Servants of Allah

African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas, 15th Anniversary Edition

Sylviane A Diouf

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781479830510
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Religión

· “A must read… Goes beyond generalities and sheds light.” – Yvonne Haddad, Georgetown University

“An important scholarly work… a testament.” – Lamin Sanneh, Yale University

1

African Muslims, Christian Europeans, and the Transatlantic Slave Trade

When the first Africans were deported to the New World, beginning in 1501, Islam was already well established in West Africa. The religion revealed to the Arabian trader Muhammad between 609 and 632 C.E. had been introduced to North Africa as early as 660. South of the Sahara it had been known since the eighth century through contacts with merchants from the north. Islam in its orthodox Sunni form started to spread, however, after the conversion of the two rulers War Diaby, from Takrur in northern Senegal—which, by applying the sharia, or Islamic law, became the first West African Muslim state—and Kosoy, from Gao in present-day Mali. Both conversions occurred at the beginning of the eleventh century. Within fifty years, Islam had expanded from the banks of the Senegal River in the west to the shores of Lake Chad in the east. Malian traders and clerics introduced it to Northern Nigeria—where the Muslims became known as Malé, or people coming from Mali—in the fourteenth century.¹

In contrast to its arrival in North Africa, where it had been brought by the invading Arabs, the spread of Islam in sub-Saharan Africa followed a mostly peaceful and unobtrusive path. Religious wars or jihad, came late—in the eighteenth and especially the nineteenth century—and Islam was diffused not by outsiders (except in the early years) but by indigenous traders, clerics, and rulers. These carriers of the faith were natives and therefore identified culturally and socially as well as ethnically with the potential converts. Some fundamental features of traditional religions and customs, such as the ritual immolation of animals, circumcision, polygamy, communal prayers, divination, and amulet making, also were present in Islam. Such affinities facilitated conversion as well as accommodation and tolerance of others’ rituals and beliefs. Africans themselves considered Islam an African religion.

Islam and Islamic populations quickly became an integral part of the West African landscape; but Islam was not the religion of the majority, and its followers coexisted with non-Muslims. Some Muslim rulers governed largely non-Muslim populations, while polytheist kings often had Muslim subjects. Muslim minorities could be found in practically every town, Muslim majorities in many. Islam was initially the religion of traders and rulers, but depending on the time and place, it also became the religion of the masses in opposition to their “pagan” leaders. As with any religion, Islam in Africa had a variety of followers—the devout, the sincere, the casual believers, the fundamentalists, the lightly touched, and the mystics.

Starting in the fifteenth century, Islam in West Africa gradually became associated with the Sufi orders. The Sufis stress the personal dimension of the relationship between Allah and man, as embodied in surah 2:115: “Wherever you turn, there is Allah’s Face.” They emphasize rituals and devotional practices such as the recitation of the Qur’an, incantations (dhikr), music to attain spiritual ecstasy (sama), meditation, acts of devotion, asceticism, retreats (khalwa), and fasting as techniques to get closer to God. Their leaders offer a mystic path (tariqah) to the believer that is more personal, more immediate, and more “human” than the intellectual and legalistic way of the ulama (learned men). The Sufi brotherhood also serves as a social organization that links its members over geography, ethnicity, and social class. They recite the Qur’an together and have their particular holy days and pilgrimages. There is usually much cohesion and support among the members of the brotherhood. The most extensive Sufi order in West Africa until the mid nineteenth century was the Qadiriyya, founded by Abdul-Qader Gilani, who lived in Baghdad from 1078 to 1166. With the deportation of Africans across the Atlantic, Sufism, which was dominant in West Africa, took hold in the New World; the traces it left can still be detected today, as is assessed in later chapters.

Just as they were part of a local milieu, the West African Muslims belonged to a much larger sphere—an Islamic world with pockets of followers from Spain to China. The West African Muslim world had direct economic, religious, and cultural ties to the Maghreb, Egypt, and the Middle East and was evolving in what today would be called a global market of ideas and goods. Kingdoms and empires such as Kanem and Mali had established diplomatic relations with Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, and Algeria. Pilgrims on their way to Mecca spent time in Egypt. The sultan of Kanem, Mai Dunama Dibbalemi (c. 1221–1259), built a school in Cairo for his subjects who were studying there. Mansa Musa of Mali—who, on a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, spent so much gold that he single-handedly drove the gold market down—brought back to his country lawyers and descendants of the prophet Muhammad, as well as a Spanish-born Muslim architect, and sent numerous students to North Africa. There was a constant exchange of religious commentators, scholars, lawyers, and theologians between sub-Saharan Africa, the Maghreb, and the Middle East. “Natives of Cairo, of the great desert, of Medina and Mecca … even the imperial Sherfa tribe [descendants of the prophet Muhammad]” visited the region, stopping over in “heathen” lands such as Asante, as reported by Joseph Dupuis, a British consul who met some of these travelers at the court of the asantehene.² Because they introduced new ideas, perspectives, and goods, the Muslims were the catalysts of change and modernization in West Africa.

Literacy among African Muslims

One invaluable innovation these Muslims brought, which would later be important to the Muslims of the New World, was literacy. Islam emphasizes literacy, though Muhammad himself could not read or write, and the Qur’an is very explicit about the need to study. The second surah, “The Heifer,” states: “Those to whom We have given the Book study it as it should be studied” (v. 121). In West Africa, literacy and the spread of Islam went hand in hand, as John Hunwick stresses:

Wherever Islam spread encouragement was given to the learning of Arabic and to the foundation of both small schools for teaching the reading of the Koran and higher schools for deeper study of the Arabic language and the literature of Muslim peoples—more especially the theological and legal literature which was to form the basis of both the spiritual and temporal life of the new converts. Once established in an area as the language of the religion, Arabic was soon put to other more worldly ends, for purposes of trade, politics and family records.³

Literacy in Arabic is of primary importance in Islam, because believers rely on the Qur’an not only to understand the religion but also to guide them in their daily life, to provide them with the right prayers for different circumstances, and to instruct them on legal matters and proper social behavior.

Contrary to the norm in Europe at the time, both peasants and girls were taught how to read and write. Concerning female literacy, French slave dealer Theophilus Conneau mentioned in his memoirs that while he was visiting the region of Timbo (Guinea), at the beginning of the nineteenth century, he saw “many elderly females … soon in the morning and late at evening, reading the Koran.”⁴ Lamine Kebe, a former Qur’anic teacher enslaved in the United States, made a point of mentioning that he had a few girls (7 percent) in his school in Futa Jallon (Guinea) and that his own aunt “was much more learned than himself, and eminent for her superior acquirements and for her skills in teaching.”⁵ He further gave his interlocutor the names of “women who have been devoted teachers for life, and have rivaled some of the most celebrated of the other sex in success and reputation for talent and extraordinary acquisitions.”⁶ This is not an isolated case; women in other parts of the Muslim world, including Africa, were recognized for their knowledge. Miriam, a daughter of Usman dan Fodio, the leader of the jihad in Northern Nigeria, was so reputed, as was his mother, Ladi.⁷ Nevertheless, female literacy was not as extensive as male literacy—usually girls form about 20 percent of the students in Qur’anic schools—and one of Usman dan Fodio’s grievances against the old order was that it did not do enough to encourage girls to go to school. He strongly denounced the men who treated women “like household implements which become broken after long use … this is an abominable crime. Alas—how can they shut up their wives, their daughters, and their captives in the darkness of ignorance while daily they impart knowledge to their students.”⁸

Not only were the schools accessible to boys and girls in a coed setting, but they were also open to non-Muslims. Some parents sent their children to the marabout (teacher, cleric) because literacy was prestigious and useful and those schools were the only educational structures available. This phenomenon is mentioned by Mungo Park, who visited Senegambia, Guinea, and Mali from 1795 to 1797, and by French explorer Gaspard Theodore Mollien, who was in the same area in 1818.⁹

The striving for literacy was quite strong in West Africa. When Al-Maghili, the Algerian scholar and counselor of King Rumfa, left Kano, Nigeria, at the end of the fifteenth century, the city boasted three thousand teachers, as Al-Maghili stressed in his accounts. One hundred years later, Timbuktu in Mali had 150 schools.¹⁰ Among the first acts of the religious leaders who founded the theocracies of Bundu, Futa Jallon, Futa Toro, and Sokoto, was to build more schools and encourage higher learning. It is telling that European visitors were quite surprised by the number of schools in West Africa compared to the norm in their own countries. Mungo Park, for example, noted that the Fulani of Bundu in Senegal had established little schools in every city. A director of the French trading company, La Compagnie du Sénégal who was very impressed with the Mandingo emphasized that almost all could read and write and that they had public schools in which marabouts taught Arabic to the children.¹¹ Baron Roger, a governor of Senegal, remarked as late as 1828 that “there are villages in which we find more Negroes who can read and write the Arabic, which for them is a dead and scholarly language, than we would find peasants in our French countryside who can read and write French!”¹²

Even if only basic, literacy was widespread in Muslim West Africa, so much so that by the end of the nineteenth century the French estimated that 60 percent of all Senegalese were literate in Arabic. In the 1880s, a French traveler remarked that “though Timbuktu is no longer a great center of erudition, the population is schooled, the majority of its inhabitants can read and write and know a large part of the Koran by heart, and they can discuss it.”¹³ By the end of the nineteenth century, Futa Jallon had three thousand schools and Northern Nigeria twenty-five thousand, as reported by the French and British colonial administrations.¹⁴

A large proportion of the Muslims could read and write in Arabic and in ajami, the generic name given to their own language transcribed in the Arabic alphabet. They were avid readers of the Qur’an, and many knew it by rote. Among these were thousands who ended their lives enslaved in the Americas, where their literacy played a significant role in their individual development, the shaping of their community, their relations with non-Muslims, their pursuit of freedom, and the rebellious movements they led or participated in.

Slavery and Islamic Law

Islam in Africa had a definite influence on governance, the administration of justice, and the institution of slavery. The Muslims who were enslaved in the Americas, like their non-Muslim neighbors, were familiar with slavery. Some had already been slaves while others had been slaveholders, and those who were neither had nevertheless experienced life in slave societies. How the Muslims viewed slavery, what form it had in Africa, how one became a slave, and how a slave could become free offer important clues to understanding how Muslims would live and react to their own enslavement in a foreign, Christian land.

African slavery did not follow one model; the institution varied according to region, people, time, and religion. There were, however, similarities among the different African systems and huge differences with American slavery. Whereas kidnapping in the early days and straight purchase of prisoners of war were the methods by which the Americans and Europeans acquired their African slaves, wars were the principal sources of captives in West Africa. The Africans’ viewpoint on the matter is of particular interest. When Frenchman Gaspard Mollien told a group of Senegalese in 1818 that the European battlefields were covered “with thousands of dead, they could not conceive that the Europeans could massacre men since it would be more profitable and humane to sell them than to kill them.”¹⁵

Besides war captives, in non-Muslim states criminals were enslaved, as, sometimes, were debtors who had first pawned themselves or members of their family to their creditor and could not repay their debt. With the development of the transatlantic slave trade, penal slavery increased very rapidly in these regions. Rulers added new categories of crimes punishable by enslavement as they saw fit. On this point British slave dealer Francis Moore emphasized, “Since the slave-trade has been used, all punishments are changed into slavery; there being an advantage on such condemnation, they strain for crimes very hard, in order to get the benefit of selling the criminal.”¹⁶

Slaves were used as porters, soldiers, palace guards, domestics, and concubines but mostly as agricultural laborers. They either lived with their owner’s family and worked partly for them and partly for themselves or were settled in slave villages to work as sharecroppers. In these arrangements, their status resembled that of the European serf, as historian John Thornton points out: “African slaves were often treated no differently from peasant cultivators, as indeed they were the functional equivalent of free tenants and hired workers in Europe.” In addition, “slaves were often employed as administrators, soldiers, and even royal advisors, thus enjoying great freedom of movement and elite life-styles.”¹⁷ The absolute chasm that existed between the slave and the slaveholder in the Americas was unknown in Africa. Several European travelers who were familiar with the American system expressed surprise at the “leniency” of the African model. Francis Moore noted in the 1730s that “some of the Negroes [in Gambia] have many house slaves, which are their greatest glory; those slaves live so well and easy, that it is sometimes a hard matter to know slaves from their masters or mistresses.”¹⁸ In Senegal, stressed another European, they were “treated so well, eating with their masters, working along with them, and being as well clothed … that it is impossible to distinguish them from free men.”¹⁹ Furthermore, African slaveholders did not mete out the horrendous punishments that were the lot of the American slave. A British traveler to Senegal remarked, “I never saw any whip or instrument of torture used on that part of the coast, nor do I believe, from the enquiries I made, that Slaves are treated with severity.”²⁰ His assertions were for the most part correct; however, a small number of West African peoples—notably in present-day Ghana and Benin—who practiced human sacrifices killed prisoners of war and slaves on certain occasions. Finally, the selling of slaves born in the family was generally considered unacceptable and shameful, and only those who had been bought could be sold.

The adoption of Islamic law had a decisive effect on slavery in West Africa, for it significantly reduced the causes for enslavement while at the same time encouraging manumission. Islam neither condemned nor forbade slavery but stated that enslavement was lawful under only two conditions: if the slave was born of slave parents or if he or she had been a “pagan” prisoner of war. Captives could legally be made slaves if th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction to the 15th Anniversary Edition
• 1 African Muslims, Christian Europeans, and the Transatlantic Slave Trade
• 2 Upholding the Five Pillars of Islam in a Hostile World
• 3 The Muslim Community
• 4 Literacy: A Distinction and a Danger
• 5 Resistance, Revolts, and Returns to Africa
• 6 The Muslim Legacy
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author