Muslim Slaves Research Articles

Literacy, hegemonic mediation, and “spiritual” liberation in colonial Jamaica

ABSTRACT This essay discusses the presence and performance of Arabic literacy, its use, and emancipatory dimension among Muslim slaves on colonial plantations in Jamaica as well as the complex and ambivalent position of the Irish abolitionist R.R. Madden in the translation, interpretation, and dissemination of some of their writings. Overall, Madden’s texts suggest a sense of agency granted to his literate Muslim interlocutors from West Africa due to his commitment to abolition. However, a careful analysis of his responses suggests that colonial subjects remain “untranslatable” to the Western mind without the active intervention of Madden, a process that echoes his collaborative translation of Manzano’s poetry in Cuba. As a translator, a proponent of the value of literacy for emancipation, Madden not only occupies a contentious mediatory site but also embraces a conflicted sense and advocacy of emancipation which he later connects to Christian spiritual liberation when faced with “critical literacy.”

Islamic Tombstones for Slaves from Abbasid-Era Egypt

ABSTRACT This article studies tombstones from eighth- to tenth-century CE Egypt that are designed to mark the grave of a Muslim slave. These funerary inscriptions are unusual in that they do not marginalize the enslaved as much as do other early Islamic sources. Furthermore, they reveal otherwise undocumented attitudes towards persons who died as slaves. Offering a thick description of an unpublished tombstone for a ninth-century concubine-mother (umm walad), the present article analyses tombstones for slaves from two perspectives. It first studies the representation of the enslaved and the specific terminology that tombstones used to designate the deceased as enslaved. It then turns to the commemorative context of tombstones, arguing that tombstones of slaves served similar purposes and used similar illocutionary strategies to those used by contemporary tombstones for free Muslims. Despite these similarities between tombstones of free and enslaved persons, we see that deceased slaves were commemorated as members of the Muslim community as well as the legal property of their owners.

The Role of Elijah Muhammad to Spread Islām in Modern America : an Analysis of his Efforts and Approaches

Based on the available materials and literature, Islām got to America as far back as 1530 when the early African Muslim slaves were taken to the land of America. Elijah Muhammad was one of the Muslim who works and struggled hard on how Islam would be spread and progress in America. Later on, the Muslim Emigrants from various parts of the World also entered America around 19th Century. Hence, it's increasing the population and strengthening the growth of the religion of Islām in the area. The West particularly America known for her secularism, capitalism and extreme individualism with a political ideology not based on the recognition of the creator talk less of monotheism. From all indication, Islām continues to grow from strength to strength despite all odds in its way. Its therefore in the light of the above, the methodology adopted for this paper was historic and descriptive method in order to describe the nature of Islām in America and its practices among the black America and the emigrants during the early days of Islām. The paper concluded that Elijah Muhammad was a great revivalist, preacher and scholars in the spread of Islam in America. Islām equally penetrated in one way and the other into the nook and cranny of America through the peaceful preaching among the Muslim slaves and the people of America.

The Maghrib in Europe: Royal Slaves and Islamic Institutions in Eighteenth-Century Spain

Did a slave mosque really operate for decades, out in the open, during the eighteenth century in the port city of Cartagena in Murcia, Spain? An alarmed Inquisitorial report submitted to the Spanish king in September 1769 left no room for doubt — the hospital of the Muslim arsenal slaves in Cartagena functioned as a mosque.1 Its live-in muezzin recited the adhān, the call to worship, from a room on the second floor, and believers convened twice a day. They left their shoes downstairs, walked up the entrance steps barefoot, kissed the steps, and prayed loudly in a large hall adorned with a lamp with three wicks and floors covered by reed prayer mats. Worse, the report states, not only had the hospital turned into a mosque, but it also acted as a sanctuary that provided asylum for fugitive Muslims. In 1768, a Muslim slave tried to flee Cartagena on the frigate of the Moroccan sultan, who had come to pick up Moroccan slaves as part of the peace agreement signed by Morocco and Spain on 28 May 1767. The slave was handed over to the Spanish authorities but managed to escape again, this time to the mosque, where he was provided with temporary asylum. This sanctuary allowed him to negotiate the conditions of his surrender. Indeed, he submitted himself to the authorities only after he was granted a pardon. The report’s sensationalist tone (‘they kiss the stairs . . . [and pray] in loud voice’) and its last bit about asylum, which proved to be an Inquisitorial fabrication, were intended to lead to the closure of the hospital-mosque.2 The plan succeeded, and in the autumn of 1770 the structure was razed to the ground.

Slavery and Interethnic Sexual Violence

Abstract This article unpacks the 1610 case of a multiple perpetrator rape of enslaved female Jews from Tétouan by Catholic convicts and Muslim slaves in Livorno, early modern Italy’s leading slaving center. Adding to the ongoing attempts to expose the violence inherent to the historical records of slavery, it charts the efforts to silence the slaves and offers a counternarrative to the one their slavers wished to create by erasing their suffering. The article argues that the assault was justified as part of a business strategy. The rape of female slaves by enslaved men as a means of increasing the slavers’ profits, it suggests, was thus a more global phenomenon than has hitherto been assumed and was not limited to women’s systematic raping in Atlantic slavery. Problematizing the scholarly focus on Muslim-Christian reciprocity in early modern Mediterranean slavery, it then proposes that the affluence of Livorno’s Jewish community increased the vulnerability of enslaved Jews in the city to excessive abuse. Complicating historiographic notions regarding religious pluralism and interethnic relations in Livorno, the assault’s analysis underscores the importance of writing Jewish slave women back into not only the history of slavery but also the narratives of Jewish history and Italian history.

Exclude or Convert? The Image of the Muslim Slave in the Iconography of the Vision of St John of Matha in Rome

On 28 January 1193, St John of Matha had a vision as he celebrated his first Mass. In it, Christ was holding the hands of two men in chains, one black and deformed and the other white and malnourished. After this event, John of Matha and Felix of Valois founded the Order of the Most Holy Trinity, which received the approval of Pope Innocent III in 1198. The order’s mission was the redemption of Christian slaves from the hands of the Saracens to prevent them from renouncing their faith and embracing that of the infidels. From the 13th century onward, depictions of the saint’s vision became the iconographic topos of the order itself. This article aims to analyse images of the Muslim slave in the vision of St John of Matha, particularly in the numerous examples still found in the Church of the Santissima Trinita degli Spagnoli in Rome, in which the Muslim slave is given certain singular features.

The rules and controls for accepting good deeds in a changing world

هدف هذا البحث إلى عرض أهم ما يسعى إليه العبد المسلم في حياته، ألا وهو تحصيل الحسنات والحرص على قبول العمل الصالح، وفق ما جاء في القرآن الكريم والسنة النبوية الصحيحة؛ ولا يتأتى ذلك إلا بالأقوال والأعمال الصالحة التي يوفق إليها المسلم في هذه الحياة، دون جهل منه أو غفلة في ضوء معرفة شروط وضوابط ذلك، فالعلم بعظمة الله تعالى تجنب المسلم الوقوع بتلك الغفلة، فالسعادة والرضا لا تكون إلا بالإخلاص والمتابعة لشرائع الإسلام، كما تطرقت إلى بيان متغيرات العصر وتأثير ذلك على قبول العمل الصالح، ولتحقيق ذلك اتبعت في بحثي المنهج الاستقرائي الوصفي، وقد قسمته إلى ثلاثة مباحث

Family Matters

History has so far paid scant attention to Muslims in the earliest phase of colonizing the Americas. As a general policy, the Spanish Crown prohibited all non-Catholics from going to early Spanish America. Nevertheless, historians recognize that a few Muslims managed to secretly cross the Atlantic Ocean with the European settlers during the sixteenth century. Later they imported African Muslim slaves but historians considered both Africans and indigenous peoples passive participants in forming Latin American society until evidence refuted these erroneous views. Furthermore, the public had assumed that only single Spanish men went to the American unknown until historians challenged this view, and now women’s role is fully recognized in the colonizing enterprise. Additionally, despite the ban on non-Catholics, researchers found many Jews in the Americas, even if the Spanish Inquisition found out and killed almost all of them. In line with revisionist history, my research pioneers in three aspects. It demonstrates that Muslim men and women went to early Spanish America. Also, the Spanish Crown allowed Muslims to legally go to its American colonies. Additionally, the documents substantiate my new findings that Muslims went to sixteenth-century Latin America as complete families. They mostly proceeded out of Spain as the wards or servant-slaves of Spanish settlers after superficially converting to Catholicism. The present study follows two case studies that record Muslim families in early sixteenth-century Spanish America. Paradoxically, their very persecutor—the Spanish Church and its terrible Inquisitorial arm—established their contested belief in Islam.

Commemorating the abolition of slavery in Tunisia. The rights of black citizens and the history of slaves of European origin

This article contrasts a policy of commemoration of slavery in post-revolutionary Tunisia with the gradual and very slow history of the demise of slavery in this country since the beginning of the 19th century. It explores the choice of the Tunisian state to commemorate the abolition of slavery in Tunisia with reference to the promulgation of a decree enacted in 1846, and the way in which the end of West and East African slavery became central to civic memory in Tunisia.The first part of the article is based on recent, innovative and stimulating scholarly research by Inès Mrad Dali, Séphanie Pouessel, Maha Abdelhamid and Marta Scaglioni on black communities in Tunisia. The second part relies on works on European captives and the Mamluks or Muslim slaves and servants of often Caucasian origin in the Maghreb.The first section places the issue of the commemoration of slavery in the context of the emergence of civic claims from black activists in Tunisia since the 2011 Revolution. The profound transformations that black communities have undergone since decolonization in the 1950s have shaped these claims. Indeed, the categories of national belonging to a Tunisian civic community, and therefore the debates on collective memory and the historical representations of the nation, have become more decisive for these anti-racist activists than the narratives of local origins which aimed to explain or even legitimize the subordinate positions of these communities, especially in the south of the country.The second section broadens the discussion to include Christian male and female captives and especially the cases of male and female slaves of Caucasian origin converted to Islam (Mamluks and Odalisques) in 19th-century Tunisia. This section shows that the descendants of European captives are less concerned with the commemoration of the abolition of slavery. Their role in the country's history is greater because of their contribution to the founding of the Tunisian nation and its state. The uneven integration of the descendants of slaves into Tunisian society, in addition to the separate relationship with the memory of slavery of these groups explain over a long period of time the presence today of the differential treatment of Tunisians on the basis of skin colour.The article concludes with two observations: Tunisian anti-racist activists wanted to fight against racist discourses and categories. From this point of view, they succeeded in advancing their cause by giving official status to the commemoration of the abolition of 1846. Henceforth, the fundamental and difficult question of the unequal distribution of resources in post-revolutionary Tunisia remains to be asked.

Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account: A Lost Narrative

From the earlier times the voices of the minorities especially the Muslims have been subjugated by the forces. Many of the texts written in the olden times, whether fictional or non-fictional hardly have any mention of Muslims in them. One such text being the historical account of the Narvaez expedition that took place in 1527, which was chronicled by Cabeza de Vaca, one of the four survivors of the expedition. What is surprising is that one of the survivors was an African slave, Estabanico but he is hardly mentioned in the original, despite being part of the expedition that stretched to eight year. Fast forward to the 21st century which is the age of postcolonialism and where the once oppressed communities are finally speaking about their truth, Moroccan author, Laila Lalami through her novel, The Moor’s Account decided to give voice and a backstory to the African slave, Estabanico. The current paper deals with the complexities of the novel and tries to provide reasons as to why Cabeza de Vaca intentionally omitted the Estabanico’s account of the travels. The paper also discusses the ingenuine use of narrative tools made by the author in the retelling of the story of a forgotten Muslim slave. It also narrates the importance of women characters in the Islamic culture of those days, when the western woman was not as liberated as she is today. Lastly, the paper draws a parallel between Estabanico’s condition during the expedition and that of the Muslim population in the post 9/11 world.

Concealment of the secret in the struggle and weevil self in the light of the Holy Quran

Praise be to Allah. Prayers and peace be upon the Messenger of Allah. After that, the reason for choosing this subject from the Islamic point of view is that there is a fear among many people of the state of whispers within the human psyche, which they believe comes from Satan only. After we applied two scientific approaches, namely the inductive and analytical approaches to the texts of the verses of the Koran and their interpretation shows that the whisper of the soul is before divulging the secret and does not know the devil as long as the servant mute his secret, either after divulging the secret and the whispers of the devil. The whispers of the soul is not held accountable by God and even angels do not write the whispers only after pronounced or written by the Muslim slave and the biggest example of this is in the fatwa of divorce does not occur divorce only after uttered or written. It is called self – jihad great Jihad mentioned that ( Ibn 'Uthaymeen )in the fatwa of self - struggle, and that the devil does not know what leaked the same human rights and what they hide. The credibility of the verse in Sura 14: "When the jinn found out that if they knew the unseen they would not have been in humiliating torment." Therefore, Allah the Almighty stated in Surah An-Nyssa '(verse 76): "The devil's kid was weak." If a Muslim slave knows that Satan does not know the unseen until after revealing the mystery, this is the weak point of Satan and the power of the believer.

Converting “the Indies” of Naples in Luca Giordano’s St. Francis Xavier Baptizing Indians Altarpiece

This article discusses an altarpiece by Luca Giordano painted for the church of San Francesco Saverio (now San Ferdinando) in Naples in 1685. Described in contemporary sources as “St. Francis Xavier baptizing the people of Japan,” the painting reveals little about Japan or Jesuit missionary efforts in Asia; instead, the painting discloses much about how Jesuits approached their mission in Naples. Here, Jesuit missionaries found a heterogeneous environment, filled with a variety of different types of potential converts, including unruly nobles, superstitious peasants, fallen women, and a large number of Muslim slaves. Giordano’s altarpiece uses the figures of St. Francis Xavier and St. Francisco de Borja to exemplify two models for the conversions that Neapolitan Jesuits hoped to bring about—the baptism of non-Christians and the religious reform of those who had been born Christian. This article will demonstrate that Giordano’s altarpiece thematized the transformation of heterodoxy into orthodoxy, while also contributing to a Jesuit discourse that characterized Naples as being another “Indies,” an environment mired in religious heterodoxy and thus attractive to ambitious Jesuits who longed for the mission fields of far off lands.

Resisting Islamophobia via [Redacted] Prayers in the Handwritten Autobiographies of ʿUmar ibn Sayyid and Mohamedou Ould Slahi

Abstract The current political climate in the United States lends fresh urgency to the task of remembering the history of enslaved Africans in the Americas, a history that has become vital for understanding today's Islamophobia. To begin this task, this article examines the invocation of the African Muslim slave in Mohamedou Ould Slahi's memoir, Guantánamo Diary, alongside ʿUmar ibn Sayyid's slave autobiography, and expands readings of Islamic prayer in carceral spaces.

"Con señales en el rostro": Salas Barbadillo's La hija de Celestina and the Apologist Rhetoric of the Morisco Expulsion

"Con señales en el rostro":Salas Barbadillo's La hija de Celestina and the Apologist Rhetoric of the Morisco Expulsion Bradford Ellis "Por cuanto la razón de bueno y christiano obliga en conciencia a expeler de los Reynos y repúblicas las cosas que causan escándalo y daño a los buenos Súbditos y peligro al Estado, y sobre todo ofensa y deservicio a Dios nuestro señor, habiendo la experiencia mostrado que todos estos inconvenientes ha causado la residencia de los Christianos nuevos moriscos en los Reynos de Granada y Murcia y Andalucía, porque demás de ser y proceder de los que concurrieron en el levantamiento del dicho Reyno de Granada cuyo principio fue matar con atroces muertes y martirios a todos los sacerdotes y Christianos viejos que pudieron de los que entre ellos vivían …" Royal decree for the expulsion of the Moriscos from Andalucía (1609). "Llamábanla sus amos María y aunque respondía a este nombre, el que sus padres la pusieron y ella escuchaba mejor fue Zara." Elena, La hija de Celestina (1612). At the dawn of the seventeenth century, Spain was in the grip of a vigorous debate over the future of the Moriscos, many of whom continued to practice their Islamic faith and traditions and resisted State efforts to assimilate them into the Christian mainstream. This debate over what became known as the "Morisco Problem" (la cuestión morisca) culminated in the Morisco expulsion in 1609 during the reign of Phillip III. This same period also witnessed the rise of the Spanish picaresque novel, which established itself as one of the most popular literary genres of its time. A frequent figure of the Spanish picaresque at the time is the Muslim or Morisco hechicera [End Page 25] who practices love magic and alternative forms of medicine. Examples include Sabina, a former Muslim slave turned hechicera in Mateo Alemán's Segunda parte de Guzmán de Alfarache (1604); Aldonza de San Pedro, mother of Pablos and an alcahueta-prostituta in Francisco de Quevedo's Historia de la vida del Buscón (1626); and Zara, a Muslim slave turned hechicera, in Alonso Jerónimo de Salas Barbadillo's La hija de Celestina (1612). Despite these representations of the hechicera as Muslim, Sánchez Ortega observes that it was the Gypsy community that was most closely associated with hechicería in early modern Spain. She explains that this association was so strong that its presence dominated many works of the period.1 the Spanish picaresque novel at the time of the Morisco expulsion, however, often depicts the hechicera as Muslim and inherently dangerous. This representation echoes the anti-Islamic State discourse that silenced public debate and dominated the printed word in Spain once the expulsion began.2 The royal expulsion decrees drew heavily upon the ideas and words of the Apologists, a powerful minority of clergy and laymen who sought to justify the expulsion. The Apologists argued that the Moriscos were incapable of becoming faithful Christians and described them as a cancer, infection, or deadly weed that must be removed if Spain was to reach its full potential as a Catholic nation. They stressed the Moriscos remained loyal to the Islamic faith and could restore Muslim control of the Peninsula through relations with Muslims in Northern Africa and the Ottoman Empire. Salas Barbadillo's La hija de Celestina appeared in 1612, during the later stages of the expulsion and height of the Apologist treatises. The novel depicts the Morisco hechicera as a subversive catalyst for death and destruction, echoing the Apologists and royal expulsion decrees. Scholars of the early modern period have valued the Spanish picaresque novel for its social realism and criticism during a period of decline and transformation within the Spanish empire. Maravall, for example, describes the Spanish picaresque as a "testimonio en el que se refleja una imagen mental de la sociedad" and notes that "nos traslada el conjunto de creencias, de valoraciones, de aspiraciones, de pretensiones que se reconocían en el mundo social y aquellas atrevidas negaciones de las mismas en las que se estimaba desmoronarse gravemente el sistema establecido" (13...

Marking the American landscape: African Muslim slave writings and the place of Islam

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the role of negotiation in identity politics, focusing on the writings of the nineteenth century African Muslim slave writings in Arabic in the United States. The writing of one man in particular, Bilali Muhammad, offers insight into the role of language, religion, and resistance in relation to identity negotiation. Bilali's world was defined by a cultural context marked by violence, foreignness, and trauma; however, he found ways to negotiate and mark his identity, specifically his Muslim identity, through language in a way that is instructive to cultural and political discourse. His manuscript locates Islam and Arabic on the American religious and linguistic landscape much earlier than is often noted. Bilali's text has implications for the Muslim American experience, which must reconfigured around a changing discourse surrounding Islam that is rooted in the history of racism, beginning with slavery, in the United States.

Prodaja roblja na Jadranu u 17. stoljeću

Since Antiquity the slave trade in the Adriatic had been a long term activity which had an important impact on the economy of the Dalmatian communes. The status of slaves and their traffic was originally regulated by the Statutes of individual Dalmatian towns. With the appearance of Ottomans in late Middle Ages into their hinterland numerous changes occurred. The traffic in slaves was redirected towards the east where the Christian captives were then sold. Nevertheless, with the new intensity of Christian warfare against the Ottomans, the Muslim slave trade from the Ottoman Empire increased particularly in Dalmatian marketplaces which were mediatory because the real trade of Ottoman subjects was across the Adriatic on the Apennine Peninsula. This traffic reached a special intensity during the Candian and Morean Wars in the second half of the 17th century. The trade of the Ottoman captives in the Adriatic, how they were kept and sold, including the legal regulations of the trade from the Venetian and Papal points of view in the 17th century, are discussed in this paper.

Legal Representations of Muslim Slaves by American Courts and Legislative Bodies: 1650–1861

This paper is the first specific exploration of Muslim slaves in front of American courts and legal mechanisms more broadly from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth century. As hundreds of thousands of slaves who came to America had Muslim backgrounds, many of those Muslim slaves found themselves in front of legal regimes and American courts. However, the Muslim identities of these slaves, despite the importance that their religious beliefs might have had for them, were rarely discussed in the case law or not mentioned at all. Drawing from Patterson’s notion of the “socially dead” slave, this paper draws on numerous examples from cases like Amistad to cases dealing with wills and estates to note that the ties to Islam in these cases were obfuscated and minimized. The social death of Muslim slaves in the way that the court documented their experiences silences the voices of American Muslim slaves who reacted in unique ways to their condition of slavery.

Precarious Passages: The Diasporic Imagination in Contemporary Black Anglophone Fiction by Tuire Valkeakari

Reviewed by: Precarious Passages: The Diasporic Imagination in Contemporary Black Anglophone Fiction by Tuire Valkeakari Toya Mary Okonkwo VALKEAKARI, TUIRE. Precarious Passages: The Diasporic Imagination in Contemporary Black Anglophone Fiction. Gainesville: University of Florida, 2017. 332pp. $84.95 hardcover. Tuire Valkeakari’s Precarious Passages provides a compelling and generative source for scholars and students of myriad fields, as she finds a way to speak beyond the usual constraints of national identity and periodization. To speak to the ongoing “representations of black diasporic identity formation” (viii), Valkeakari brings black diaspora and Anglophone literatures into conversation with each other through connected histories that ultimately begin with the Middle Passage. Her extensive treatment of the primary novels benefits through thoughtful contributions from critical race, Atlantic, gender, trauma, and memory studies. As no universal consensus on the definition of “diaspora” exists, Valkeakari preempts possible confusion and gives several definitions of the term and other concepts throughout her book. Contemporary black diasporas, while not all originating with the Middle Passage, are connected through racism within the Anglophone worlds of the Americas, the Caribbean, and Great Britain. Valkeakari makes four overarching claims with this book: first, through their fictive works, Charles Johnson, Lawrence Hill, Toni Morrison, Caryl Phillips, George Lamming, Andrea Levy, Cecil Foster, and Edwidge Danticat have actually influenced the shaping of transnational black diasporic identity; second, by representing slavery and colonial modernity, these novelists examine the oppressive legacy of those institutions on the black diaspora; third, black displacement can be excavated from unexpected experiences, and a twofold focus on depictions of dislocation and representations of diaspora is important to understanding the complexities of “transnationalism, national identity, and other modes of belonging” (6); fourth, though fictive, these novels represent a “‘diasporic double consciousness,’” and the characters are often “caught, legally or emotionally, in no-man’s land between diasporic identification and national identity” (7). Through impeccably detailed analysis, Valkeakari addresses “eleven historically informed novels written by eight contemporary novelists of African or African [End Page 575] Caribbean descent” (2) to showcase the varying outcomes of migration on the black diaspora. Thus, the Middle Passage and slavery, along with concepts of ur-trauma, home, belonging, and unbelonging for black bodies take a central position in the five chapters. These chapters are organized by the chronology of the novels’ settings, and Valkeakari includes close readings of the novels that support the argument that she has established at the beginning of each chapter. Most useful are the chapter conclusions, where she gives a summary of that chapter’s contribution to her overall argument and connects it with the ensuing chapter’s arguments and themes. Homing in on the existential journey of Rutherford Calhoun in Middle Passage by Charles Johnson, chapter one “laments the suffering that the Atlantic slave trade inflicted on its victims” (60). The most compelling argument of this chapter is the reading of a “Buddhist storyline” (44) into Calhoun’s journey, and Valkeakari proves that Johnson was interested in the “Eastern philosophical perspective on possessions” that “effectively displaces the slaveholding United States’ understanding of ownership” (45). By doing a close reading of Middle Passage in connection to Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” Valkeakari offers robust counters to the notion of blackness as static and unmalleable. Chapter two examines Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes and the power of narrating “black diasporic subjectivity into being” (98). Hill’s book is situated in a more traditional historical context than the philosophical Middle Passage. The voluntary and forced travels of Aminata showcase the constant movement and reconfiguration of black diaspora identity through a female character who possesses remarkable intelligence, a notion of returning “home,” an unexpected sense of agency, and resourcefulness in spite of ongoing sufferings. Aminata’s experience as a Muslim slave who makes the Middle Passage to the United States, joins the Black Loyalists in the Revolutionary War period, and is relocated to Nova Scotia before going back to the African continent to settle Freetown in Sierra Leone demonstrates the copious integration of non-fiction research into this story. By exposing these forgotten black peoples, whose individual identities have become lost, through Aminata’s story Hill “highlights the link between black diaspora memory and identity” (31...

West African Islam in Colonial and Antebellum South Carolina

Over the last 20 years, scholars have begun to critically investigate the historical presence of enslaved African Muslims in the Americas, including the United States. Studies are typically broad in scope. Meanwhile, the vast body of scholarship on American slavery produced by non-Islamicists has generally disregarded or overlooked the retention of Muslim practices or beliefs among slaves. This study examines the presence of West African Muslims in colonial and antebellum South Carolina, particularly among the rice plantations in the coastal regions of the state, part of the Gullah-Geechee Corridor. At the same time, it looks at these Muslim slaves in the distinctive historical context of West African Islam, specifically Malikite Sunnism and Sufism. In doing so, this study further documents the significant Muslim presence in colonial and antebellum America, specifically South Carolina, while arguing for the need to re-examine prevailing conclusions about the origins of distinctive Gullah cultural practices and beliefs, such as the “Ring Shout” ritual once performed in Praise Houses.

Emancipation and “the Great Wheel of Labour”: Enduring Liminality in Rayda Jacobs’s <i>The Slave Book</i> (1988) and a Painting of Two Slave Women (1859) by Thomas Baines

On this anniversary of the Freedom Charter, we may reflect on the erasure of slavery from the national memory and remind ourselves that freedom is never absolute, always deferred. This paper suggests that by comparing the aesthetic of fragmented and incoherent afterimages of slavery at the Cape, two slave women in Rayda Jacobs’s postcolonial narrative The Slave Book (1998) with a Thomas Baines watercolour, we may articulate these multifaceted, unstable and very different structures of subjectivity, memory and history. Jacobs’s artistic re-imagining of a subsumed Muslim slave presence becomes the means towards individual self-fashioning, diasporic connection and communal liberation embodied in the transcendence of her ‘romantic’ protagonists (although their emancipation is deferred). Baines’s ethnographic painting of two slave women aboard a ship that symbolized British imperial superiority is examined from a postcolonial vantage point, which problematizes his act of artistic representation and the instability implicit in his role as observer. In order to negotiate mutable identities and multiple realities we may juxtapose contemporary artistic expressions which strive towards communal liberation and individual self-fashioning with fragmented afterimages of slavery and oppression. In this way it becomes possible to acknowledge the “inescapable hybridity and intermixture of ideas” (Gilroy 1993, xi).