not understand it; they thought at first that these were magical signs, devilish inscriptions, and a local clergyman who came to look understood no more than the guards that this was a language and not magic. So the news spread that this was no ordinary fugitive slave but 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, and 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 of Arabic, with calligraphy that shows his Futa Toro schooling, and it is the only surviving Arabic slave narrative from the antebellum US. It exists, and it lies today in the Library of Congress in Washington DC, digitized and readable.

The text does not open with his name or with his date of birth, but with Surah al-Mulk, “Al-Mulk”, The Sovereignty, chapter 67 of the Qur’an, which Muslims have traditionally read over the dead, and which in the Nubian and West African tradition is recited over those who have lost their way.

That is the opening: a Qur’an recitation over his own buried life and his own lost sovereignty, rather than a Christian conversion or an appeal to his master.

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”, while on the inside he cites surah after surah, al-Fatiha, al-Nasr, al-Mulk, and mentions his twenty-five years of study in Futa Toro with a pride that no genuine convert would show over his “pagan past”. The interpretation that is now scholarly consensus is that Omar pursued a taqiyya strategy: outward conformity, inward continuity.

He wrote in total some fourteen Arabic manuscripts during his slavery, some of them partial Qur’an copies, others short personal texts, and once he wrote down for a visitor the Christian Lord’s Prayer in Arabic, though 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, since Omar was throughout his life a man of letters whose masters could not read him, which 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, and his name is named here.

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, which like Futa Toro was a reform state, founded in 1725 by Karamoko Alfa and Ibrahim Musa, one generation before Sulayman Bal and two generations before Usman dan Fodio ﵀, and which was an intellectual center, a world in which fiqh instruction was given at an adult level.

Bilali Muhammad ﵀ was born around 1770 in Futa Jallon and was captured as a young adult, probably around 1800. 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, and 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 but an intellectual, an experimental farmer, and, unusually for his time, a man who could place pragmatic trust in African competence, so that 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, coordinating the labor of roughly four hundred enslaved people over rice and sea-island cotton fields and negotiating with outside merchants.

And in 1815, during the British invasion of the sea-island coast, the War of 1812 having run into that year, Spalding entrusted him with eighty muskets to defend the plantation, so that an enslaved African stood with firearms to defend his master against another European power, an episode that alone justifies a separate book. Bilali ﵀ led the defense and the British were repulsed, while not a single one of the eighty muskets was turned against the white inhabitants of the island.

What made Bilali ﵀ the man he was is that he had not lost his deen, since on Sapelo, and this is why his story matters, he organized a small Islamic community in which enslaved people from Futa Jallon, and later also others he recruited from new shipments, performed the five salawat and 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, while Bilali ﵀ gave his children Arabic names: Yarruh, Fatima, Medina, Bentoo, Charno, Hestor and Yaruba.

And somewhere between 1820 and 1850, because 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, where it lies today under catalogue number MS 2826, available to researchers. Visitors into the 1980s thought it was babble, weighty-looking pseudo-Arabic, and only late twentieth-century Arabists, Muhammad al-Ahari and Ronald Judy, and 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, and on adhan and iqama, but it is incomplete, passages run into one another, and some parts can no longer be placed in the Qayrawani tradition.

This is why it is important: Bilali ﵀ wrote from memory, without a book to copy from, since there was no Risala on Sapelo Island and no other Arabic text within a thousand kilometers. He sat as an old man, in the 1850s according to Diouf, 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, and so 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 on Sapelo with his face toward the east, 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, a Geechee historian, storyteller and author of God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man (2000), who into the 2010s 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; and the name “Bilali”, the muezzin of the Prophet ﷺ, that was passed down through the family line. She died in 2017, and 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, and 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, and his family belonged to the Toronkawa Fulbe scholarly caste, his father being 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, and ironically also to sell two slaves on his father’s behalf at the English factory, which immediately makes him a complicated figure, since he was no innocent victim in a general sense but 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, and sold him to the British fort at Joar, from where he went onto a slave ship, eight weeks across the Atlantic, and ashore in Annapolis, Maryland.

He was bought by Alexander Tolsey, a planter on Kent Island in Chesapeake Bay, and worked there in the tobacco fields, a labor unknown to a Fulani imam of thirty and one at which his body broke down, so that he fled, was caught in Kent County, and was locked up in the county jail.

And there, in the moment that saves his life, a visitor saw him write Arabic signs in the sand, and that 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, and the letter traveled via Annapolis, across the Atlantic, to London, to Oxford where it was translated, and on 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, and the RAC decided to buy Ayuba ﵀ free, a decision driven partly by genuine astonishment, partly by propaganda value. In 1733 Ayuba ﵀ arrived in London, where he was lionized for a season, introduced to King George II and the royal family, and 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 and was translated into French and German, and together with Francis Moore’s Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa (1738) it formed the image that eighteenth-century Europe developed of West Africa.

Ayuba ﵀ prayed his five prayers in London, openly and in high company, and 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, and several times he wrote out the 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, where he found that his family had thought him dead, that his father had died, and that one of his wives had remarried, and he resumed his imam function. He died in 1773, seventy-two years old.

And here comes the uncomfortable truth that makes the story of Ayuba ﵀ sharp.

The history of Ayuba ﵀ 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, while 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”. The same RAC was meanwhile itself shipping tens of thousands of others to Jamaica, and Bluett, his biographer, was himself enmeshed in the RAC networks, so that his book mentions the civilization of Ayuba ﵀ in the same breath as the argument that the ordinary African may remain enslaved.

This “exception proves the rule” logic recurs 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 but 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, and his faith had survived an Atlantic double-fork without letting itself be bent. He returned as imam, as the same man who in 1731 had gone down the Gambia River, rather than as an English monument or a converted exotic, and 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 they are placed in a wider network. There was a West African Arabic literacy on American plantations, documented in diaries, court records and travel accounts, and a handful of examples can stand alongside these three.

Salih Bilali ﵀ (c. 1765 – c. 1859) was an enslaved Fulbe Muslim from Massina (central Mali), captured as a boy, who ended up on St. Simons Island in Georgia under owner James Hamilton Couper and who became, like Bilali Muhammad ﵀, driver. He signed official documents in Arabic script, including bills of sale preserved in the Couper family archives, and Couper corresponded about him with Theodore Dwight, who in 1844 published fragments from the autobiography of Salih ﵀. Salih ﵀ fasted Ramadan and 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 and no alcohol, and 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, and he died in 1823 and was buried in Georgetown, by tradition with his face toward the east, while 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 ﵀, and 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, received by some as exotica and 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, of which 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, and 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, led by 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, and some had school notebooks with Arabic texts on them, while 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 and several hundred were arrested, and in the subsequent trials, in which the Brazilian authorities found dozens of Qur’ans, prayer mats and Arabic writings, nine executions were carried out, since Brazilian law did not yet allow mass executions. Thousands were deported back to Africa, a bizarre consequence, since 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 (directed 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 matters, not because we romanticize 1835, since 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; it shows too 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 we do not want to let slip, since it connects the numbers with the names, and 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 circulated only in Timbuktu, since copies descended via Mauritanian and Sahelian networks to Hausaland, and 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 that means is that 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 no merely symbolic line but 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, since 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, and it is in fact the core of what we wish to honor here.

Three Names Against Oblivion

At the end it is fitting to be precise about what has been proved and what cannot be proved.

What can be proved:

• Among the ten million Africans who survived the Atlantic, hundreds of thousands of Muslims walked.
• Of three men there survive 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, of which the family of Bilali ﵀ 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 cannot be proved:

• How many Muslims on Curaçao, on Bonaire, in Suriname held to their faith. The Dutch Caribbean archives are there, but they have not yet all been read on this question, and this is work that can yet be done.
• How the question of the qibla played out precisely for most captives. There are indirect indications but no direct accounts.

But we know in any case these three men, we know their names, and we know that Omar ﵀ wrote Arabic with charcoal on a Fayetteville wall, that Bilali ﵀ at eighty wrote out the Risala from memory on Sapelo, and 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, and each name is a record of what these three men did: they carried their faith through places where it could not be read, and they waited for the place in which it could be spoken aloud again.

These were three names, and there were millions, but we know, in any case, these three, and that is for now enough to go on.

May Allah ﷻ be pleased with Omar ibn Said ﵀, with Bilali Muhammad ﵀, with Ayuba Suleiman Diallo ﵀, with Salih Bilali ﵀ and Yarrow Mamout ﵀, and with all those whose names the archives did not catch. He ﷻ knows them, and He ﷻ does not forget.

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Sources

• Omar ibn Said ﵀, A Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar Ibn Said, ed. and trans. Ala Alryyes, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 2011, pp. xi, 3–4, 6, 26, 32, 61, 63, 77, 103, 126.
  • pp. xi, 3–4, 6, 61, 63, 77: the Life of 1831, the only surviving Arabic slave narrative in the United States, twenty-three quarto pages opening with Surat al-Mulk, in Omar’s own words: born in Futa Toro (1770), twenty-five years of study under three sheikhs whom he names, carried off by a big army in 1807 at the age of thirty-seven, a month and a half at sea to Charleston, sold to the evil Johnson, escaped after a month, sixteen days in jail and since then with Jim Owen in Bladen County, whose brother was Colonel John Owen; death in 1864 with the Owens.
  • pp. 26, 32: Alryyes on Omar ﵀ retaining his faith and writing the Lord’s Prayer and Psalm 23 as pieces that do not contradict Islam; the 1854 report of the walls of his cell filled with Arabic petitions written with coals from the ashes.
  • pp. 103, 126: the essay by Michael A. Gomez: Muslims in North America in the thousands, if not tens of thousands; slightly over half of the Africans landed from regions where Islam was at least a minority religion; Allan Austin’s estimate of ten to fifteen percent, which Gomez calls unsubstantiated.
• Thomas Bluett, Some Memoirs of the Life of Job, the Son of Solomon, the High Priest of Boonda in Africa (London 1734), as discussed in Austin, pp. 54–58, and quoted in Diouf, p. 192.
• Francis Moore, Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa (London 1738), the main source on Ayuba ﵀ after his return, as discussed in Austin, pp. 59–60, and quoted in Diouf, p. 233.
• Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani ﵀, al-Risala, the Maliki textbook from tenth-century Kairouan from which the manuscript of Bilali ﵀ contains excerpts, as established in Diouf, pp. 182–183, and Austin, p. 90.
• Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti ﵀, Miʿraj al-suʿud (1615), the fatwa in which unbelief is the only legal ground for slavery, as quoted in Diouf, p. 32.
• Sylviane A. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas, 15th anniversary edition, New York University Press, New York 2013, pp. 29, 32, 44, 47, 69–70, 87, 94, 114, 116–118, 126, 169, 181–183, 186, 192, 233, 246.
  • pp. 44, 47, 69–70: the theocracy of Futa Jallon, founded in 1725 by Karamoko Alfa, with Ibrahima Sori as his successor, and Futa Toro, founded in 1776 by Suleyman Bal and Abdel Kader Kane; Diouf’s deliberate refusal to give a percentage, speaking instead of hundreds of thousands of Muslims in the Americas.
  • pp. 87, 94, 114, 116–118, 126, 169, 181–183: Bilali ﵀ in the 1801 estate inventory on the Caicos Islands as driver with his wife Phoebe and four children; the seven daughters on Sapelo, Margaret, Hester, Yarrabuh, Bintu, Medina, Charlotte and Fatima, who kept their Christian names but were raised as Muslims; Cornelia Bailey as a descendant; Bilali ﵀ with his family, Salih Bilali ﵀ and Diallo ﵀ keeping the fast; Salih Bilali ﵀ as driver of Hopeton, recorded as Tom in the papers; Yarrow Mamout ﵀ praying in public, with Peale’s testimony of 1819; Bilali ﵀ buried with his Qur’an; the thirteen-page manuscript, given in 1931 to the Georgia State Library and now at the University of Georgia, identified by Greenberg as excerpts from the Risala; his death before October 1857.
  • pp. 29, 192, 233: Ayuba Suleyman Diallo ﵀ of Bundu, sold on the Gambia in 1731; his Arabic letter to his father, which reached Oglethorpe of the Royal African Company via Oxford and brought his redemption for forty-five pounds in June 1732; translator for Sir Hans Sloane in London and received by the royal family; the landing at Fort James on 8 August 1734, his father dead and one wife remarried.
  • pp. 32, 186, 246: Ahmad Baba ﵀ on unbelief as the only legal ground, a view shared by the West African Muslims; the amulets found by the Bahian police after 1835; the two hundred suspects deported to Ouidah in November 1835.
• Allan D. Austin, African Muslims in Antebellum America: Transatlantic Stories and Spiritual Struggles, Routledge, New York/London 1997, pp. 22, 31–32, 54–61, 86–87, 89–90, 94, 96, 106, 129, 134, 136.
  • pp. 129, 134, 136: fourteen surviving Arabic manuscripts by Omar ﵀, including the only Arabic autobiography by an American slave; a scholar for twenty-five years, carried off around 1807 and with James Owen around 1811; the Lord’s Prayer he often wrote in Arabic.
  • pp. 54–61: Ayuba ﵀ sent by his father to the Gambia to sell two slaves, captured and shaved bald as a prisoner of war, sold to Captain Pike and in Annapolis to Tolsey of Kent Island; the tobacco, the flight and the jail; the letter to his father and Oglethorpe; the crossing with Bluett in March 1733; the royal family, three Qur’ans written from memory, translation work for Sloane and the portrait; Bluett setting him above the other Africans of the Royal African Company; the landing in the Gambia on 8 August 1734, Bundu in June 1735 and his death in 1773.
  • pp. 22, 31–32, 86–87, 89–90, 94, 96, 106: Couper’s letter of 1838 to William Brown Hodgson, published in 1844; the eighty muskets Spalding entrusted to Bilali ﵀; Spalding’s four hundred to a thousand slaves and the names of Bilali’s daughters; the thirteen-page manuscript, partly translated by Ronald Judy in (Dis)Forming the American Canon (1993) and studied by Muhammad al-Ahari, identified by Greenberg as Risala and kept at the University of Georgia; Salih Bilali ﵀, born around 1765 in Kianah in Massina, bought around 1800 from the Bahamas, head driver from 1816 over about 450 people, who kept Ramadan and could read Arabic but not write it; Yarrow Mamout ﵀, painted by Peale in 1819, freed after building the Bells’ house in Georgetown, owner of his own house, praying in the street and taking no pork or whiskey; Austin’s own estimate of five to ten percent.
• João José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia, trans. Arthur Brakel, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 1993, pp. xiii, 91, 93, 96, 106, 118–119, 127, 206, 217.
  • pp. xiii, 91, 93: the night of 24 January 1835 in Salvador, with hundreds of participants, about six hundred according to Reis, nearly seventy dead and more than five hundred sentenced; the rebels in Muslim dress and the amulets and Qur’an papers on the bodies of the fallen.
  • pp. 96, 106, 118–119, 127, 206, 217: the name Malê from the Yoruba imale; the Arabic lessons and the copying of Qur’an passages in Bahia; 25 January 1835 as 25 Ramadan 1250 and the possible celebration of Laylat al-Qadr; no classic jihad of the sword and not directed against Christians as such; four death sentences, nine slaves sentenced as leaders and thirty-four deportations; the four Africans executed on 14 May 1835.