Islam, Race and Rebellion in the Americas: Transatlantic Echoes of the West African Jihads

From the start of the fifteenth century, and for four hundred years to follow, twelve to fifteen million Africans, victims of the transatlantic slave trade, were shipped to the Americas and the Caribbean, mainly from regions along the Guinea coast, the banks of the Senegal and Gambia rivers and far western fringes of the Sudan. Among this number were about one to two million Muslims. Many of the slave rebellions and insurrections against the plantation owners and colonial authorities were led by Muslims, inspired by their faith and the jihad tradition of West Africa. The first was the Wolof uprising in the Caribbean Island of Hispaniola in 1521.

Dr Daud Abdullah’s work, drawing on a range of primary and secondary sources, provides specific details of Muslim involvement in the numerous ones to follow. For example, prominent in Haiti’s revolt was Francois Makandal, “born in Guinea into an illustrious Muslim family of scholars who were proficient in Arabic [. . .] believed to be a marabout”, with a plan to expel the French from the sugar-producing colony. He was captured in 1758 and “burnt at the stake in a public square in Port-au-Prince”. In the uprisings in Jamaica in 1831 and Bahia, Brazil, four years later, there were insurrectionists who communicated in Arabic. Dr Abdullah’s book includes illustrations of handwritten Qur’anic verses from that period, some “found in the amulets worn by Muslims for divine protection and support”, now in the archives of the Islamic Cultural Centre in Salvador.

Each of the book’s six chapters has a clearly stated aim. Chapter 1, ‘Legacies of the Crusades in the New World’, “asserts that the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula in 1492 and the expulsion of the Moors did not bring an end to Iberian-Islamic hostilities. The centuries of struggle for dominance between Christians and Moors in the Iberian Peninsula were replayed, albeit in different forms, with new actors in the New World”.

Chapter 2, ‘Slavery in the New World’, teases out some of the differences between Iberian and Anglo-Saxon justifications of plantation slavery: “the Portuguese claimed that their trade was an efficient means to bring Christianity to the Pagan Blacks [. . .] they were branded on the breast to show they had gone through the [baptismal] process”; in Britain, the plantation owners told the missionaries, “we will not suffer you to enlighten our slaves, who are by law our property”.

Chapter 3, ‘The Jihad tradition in West Africa’, notes that “an appreciation of the reform movements in West Africa will help to understand some of the momentous events that unfolded across the Atlantic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries”. After a comprehensive survey, with much information on the life and career of the Fulani Shaikh Usman dan Fodio, Dr Abdullah concludes that “the reformers discharged their canonical obligation to wage jihad against the Pagans who were oppressors (zalimin). In all these movements, the role of the jama’a cannot be ignored. It was, on all occasions, the vital vehicle that enabled diverse groups to work and struggle for a revolutionary cause. Similarly, in the Americas, slaves from different tribal backgrounds came together to free themselves from the tyranny of plantation slavery. Whether it was against slavery or Paganism, the tradition of jihad was well entrenched in the experiences of Muslims in West Africa, as well as the slave colonies of the Americas.”

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Chapter 4, ‘Slave Revolts and the Muslim Factor’, “examines the history of slave uprisings in the Americas, their underlying and immediate causes and their impact on the plantation system where they occurred. “It is here that the accounts of the revolts can be found, including those in Haiti, Jamaica and Bahia cited above. It is a testament to the resilience of the Muslims of Bahia – mainly of Yoruba and Nupe ethnicity – that in spite “a veritable campaign of repression” and deportations, “when Al-Baghdadi, an Ottoman imam, visited Bahia in 1865, he found thousands of Muslims there, confirming that Islam was still alive and well”.

Chapter 5, ‘The Aftermath and Legacy”, quotes Ibn Khaldun’s assertion that conquered people invariably adopt the culture of their conquerors, but provides the evidence that “in the nineteenth-century Americas, this claim was manifestly disproved as far as the Muslims were concerned. They not only rejected the culture of their masters, but, more importantly, they fought relentlessly for its destruction [. . .] even when they were coerced into baptism and forced to adopt Christianity, they remained secretly committed to Islam”. The chapter provides brief biographical accounts of Muhammad Sisie, who arrived in Trinidad in 1816 and was a co-signatory in a petition to King William IV asking to be repatriated; Ayuba Suleiman Ibrahim Diallo, a hafiz, and well-known in accounts of British Muslim history because of his arrival in England in 1833; Omar Ibn Said, who escaped from a cruel owner in Charleston, recaptured and imprisoned – “had become well known for his Arabic writings, some of which were written on the cell walls.” He found some ease as a slave of a considerate White family in North Carolina who appreciated his loyalty and learning. When he died in 1864, his epitaph was inscribed, “The dear old saint, now gone to rest.”

The sixth and final chapter, ‘Islamic Revivalism in the Twentieth-Century Diaspora’, is in two parts. The first considers some of the pioneers of the Pan-African movement, including Dr Edward Blyden, Marcus Garvey and Dusé Muhammad Ali, the last-mentioned also of interest to a British readership for his Muslim activism in London in the 1910s and 20s. There are references too to the Universal Races Conference held in London in 1911.

While Dr Abdullah’s account in preceding chapters highlight historical continuities, he notes a moment of rupture: “the decade of the 1970s marked a turning point to the revival of Islam in several parts of the Americas. In the United States, new movements emerged that were theologically distinct from those of the early twentieth century.” This leads the author to describe the rise (and fall) of the Nation of Islam, and the short life but lasting impact of Malcolm X.

In the second part of this concluding chapter, Dr Abdullah shares his own experiences and encounters with Muslim activists when he was a student at the University of Guyana in the late 1970s. It is a unique record of the tensions that arose between the Islamic Party of North America (IPNA), its offshoot in Trinidad (IP, Islamic Party), and the Marxist-Leninist People’s Revolutionary Government (PRG) that had come to power in Grenada in 1979. Reflecting on these and the 1990 uprising of the Jamiatul Muslimin in Trinidad, he concludes that the twentieth century revivalist attempts in the Americas failed because of “weak intellectual foundations”. This was in contrast to the reformist movements of preceding centuries in West Africa that succeeded “because of their attachment to learning”.

Islam, Race and Rebellion in the Americas includes many other such insights that make this book a notable scholarly contribution. It is a doorway to at least two further lines of enquiry: first, while there are references to West African Muslims themselves profiting from the transatlantic slave trade, these are scattered across the book and merit consolidation; second, further biographical research on Dusé Muhammad Ali may uncover links between the Pan-African, Back-to-Africa and Pan-Islamic movements In his book, The Land of the Pharaohs, A Short History of Egypt from the fall of Ismail to the assassination of Boutros Pasha published in London in 1911, Dusé referred to Jamaluddin Afghani as “a leader of religious and political thought.” When he launched the African Times and Orient Review (ATOR) the following year –the young Marcus Garvey was an employee – the journal’s offices on Fleet Street was also the address for the Central Islamic Society, the main British Muslim association of the period. Dusé was also one of the Society’s vice-presidents. He was even a shrewd observer of the schemes in the aftermath of the Great War to dismember the former Ottoman Arab provinces: “it has been a great surprise to find the Jews casting the weight of their great financial influence into the scale against Turkish political interests. It was the much vilified Abdul Hamid who gave Jews a home in Palestine and elsewhere whenever the Russian pogroms under the old Imperialist regime made life impossible for Jews in Russia” (published in African and Orient Review, ATOR’s successor journal, Vol.1 No.12, December 1920). Duse left for the USA shortly after to collaborate with his protégé Marcus Garvey, in the Universal Negro Improvement Association.

As observed by Dr Usman Bugaje, the Islamic scholar, political activist and civil society leader and thinker from Nigeria, Dr Daud Abdullah’s book is a contribution to knowledge and learning by “uncovering the real heroes of the anti-slavery movements.”