The presence of Muslims in early America has been largely forgotten in part because the complicated role of religion in the origins of slavery has been written out of history in favor of the distinctions made according to race. Some of the original laws regarding the importation of enslaved men and women were more concerned with the content of forced laborers’ beliefs than with the color of their skin. The reason for this, from the perspective of Europeans of the time, was clear: Belief could spread in a way that color could not. As a Spanish law of 1685 stated, “The introduction of Mohammedan slaves into America is forbidden on account of the danger which lies in their intercourse with the Indians.” As in so many moments in American history, religious difference was regarded as highly contagious, and thus dangerous.
Having a less fraught history with Islam than the Spanish, the English colonists paid less attention to the religious commitments of the people they enslaved, but they too were not blind to religion’s role in the creation and maintenance of a colonial economy built on forced labor. In the beginning of slavery in the English colonies of North America, it was assumed that Christians should not be slaves. Christian servants might work for a predetermined period under strictures of indenture that were often barely distinguishable from slavery, and their indenture could be bought and sold as if they were slaves, but the duration of their servitude was limited by definition. Non-Christians, on the other hand, could be trapped in bondage for life.
This arrangement proved untenable, however. If slavery was defined in relation to belief, then conversion would become a potential path to freedom. This possibility put Christian slaveholders in the uncomfortable position of accepting the theory that the Gospel should be spread to all people in all lands, but recognizing that conversion of the enslaved would have ruinous financial effects. Another law reflected this concern: “The conferring of baptisme doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or freedom,” a Virginia statute of 1667 states, “divers masters, freed from this doubt, may more carefully endeavor the propagation of Christianity.”
The development of this approach to the religious lives of the enslaved suggests another reason for the disappearance of Islam from popular understandings of slavery: the belief that Africans brought to America could be spiritually transformed by the will and at the word of Europeans. As the Virginia law continues, all enslaved men and women “brought or imported into this country, either by sea or land, whether Negroes, Moors, Mollattoes or Indians, who and whose parentage and native country are not Christian… they shall be converted to the Christian faith.”
The legal possibility of keeping Christians as slaves did not immediately translate into widespread conversion of the enslaved, however. Throughout the colonial period, most slaveholders remained reluctant to offer salvation to the people they considered their property. To begin with, conversion was seen as needlessly expensive—the hours spent in religious instruction and then in worship were hours in which a valuable resource was not being properly invested. Allowing Christianized slaves to honor the Sabbath with a day of rest, for example, would mean a loss of one-seventh of their productivity. Moreover, many slave owners did not care enough about religion themselves to even entertain the notion of converting their slaves. A common understanding of plantation owners in the eighteenth century was that they had “No other God but Money, nor Religion but Profit.” One newspaper wit of the day suggested, “Talk to a Planter of the Soul of a Negro, and he’ll be apt to tell ye that the Body of one of them may be worth twenty Pounds, but the Souls of an hundred of them would not yield him one Farthing.” The traveler Peter Kalm, who provided a view of colonial America similar to that of the new nation offered ninety years later by Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote in 1745 that it was “greatly to be pitied that the masters of the Negroes in most of the English Colonies take little care of their Spiritual welfare and let them live on in their pagan darkness.” The reason for this, Kalm noted, was that even the pious among the slave owners feared what would happen if the people they kept in bondage came to see themselves as spiritual equals.
As the majority of the enslaved population became natives of this country—that is, born in the newly birthed United States of America rather than transported across the ocean in chains—the tendency to avoid or even prevent the conversion of slaves began to change. By the time of Omar ibn Said’s enslavement in the early nineteenth century, the position of many slave owners was that, contrary to previous generations’ assumptions about Christianity’s potentially destabilizing influence, conversion could be good for all concerned, provided it was properly deployed. Slave owners frequently gave voice to the religious justification that it was their Christian obligation to educate their servants in the tenets of their faith. As the attendees of an 1845 meeting on “the religious instruction of the negroes” suggested, “the duty of imparting a Revelation which Divine Providence has placed in our hands, to those whom the same Providence has made dependent on us, we trust may be assumed.”
The motivation for this duty, however, was of course not purely spiritual. It was also a matter of control. “I am perfectly satisfied, from long observation, of the beneficial effects of religious instruction on the minds and hearts of the blacks,” one slaveholder wrote. “Those who have grown up under such instruction are more honest, truthful, moral, and well-behaved, more neat and clean in their dress, more improved in their manners, and devoted to their owners’ interests than those who have not enjoyed the same advantages.” With less pretense of piety or the niceties of good manners, another slave owner put it plainly, “plantations under religious instruction are more easily governed, than those that are not.”
Such understandings transformed the faith that had been seen as an obstacle to slavery into a virtual requirement, as exposure to Christianity became part of the experience of bondage. Haven Percy, the mid-twentieth-century historian of American Christianity, summed up the religious assumptions of slaveholders as follows: “The Negro, like other men, is innately religious, and he will get his religion in distorted form through leaders of his own race if deprived of white guidance. Since the Christian life consists in grateful acceptance of the station to which one has been called, and faithful performance of the duties of that station, conversion will produce the most obedient slaves.”
The basic assumption that Christianity was an unqualified benefit to the enslaved was not only a matter of self-justification on the part of those who profited from the arrangement, however. It was shared also by those who opposed slavery. Abolitionists told stories of men and women who won their freedom by becoming Christians and making their lives into living versions of Exodus. Such tales of emancipation were often approached through the model of religious conversion narratives, in which Christian terms were applied to both the condition of slavery and the desire to overcome it.
The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, for example, described the moment at which Douglass, born a slave on a Maryland plantation, first was moved to resist mistreatment by his master, a “nigger-breaker” called Covey. When he found the courage to raise his fists against this cruel man, it was, he wrote, akin to spiritual conversion. “My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place; and I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact.” Thereafter, he experienced “a glorious resurrection, from the tomb of slavery, to the heaven of freedom.”
Another example can be found in the controversial leader of an unsuccessful slave uprising in 1831, Nat Turner, who is often remembered for the biblical tropes of his message. Exposed to the Christian faith by the Methodist minister who was his first owner, Turner infamously was inspired by otherworldly visions to lift a hatchet against a later master’s family, and then to lead a revolt against other plantations nearby. As he later described his visions in the “Confession” he gave before his execution: “I saw white spirits and black spirits engaged in battle, and
the sun was darkened—the thunder rolled in the Heavens, and blood flowed in streams—and I heard a voice saying, ‘Such is your luck, such you are called to see, and let it come rough or smooth, you must surely bare it.’ ” Moved by what he took to be an experience akin to those of biblical prophets, he was baptized in a river, as Jesus himself was when he began his mission, and then, Turner said, “I heard a loud noise in the heavens, and the Spirit was loosened, and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men.” In the model of Christ, he would “fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching when the first should be last and the last should be first.”
Both Douglass and Turner describe their experiences in terms clearly drawn from Christian scripture, but neither man was informed exclusively by Christianity. In Douglass’s case, before the showdown with Covey that left him so elated, he had been urged by a friend, in accordance with traditional African beliefs, to find a particular plant and keep it in his pocket. “He told me, with great solemnity, I must go back to Covey,” Douglass wrote, “but that before I went, I must go with him into another part of the woods, where there was a certain root, which, if I would take some of it with me, carrying it always on my right side, would render it impossible for Mr. Covey, or any other white man, to whip me. He said he had carried it for years; and since he had done so, he had never received a blow, and never expected to while he carried it.” Douglass expressed incredulity that this practice would have any benefit, despite American precedents dating back to the aduru magic used during colonial slave revolts, and even to the Hoodoo of Tituba. Still, he recognized that it was an expression of belief from which many of the enslaved drew strength. The decidedly non-Christian practice of carrying the root, then, was part of his explicitly Christian “resurrection.”
Turner, too, was shaped not only by the biblical lessons he had first learned from the Methodist minister who had owned him in his youth but by traditional beliefs his mother and grandmother had brought with them across the Middle Passage. Such traditions knew the “Spirit” Turner had heard speak not as the Holy Spirit of the Gospels but as a Yoruba figure known variously as Eshu or Legbo, the god of messages, known for communicating with elements of the natural world. “Laboring in the field, I discovered drops of blood on the corn as though it were dew from heaven,” Turner recalled, “and I then found on the leaves in the woods hieroglyphic characters, and numbers, with the forms of men in different attitudes, portrayed in blood, and representing the figures I had seen before in the heavens.” These messages, together with the prophetic model of the Bible, formed the revelation that led to his rebellion.
In the stories of Douglass and Turner, and others like them, focus on the Christian elements at the expense of perhaps less-respected religious influences has served to create a kind of conversion narrative of the entire experience of slavery and its eventual end, making it seem as if becoming Christian was a necessary step in the struggle for freedom. Certainly a shift among the enslaved from beliefs brought to beliefs imposed did eventually occur on a communal level, giving rise to the distinctly syncretic tradition of African American Christianity, also known as the black church; but this evolution often elides the complexity of the individual lives and the struggles of those caught between one faith and the next.
This was particularly true in the case of Islam, the one set of beliefs brought by the enslaved that stressed its singularity as fervently as did Christianity. The seventeenth-century laws mentioned above allude to enslaved followers of Islam as a group, but the experiences of individuals can also be found throughout the historical record. The historian Allan Austin has catalogued and described the captivity endured by seventy-five Muslim men in both the English colonies and the young United States, many of whom left written evidence of their enduring religious affiliation with Islam. Indeed, among those who became known outside the households or plantations by which they were enslaved, literacy was not only a common bond but the trait that set them apart. The ability to read and write commanded respect in a society that did not yet take these skills for granted. Moreover, such skills represented a potential danger to a well-ordered plantation, suggesting the possibility of slaves communicating across distances and in the silence of the written word. These two implications of literacy—respect and risk—occasionally conspired to win enslaved Muslims their freedom.
Such was the case for the earliest recorded individual Muslim enslaved in North America, Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, who became known in both England and the colonies as Job ben Solomon Jallo in the 1730s. The story of Diallo’s capture and enslavement—published by the Annapolis judge Thomas Bluett in London in 1734—serves as a reminder that while slavery may have become our nation’s “peculiar institution,” it was not particular or unique to the United States. Diallo, born in Catumbo, in present-day Angola, had assisted his father as an imam, or Islamic teacher, in their community. From his father he learned to read the Quran as well as to read and speak Arabic in addition to the local Wolof language.
Just as Christian ministers in the colonies were as likely as anyone to purchase slaves (or, like Cotton Mather, to receive them as a gift), in his native land Diallo’s family of religious leaders had been wealthy enough that they had slaves of their own. As he later recounted the tale of how he came to be enslaved, in February of 1730 he had been sent by his father to sell two men, members of a neighboring non-Muslim nation, either for cash or in exchange for paper, a prize commodity in a family of scholars. When he could not reach an agreement with the English shipping captain acting as slave merchant, Diallo traded the two men for livestock and then prepared to rest for the night. After he had put down the sword he had carried with him for the journey, he was ambushed and brought back to the same Englishman with whom he had dealt the day before—this time not as a seller negotiating a price but as the one being sold.
Diallo was transported to the Americas in chains and was soon purchased at the harbor in Annapolis, the same site at which Alex Haley’s ancestor Kunta Kinte would be sold to a Virginia plantation owner twenty-seven years later. Put to work on Kent Island across the Chesapeake Bay—not far from the scene of Jacob Lumbrozo’s trial for blasphemy—he harvested tobacco until the work proved too physically demanding for a man of slight frame unused to long stretches of manual labor. In a bitter turnabout given the exchange he had made for two men before his capture, he was put to the task of tending livestock.
He might have passed the rest of his days as a cowherd. Like Omar ibn Said eighty years later, however, Diallo’s future would be determined by his frequent seeking of solace in the prayers of his youth. While in the pastures of Kent Island, Thomas Bluett notes, “Job would often leave the Cattle, and withdraw into the Woods to pray; but a white Boy frequently watched him, and whilst he was at his Devotion would mock him, and throw Dirt in his Face. This very much disturbed Job, and added to his other Misfortunes; all which were increased by his Ignorance of the English Language, which prevented his complaining, or telling his Case to any Person about him.” And once again like Omar ibn Said, he soon decided to take his chances as a runaway. He headed off to the woods as if to pray but then kept going, and did not stop running until he reached the Delaware Bay.
It was not long before he was captured. When Judge Bluett heard of a strange man locked in his jail, he brought a contingent of curious gentlemen to see him. They found that he “could not speak one Word of English,” but “Upon our Talking and making Signs to him, he wrote a Line or two before us, and when he read it, pronounced the Words Allah and Mahommed; by which, and his refusing a Glass of Wine we offered him, we perceived he was a Mahometan, but could not imagine of what Country he was, or how he got thither; for by his affable Carriage, and the easy Composure of his Countenance, we could perceive he was no common Slave.”
In time, they found ways to communicate. “As to his Religion, ’tis known he was a Mahometan,” Bluett writes, “but more moderate in his Sentiments than most of that Religion ar
e. He did not believe a sensual Paradise, nor many other ridiculous and vain Traditions, which pass current among the Generality of the Turks. He was very constant in his Devotion to God; but said, he never pray’d to Mahommed, nor did he think it lawful to address any but God himself in Prayer. He was so fixed in the Belief of one God, that it was not possible, at least during the Time he was here, to give him any Notion of the Trinity; so that having had a New Testament given him in his own Language, when he had read it, he told me he had perused it with a great deal of Care, but could not find one Word in it of three Gods, as some People talk: I did not care to puzzle him, and therefore answered in general, that the English believed only in one God. He shewed upon all Occasions a singular Veneration for the Name of God, and never pronounced the Word Allah without a peculiar Accent, and a remarkable Pause: And indeed his Notions of God, Providence, and a future State, were in the main very just and reasonable.”
With his captors convinced he was a man not fit for slavery, Diallo’s freedom was soon purchased. He was returned home by way of England, where some well-heeled supporters first introduced him to the royal family before sending him back to Catumbo to be reunited with his own.
All told, Ayuba Suleiman Diallo remained in America less than two years, and so it is perhaps not surprising that he managed to maintain and even publicly affirm his faith. Perhaps more unexpected is the case of the man considered by Allan Austin to be the most famous African in antebellum America. Nearly a century after Diallo used his religious education to prove his humanity and escape the suffering of enslavement, a slave in Mississippi was discovered to be a prince after forty years of forced labor. He, too, revealed the extent of his education in Islam, and became a cause célèbre as a result.
Abd al-Rahman, as a contemporary newspaper account reported, was a man who “though sixty-five years of age” had “the vigour of the meridian of life.” After he was recognized by an Irish doctor who had spent time in what is now Mali four decades earlier, Rahman attracted intense interest particularly among the members of the American Colonization Society, also known as the Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color of America, which advocated sending free blacks to the newly founded colony of Liberia on the west coast of Africa. ACS members, including Secretary of State Henry Clay, believed Rahman might serve as an intermediary to Muslim nations. When the sultan of Morocco heard of the slave’s plight through Clay and announced that he would pay for the prince’s return to his homeland, Rahman’s freedom was obtained by order of President John Quincy Adams.
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