IB_18

5 / 22

Page 5 The Islamic Bulletin Issue 18
Muslims in the Anti-Bellum South
Job Ben Solomon
Jallo was kidnapped
from his home in Af-
rica and ended up in
America in 1730. He
was sold into slavery
and became increas-
ingly angry with such
a station in life. In a
biography written
about him, Job said
his unhappiness led to much praying, and that once, when he pros-
trated himself in prayer in public, as was his religious custom, a boy
threw mud in his face. Not only was he unhappy with his treatment,
he was also dismayed that he had no place to pray five times a day,
as was the custom of the Muslim faith that he brought with him from
Africa. So, he ran away from Maryland to Pennsylvania.
There, he was imprisoned for lack of documents showing he was
either free or indentured and was eventually returned to his master.
Upon his return, his master was told that Job Ben Solomon wanted
to be treated better and wanted a place to pray. He got both.
But he was not content to remain a slave. He wrote his father in
Africa a letter in Arabic asking for help. James Edward Oglethorpe,
founder of Georgia, became aware of the letter and helped secure a
bond for Job’s release from his master. Job was later sent to England
with the Royal African Co., his new owners, and was introduced
to a number of wealthy Englishmen who eventually paid for him
and set him free. These same friends paid for his return to Gambia.
Job Ben Solomon’s story and dozens of others like his are told
in “African Muslims in Antebellum America: Transatlantic Stories
and Spiritual Struggles,” by Springfield College (Springfield, Mass.)
professor Allan D. Austin. It’s a condensation and updating and
unfolds the lives of more than 80 African Muslims who were slaves
in America between 1730 and 1860.
They came from Nigeria, Gambia, Benin, Togo, Sierra Leone,
Senegal, Mali and other surrounding countries, where many of
them had been political, religious, commercial, or military leaders.
They were valuable as slaves because of their intelligence and
skills. Some were able to return to Africa, while others, like Bilali
Mohammed on Sapelo Island, became leaders on plantations.
Austin, a noted scholar of antebellum black writing and history, visited
Savannah recently and gave a lecture on his book at the Beach Institute.
As a professor of Afro-American Studies, Austin said he knew therewere
a number of slaves who were Muslims because of his research of the
antebellum writings of blacks. So, he planned an essay on the subject.
But his essay grew into a 700-plus page book as he discovered much
more information about the slaves who were Muslim.
Wealth of I nformation
The data Austin gathered provides a realistic portrayal of Africans,
contrary to the portrayal they were given by white writers of the
day. It is not yet possible to tell how many Muslims were taken
out of Africa during the era of international slave trade, Austin
contends. But by looking at available records, he estimates that
between 5 and 10 percent of all slaves taken from Senegal and
the Bight of Benin were Muslims.
Half of all Africans sent to North America came from this region,
Austin said. “If the total number of arrivals were 11 million, as
scholars have concluded, then there may have been about 40,000
African Muslims in the colonial and pre-Civil War territory making
up the United States before 1860.”
Job Ben Solomon was typical of the Muslims who found themselves
in the South. Their spirituality, manners, sense of dignity and in-
telligence impressed slave owners and others. Some erroneously
thought these slaves had received these gifts from their masters.
Not so, Austin said. A memoir of Job Ben Solomon’s life was later
published in 1734 by lawyer Thomas Bluett. “It was a very dig-
nified statement about an African who did not find America, its
Christianity, its modernization all that wonderful, and wanted to
return to Africa,” Austin said.
“He struggled with his master to get the right to pray publicly and
to not have to do the field work his master wanted him to do. He
was in prison temporarily and started writing on the walls in Arabic.
Somebody recognized that here was a man who had principles and
they eventually realized this man was a Muslim. He was literate
in Africa, he knew the Koran by heart, he was literate in Arabic.”
The Strength of Their Faith
Austin also wrote about other slaves who also didn’t give up
their Muslim faith. For instance, around 1831, one Muslim slave,
Umar ibin Said, wrote an autobiography thought lost until 1995.
According to his writings, he was originally from Senegal. He was
purchased in the early 1800s by a slave owner who recognized
his intelligence and didn’t put him in the fields.
He wrote nearly 22 manuscripts in Arabic, among them the Lord’s
Prayer and the 23rd Psalm. Said did not deny Islam, but “added
Christian prayers to his spiritual stock, not an uncommon practice
for religious Muslims among Christians,” Austin writes in his book.
In another case, “by the time you get to the turn of the century,
around 1800, there are a number of people, Bilali Mohammed and
Salih Bilali, who set up their own Muslim communities on Sapelo
and St. Simons Island,” Austin said. Imam Maajid Ali, leader of the
Masjid Jihad mosque in Savannah, explained why Muslim slaves
would adopt the Christianity often forced upon them. “If we are
forced to assimilate another faith, other ideas, another concept
of God, we are allowed to verbalize that, as long as we don’t give
our heart to that particular position,” Ali said.
But how did Austin’s subjects, in the face of such oppression as
slavery in America, maintain their faith with such urgency? “In
Islam we don’t have that division between secular and sacred,
which means that Islam is really a total way of life,” said the Imam.
“Those individuals who were Muslim and also brought here for
slave labor, I could very well understand why it was that they
insisted upon the practice of certain tenets in the religion such as
the prayer five times daily, (refusing to do certain) types of labor.
“In Islamwe have the belief that all people, men and women, are the
slaves of God, therefore, no human being can be the slave of another
human being. That would be one of the driving forces in the Muslim’s
life, so I could see how they would have rejected the common status
of servitude that was accepted by other non-Muslim slaves.”
A Muslim in servitude would never really accept being shackled
and his or her behavior could be interpreted by other slaves or the
slave-master as being insubordinate, Ali said. “He or she wasn’t
rebelling against the person or the institution, as much as living
his or her religion. If that conflict came up between religion and
institution, they would choose their religion in defiance of the
forced institution of slavery.”
So the men Austin wrote about were moved by the dictates of
their faith, not out of fear of losing some eternal reward, Ali said.
Even on the issue of not eating pork, the Koran makes allowances,
stipulating that if a Muslim is dying of starvation, he or she can eat
enough pork to survive the threat of death.
Islam in History