1802: Muslim Slaves in Georgia

1802. Muslims among Savannah, Georgia slaves

In May of this year, two slaves who served as animal drivers on a large, Georgia plantation escaped. Like many slaves, we know precious little about who they were: it is rare that slaves left any written records, and typically what we know comes from what others might have said about them in passing. In this case, however, the names of the two provide us with an important clue: “Alik” and “Abdalli” suggest that both were Muslim.[1]

RELATION TO CLASS READING
As Kambiz Ghanea Bassiri points out in A History of Islam in America, the earliest Muslim population in the United States consisted of slaves brought to the colonies from the western shores of Africa.[2] Scholars like Ghanea Bassiri are learning that, if we want to know more about the slave population in this country, we need to research not only information about life here, we must find out more about their African homelands. One of the consequences of this new approach is the discovery that large areas of the west African coastline—the Senegambian region—had become Muslim by the early nineteenth century. No one knows for certain if Alik and Abdalli came from those areas (or if any of their family did), but the chances are good: slaves from this region were valued by whites in the southern colonies because of their ability to farm in hot, humid climates (growing crops that included rice), and both of these men escaped from a Georgia plantation near Savannah and a series of islands off the Georgia coast.

INFORMATION ABOUT MUSLIM LIFE IN U.S.
One of these islands was Sapelo, and it is significant because among the small plantations on it lived a slave named Bilali. His owner was a man named Thomas Spalding, who used to put Bilali in charge of the plantation when he was away. That fact is interesting, given some of the claims GB makes about the attitudes of white people toward Muslims in the early United States. Of course, Bilali undoubtedly was trustworthy. But it is interesting to think that perhaps one of the reasons Spalding perceived him as so trustworthy is that he was religious. More specifically, Bilali practiced his religion with a degree of seriousness that may have made him seem less like a typical “Negro” (his Muslim faith helped to “de-negrofy” him, as GB says). He would have seen Bilali pray regularly, reserve Friday for special prayers, maintain the fast at Ramadan, and pass along his faith to his children (he had seven daughters, all with “Muslim” names: Magret, Bentoo, Chaalut, Medina, Yaruba, Fatima, Hestuh).

Much of what we know about Bilali comes from interviews done with descendents, particularly the daughter of Magret, Katie Brown, who was interviewed in 1940 as part of a government project to record the histories of people whose stories might be forgotten easily. Katie brown was one of the oldest inhabitants of Sapelo Island in the 1930s when she spoke about her grandparents, Bilali and Phoebe.

Belali an he wife Phoebe pray on duh bead. Dey wuz bery puhticulah bout duh time dey pray an dey bery regluh bout duh hour. Wen duh sun come up, wen it straight ober head an wen it set, das duh time dey pray. Dey bow tuh duh sun an had lill mat tuh kneel on. Duh beads on a long string. Belali he pull bead an he say “Belambi, Hakabara, Mahamadu.” Phoebe she say “Ameen, Ameen.”[3]

The details of this description allude to the Muslim faith shred by Bilali and Phoebe: prayer at regular hours (fixed by the position of the sun), the use of prayer beads and prayer mats and, of course, the reference to “Mahamadu.”

These practices are corroborated by others from nearby St. Simons Island, who also were interviewed for the same project. Resident Ben Sullivan recalls stories of two slaves from his grandfather’s generation, Daphne and a man named “Old Israel.” Daphne prayed regularly wearing a veil in the style of the traditional Muslim hijab. “Ole Israel,” Sullivan explains, “he pray a lot wid a book he hab wut he hide, an he take a lill mat an he say he prayuhs on it. He pray wen duh sun go up and wen duh sun go down. . . . He alluz tie he head up in a wite clawt and seem he keep a lot uh clawt on hand.”

One of the qualities that set these slaves apart from others might have been their connection to the written word. In an age when so few African slaves could read or write, certain Muslim slaves seem to have been associated with the written word. Because of the fact that Allah’s revelation is made available by the prophet Muhammad through the Qur’an, it is natural that serious Muslims anywhere would recognize how important a text can be.

IMPLICATIONS FOR IDEAS AND THEMES IN U.S. MUSLIM HISTORY
It is unlikely, however, that these Muslim slaves were truly literate. Bilali is an interesting case because his name is associated with a text that seems to have been a random collection of words and passages from the Qur’an and Muslim commentators. Without the ability to really understand the words, the text itself became sacred as an object—a sort of talisman that could bring good or bad things. As naïve and superstitious as that seems to us, it is not completely unfamiliar to the way we all treat sacred objects within religious systems of belief, including Muslims today who revere the Qur’an and its original language, Arabic.

In fact, these Muslim slaves were not the only ones who treated this text superstitiously. It became known as Bilali’s “diary.” As GB tells readers, the American author and Savannah, Georgia resident Joel Chandler Harris (1843-1908) wrote about the text, which he probably learned about through inflated accounts of its importance or powers. Because he had no more interest than other whites in learning something accurate about the Muslim faith of Georgia slaves, he simply chose to give it a name that sounded foreign: “Ben Ali’s Diary.” It figured in his 1895 book The Story of Aaron (so Named). Harris’s attitude toward Islam persists today as Americans show little interest in moving beyond Muslim stereotypes fueled by prayer in a strange language and an apparent worship of the Holy Qur’an (recall the July, 2010 threat by Gainsville, FL church members that they would burn copies of the Qur’an because it is “the religion of the devil”).[4]

[1] Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African American Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: U. of North Carolina Press, 1998), 76. Much of the following information comes from chapter 4 of Gomez’s book, “Prayin’ on duh Bead: Islam in Early America.”
[2] Kambiz Ghannea Bassiri, A History of Islam in America (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2010), 15-52.
[3] Georgia Writers’ Project, Drums and Shadows: Survival Stories among the Georgia Coastal Negroes (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1940), 161.
[4]Lauren Russell, “CNNUS,” July 30, 2010, http://articles.cnn.com/2010-07-29/us/florida.burn.quran.day_1_quran-burning-florida-church-terry-jones-american-muslims-religion?_s=PM:US .