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, and he received a scholarly education there in Qur’an, Arabic and 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, and 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, 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, and 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, and 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, and 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 some point between 1820 and 1850, though the dating is contested, 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.

Nineteenth-century readers took its contents for superstition, “African gibberish”, and 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, and 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, out of 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; the writing was 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, and 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. Omar ibn Said ﵀ was carried from Futa Toro to North Carolina, and between them the two men span a trans-Atlantic West African Islamic arc: Senegal and Guinea on one side, the Carolinas and Georgia on the other, and the Bahamas in between. 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; and the name Bilali, borne by Bilal ibn Rabah ﵁, 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 as trusted driver, literate man and 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.

---

Uncertainties:

• The birth year of c. 1770 is an estimate based on his stated age at death, and the precise year is unknown.
• The order Bahamas to Sapelo, and the dating of his acquisition by Spalding in 1802-1803, are given slightly differently by different sources. Middle Caicos is the most accepted Bahamian location, though it has not been definitively proven.
• The dating of the Bilali Document between 1820 and 1850 is as narrow a window as the paleography allows.
• The tradition that he was given eighty muskets during the War of 1812, at the British invasion of 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, and at any given moment a smaller group worked under Bilali.

Sources

• Bilali Muhammad ﵀, the thirteen-page Arabic manuscript (the so-called Ben-Ali Diary, University of Georgia Libraries, Athens): the excerpts from the Risala of Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani ﵀ on ritual ablution and the call to prayer, as described in Diouf, pp. 152, 181–183, and in Austin, pp. 89–91.
• Cornelia Walker Bailey, God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man (New York 2000), and Charles Colcock Jones, The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States (1842): the Geechee family tradition and the contemporary mention, as cited in A Muslim American Slave, p. 149, and in Austin, p. 40.
• Allan D. Austin, African Muslims in Antebellum America: Transatlantic Stories and Spiritual Struggles, Routledge, New York/London 1997, pp. 16, 40, 85–92, 94, 96–98.
  • pp. 85–87, 94: the Fula from Timbo in Futa Jallon as almaamy of Sapelo, with fez, prayer rug and the fasts; Spalding’s eighty muskets, the only instance of armed slaves in antebellum Georgia, and his word that he answered for every Muslim but not for the Christian dogs (also p. 16); Spalding who returned to Georgia in 1802 and owned four hundred to a thousand slaves under Black head men.
  • pp. 89–92: the name Bilali after the first muezzin of the Prophet ﷺ; Greenberg who recognised the excerpts of the Risala in 1940, Martin, al-Ahari and Judy who read the manuscript as the recollections of an aged man; the eighteenth-century Venetian paper that must have been brought from Africa; the stay in the Bahamas.
  • pp. 88, 96–98: Harris who presented Bilali and his son as near-white Arabs; the daughters Margaret, Hester, Charlotte, Fatima, Yoruba, Medina and Binty, his wife Phoebe from the Bahamas, the prayer beads, the saraka cake and the threefold Ameen.
• Sylviane A. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas, 15th anniversary edition, New York University Press, New York 2013, pp. 44, 57, 72, 89–90, 92–94, 104, 115–117, 122, 125–126, 133, 152, 169–170, 181–183, 280.
  • pp. 44, 57, 72, 115–117: Karamoko Alfa and the theocracy of Futa Jallon in 1725; the former cleric from Timbo; the arrival on Sapelo in 1802, bought with his family in the Bahamas, and the seven daughters and twelve sons; John Bell’s inventory on the Caicos Islands of February 1801 with the driver Belley, his wife Phoebe and four children, and the capture as a boy not fully grown.
  • pp. 89–90, 92–94, 104, 122, 125–126: the prayer toward the east at sunrise, noon and sunset on a little mat, the fasting of the whole family, the fez; the saraka rice cake of his daughters as sadaqa; the four hundred and fifty people on the plantation and the eighty Muslims among them; Cornelia Bailey on his distance from the others.
  • pp. 133, 152, 169–170, 181–183, 280: Harris’s Arab; the manuscript from the 1850s, given in 1931 to the Georgia State Library, with the death shortly before 13 October 1857; the burial with his Qur’an; the paper made in Italy for the African market; the washing of the feet that Cornelia Bailey remembered.
• 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. 108, 111–112, 114, 124–125, 139–140, 149: Gomez’s essay on the driver of a plantation of four to five hundred slaves, the defence of 1813 with eighty armed men, the Muslim names of his nineteen children and the testimony of Katie Brown; Cornelia Walker Bailey, born in 1945 and living in Hog Hammock; Austin’s essay on the plantation manager who acted as imam and the manuscript from the 1830s or 1840s on Venetian paper.