Before the Republic

Islam and the Making of Black America

ESSAY ONE  ·  PART ONE OF THREE

In Chains, Across the Atlantic

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There is a document in the Library of Congress that most Americans have never seen. It is thirteen pages long, written by hand in careful Arabic script, composed sometime around 1820 on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. The man who wrote it was enslaved. He managed a plantation, a farm built on the labor of his people, on land that had been stolen from the Muscogee. He was a scholar, a practitioner of Islamic law, and a man of demonstrable faith, and he had been in America for nearly twenty years before he put pen to paper.

His name was Bilali Muhammad. And the island where he prayed, fasted, and wrote was called Sapelo.

This is where Sapelo Square begins. Not in a metaphor. Not in an aspiration. A man, on an island, writing in Arabic in a country that had not yet decided whether he was a person.

We begin this series, 250 years of Black Muslim life in America, with a correction. This is a necessary, documented, irrefutable correction to the story that most Americans believe they know.

Islam did not come to America with immigrants. It did not arrive on September 11, 2001, in the imagination of politicians who wanted a villain, or in the 1960s, with the rise of the Nation of Islam, or even in 1913, when Noble Drew Ali announced to Black people in Newark, New Jersey that their true religion had always been Islam. This faith, Islam, came to America in chains, across the Atlantic, in the bodies of West African men and women who were stripped of their names, language, culture, families, and freedom but not, it turned out, their faith.

Islam came to America in chains, across the Atlantic, in the bodies of West African men and women who were stripped of their names, language, culture, families, and  freedom but not, it turned out, their faith.

Historians estimate that between fifteen and thirty percent of the enslaved Africans who were brought to the Americas were Muslim. The ships crossed from Senegambia, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, and the Bight of Benin, regions that had been home to Islamic civilization for centuries. The men and women packed into the holds of those ships included merchants and scholars, imams and students, people who had memorized the entire Qur’an, people who had studied Islamic jurisprudence, and people whose grandparents had founded masjids in cities that predated Columbus’s voyage by five hundred years. This contradicts the belief that they were a marginalized community who had found solace in religion. They were, by the standards of their time and place, among the most educated people on earth.

They arrived in a country that would not exist as a nation for another generation.

Job ben Solomon

In 1730, a scholar named Ayuba Suleiman Diallo left his home in Bundu, in what is now Senegal, to sell two enslaved people to British traders at the Gambia River. He was subsequently captured, sold into slavery, and transported to Maryland, where he worked on a tobacco plantation. He was twenty-nine years old. He spoke no English. He had, before his capture, memorized the entire Qur’an.

His English captors called him Job ben Solomon, a biblical translation of a Muslim name, the first of many erasures. But Job ben Solomon refused to be erased. He retreated into the woods near his plantation to pray, away from the gaze of those who mocked him. When a white boy followed him, threw dirt on him, and destroyed his makeshift prayer cap, he made another. He prayed anyway.

He prayed five times a day. He faced Mecca in a direction he had computed himself, without instruments, from a land he had never seen on a map. He fasted during Ramadan. He refused to eat pork. He wrote letters in Arabic, remarkably formal and grammatically correct, to his father in Bundu, missives that improbably reached the British philanthropist James Oglethorpe, who was moved enough to purchase Job ben Solomon’s freedom. European scholars examined him and confirmed what he already knew: that he was a man of considerable learning. He returned to Africa in 1734 after four years of bondage.

But his story stayed here. It is one of the first documented proofs that the American story, in tobacco fields and in the shadow of the Chesapeake, begins partly in Arabic.

Bilali Muhammad and the Island That Gives Us Our Name

The island of Sapelo lies twelve miles off the coast of Georgia. It is accessible only by ferry. It is one of the most beautiful and haunted places in America, which often means the same thing here. The Gullah Geechee people have lived on Sapelo for generations, descendants of enslaved West Africans who maintained their language, their culture, and traces of something else: something that showed up in the way certain families abstained from pork, in the names they gave their children, in the direction certain elders faced when they prayed.

Bilali Muhammad was brought to Sapelo Island sometime between 1802 and 1803. He had been enslaved in the Bahamas before being purchased by Thomas Spalding, a Georgia planter who recognized in Bilali a man of unusual capability and put him in charge of managing four to five hundred enslaved people on a plantation called Sapelo.

This arrangement, where an enslaved Muslim managed the enslavement of others, embodies one of the unbearable complexities of American history and deserves to be named rather than avoided.

We also know this: Bilali Muhammad prayed. He wore a fez and a long coat even on the plantation. He fasted for Ramadan. He observed Islamic holy days. He taught his sons and daughters the fundamentals of Islamic practice. And he wrote. Thirteen pages of Arabic text, written in a careful hand, drawing on an Islamic legal manual known as the رسالة of Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani, a foundational Maliki jurisprudence text studied across West Africa for centuries. The Bilali document is not a ‘woe is me’ story. It is not a letter home. It is a legal and devotional treatise, the notes of a scholar maintaining his intellectual practice under conditions designed to make scholarship impossible.

The Bilali document is not a ‘woe is me’ story. It is not a letter home. It is a legal and devotional treatise, the notes of a scholar maintaining his intellectual practice under conditions designed to make scholarship impossible.

Bilali Muhammad died around 1859. He asked to be buried with his prayer rug and his Qur’an. The island that bore witness to his faith is the island that gives Sapelo Square its name.

COMING SATURDAY, JUNE 20 — PART TWO:  Bilali Muhammad was one of four men whose faith we can document by name. Next, we meet two more: a scholar who opened his autobiography not with his voice but with Allah’s voice, and a freedman building a house in Georgetown while the Constitution was debated in Philadelphia. We turn, at last, to the question their lives keep asking: What did it mean to be Muslim on this soil with no community, no mosque, and only Allah’s book stored in your heart?

Nisa Muhammad is a lover of most things Black and Muslim, especially modest fashion. She is Sapelo Square’s Director of Content and Programs. She has been with Sapelo since the beginning and has served as politics editor and intern coordinator. Dr. Muhammad is the creator of Sapelo’s highly successful Freedom School.