Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
in Antebellum America
In the name of God, the merciful! the compassionate! God bless our Lord Mohammed his
prophet, and his descendants, and his followers,
and prosper them exceedingly. Praise be to God
the Lord of all creatures! the merciful, the compassionate king of the day of judgment !
Thee we adore, and of thee we implore assistance
! Guide us in the right way, the way of those with
whom thou art well pleased, and not of those with
whom thou art angry, nor of those who are in
error. Amen!
The Fatiha, the Opening Surah of the Quran, Islam's First Prayer, of Chamo [Chiemo}
and Translation, Georgia, c. 1830.
African Muslims
in Antebellum America
Transatlantic Stories and Spiritual Struggles
Allan D. Austin
ROVTLEDCjE
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
List of Maps and Illustrations
1.
Vll
IX
Xl
31
51
65
85
115
129
159
173
Index
187
Acknowledgments
Early on in the original version of this project-the one I began in the late 1970s
thinking it might lead to an article-my mentor and the collector of the widest
range of information on African Americans, the late Prof. Sidney Kaplan of the
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, introduced me to several of the minor
African Muslim figures to add to those with whom I was already familiar. The
most productive and generous correspondent was Prof. Thomas C. Parramore of
Raleigh, North Carolina, who knew more about Umar ibn Said and his writings
than anyone else. Parramore also introduced me to papers on Osman and S'Quash.
Mary C. Beaty, the reference librarian at the Davidson College Library in Davidson,
North Carolina, provided further documents on and a portrait of Umar. Sylvia
Lara of the University of Cantinas in Sao Paulo, Brazil, told me about Mahommah
Baquaqua making it to England.
Original translations of manuscripts in Arabic were provided by three busy
men: Dr. Elias Saad, scholar interested in fellow scholars from Timbuktu to
Baghdad and beyond, Wellesley, Massachusetts; my good friend and Muslim
source of inspiration, Dr. Kamal Ali, Westfield State University, Westfield,
Massachusetts; and Dr. Abdullah Basabrian, graduate student at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst, in the early 1980s, now somewhere in Saudi Arabia. The
recent polisher of these early translations, Muhammad al-Ahari, Chicago, an indefatigable tracer of lost Muslims, has brought several corrections and additions to
this book.
Because I submitted an acknowledgments page too early to the first version of
viii
Acknowledgments
the stories that follow, my African Muslims in Antebellum America: A Sourcebook (New
York: Garland, 1984), I herewith want to belatedly thank my staff-a sort of
revolving one, as I remember-of copyeditors eventually under the eye of Phyllis
Korper, who made my first collection of old papers, notes, introductions, and
photographs into a book.
I want now to thank Marlie Wasserman, who brought my manuscript to
Routledge and gave me some much-needed early guidance, and Connie Oehring,
whose precise copyediting has corrected and streamlined my ponderous prose.
I thank you one and all.
Finally, I want also to express my appreciation first to my Humanities
Department and the faculty members who approved and Vice President Malvina
Rau who authorized a sabbatical year from my academic home, Springfield College,
Springfield, Massachusetts; and second to those enthusiastic and wide-ranging
scholars Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Richard Newman, and Randall Burkett at the
W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research at Harvard University,
where I spent 1994-1995; and, most emphatically, to my wife, Joyce, for financing out of her business that sabbatical year and for staying with me through my
several announcements that I was just about finished with the sometimes tortuous
extracting and bridging of the original African Muslims in Antebellum America.
Preface
Map 1.
The Homelands.
Map II.
Map III.
Map IV.
Map V.
Fig. l.
Fig. 2.
Fig. 3.
Fig. 4.
Fig. 5.
Fig. 6.
Fig. 7.
Fatiha, Surahs ll4-the Last, ll3, ll2, llO by "a Negro Slave of Capt.
David Anderson," Sourh Carolina, 1768. Savannah Historical Society.
J.
xii
Fig. 8.
Fig. 9.
Fig. 10.
Fig. 11.
Fig. 12.
Fig. 13.
Fig. 14.
Fig. 15
Bilali Descendant Shad Hall of Sapelo, late 1930s, from Drums and
Shadows, 1940.
Fig. 16.
Bilali Descendant Katie Brown of Sapelo, late 1930s, from Drums and
Shadows, 1940.
Fig. 17.
Fig. 18.
19 & 20. John Couper and James Hamilton Couper, Photos of oil portraits, courtesy of Mrs. Mary Thiesen, a direct descendant.
Fig.21.
22
&
23.
Fig. 24
Fig. 25.
Fig. 26.
Fig. 27.
xiii
Fig. 28.
Fig. 29.
The 23rd Psalm, 1855,John Frederick Foard, North America and Africa:
Their Past, Present and Future and Key to the Negro Problem, 1904.
Fig. 30.
Fig. 3l.
Fig. 32.
The Bismillah, 23rd Psalm, and Quranic phrase "All good is from
Allah, and no other. "
Fig. 33.
The Bismillah and "This is How You Pray, You .... " Both from Eliza
H. Owen Scrapbook.
34 & 35.
Cover Page and First Page ofUmar's "Life." Photos courtesy of Derrick
Joshua Beard.
Fig. 36.
Fig. 37.
Fig. 38.
Fig. 39.
Fig. 40.
African Muslims
in Antebellum America
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1
IIThere Are Ciood Men in America,
but All Are Very Ignorant of Africa
-and Its Muslims
ll
"There are good men in America, but all are very ignorant of Africa," declared
the African-born Lamine Kebe in 1835, after forty years of American slavery in
three Southern states. Kebe might also have said, "and very ignorant of Islam
in both Africa and America. " Criticisms, recollections, and stories by and about
Old World immigrants and the ways they reacted to and changed the New
World after 1492 have been told and retold throughout the centuries. Stories
have differed, of course, with the teller, beginning with the Native Americans,
Spanish, French, British, Dutch, or the Africans these four European nations
brought with them. Stories told by those who arrived later-Swedes, Irish,
Germans, Italians, Chinese, Jews, Arabs, Latin Americans, and Southeast
Asians-have also varied considerably, as do those by males and females, rich
and poor, free and indentured or enslaved, and Christians and non-Christians.
Stories by African immigrants, including those who were, like Kebe, Muslims,
have been fewer for many reasons that I will explore later. Here the emphasis
is on stories by African Muslims-a proud people, influential beyond their
numbers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean-who until very recently had
been almost completely neglected by modern America's eagle-eyed historians
and storytellers.
It is a fact, of course, that most African Muslims, like the great majority of
the first Africans in America, remain anonymous or are little more than names
Laml.nJay
OUall
JAMAICA
~
Kingston
Abu Bakr aJ-Slddlq. Mohammod Kaha, "Beaj... la Coebraue,"
"WUJtam R.a"ord," and uCbarles Lartco"
"There Are Cjood Men in America, but All Are Very Ignorant of Africa"
the nobility and intelligentsia in England, and a wealthy returnee to the country now called Senegal. It is a very respectable and self-respecting piece written by an English friend. Summary notices of Job's remarkable experiences
have appeared regularly over the past two and a half centuries but have seldom
been related to stories of his peers.
The dramatic history, travel, and letters of Ibrahim Abd ar-Rahman,
captured as a cavalry officer in Guinea, later a runaway, and then a plantation
manager in Natchez, Mississippi, who was freed as an old man and who
campaigned to raise money to free his children; whose sense of self and dignity impressed many American leaders, black and white, across the Northern
states; and who scared newspaper editors in the Old Southwest before he and his
wife gained passage to Liberia, Africa, in 1828, are worthy of a feature movie.
Limited versions of his wonderful story have been retold often. Ar-Rahman
said he received some education in Timbuktu. The city, as seen in 1828, appears
in Fig. 2. For an early depiction of Muslims from Guinea see Fig. 3.
Another strong African and American, Bilali, originally from Guinea but
taken to the Bahamas and then to the North American mainland, was a plantation manager supervising 500 to 1,000 slaves-without white overseership.
He was also a religious father, an imam (Arabic) or almaamy (Fulfulde) who in
the 1840s began to write a thirteen-page manual in Arabic for his Sapelo Island,
Georgia, umma-the only known antebellum African Muslim community in
the United States. His reticent purchaser, Thomas Spalding-a contributor
to some local newspapers-remained mum about his prized slave's accomplishments and acquirements. In the 1930s, however, descendants recalled
Bilali and his Muslim daughters for modern interviewers. His "manual"-for
years thought to be a diary-still awaits a complete translation.
On the neighboring island of St. Simon's, a comparably competent figure,
Salih Bilali, Bilali's friend, had a similarly reticent master. But the latter did
write a revealing letter to the most knowledgeable American student of North
African languages and culture, William Brown Hodgson-whose name appears
often in this book-on his African Muslim's intelligence, leadership skills,
and homeland of Mali.
Only fragments of Lamine Kebe's remarks on Africa and his Guinean
homeland have been found so far. But his comments on teaching were printed
in an American educational journal in 1836-a year after Kebe had returned
to Liberia. Kebe and Umar corresponded in Arabic in 1835. The Christian
New Yorker who introduced them to one another, Theodore Dwight, Jr., was
a professional writer who seems to have sincerely believed that at least some
Fig. 2. View of the City of Timbuktu by Visitor Rene Caillie, from Caillie, Travels Through
Central A/rica to Timbuktu, 1830.
Fig. 3. Muslim Soldier and Chief in Sangara or Kankan (Guinea), from Alexander Laing,
Travels in the Timanee, Kooranko, and Sooli177a Countries in Western Africa, 1825.