Before the Republic

Islam and the Making of Black America

ESSAY ONE  ·  PART THREE OF THREE

What America Chose Not to Remember

PREVIOUSLY, JUNE 19–20 — PARTS ONE AND TWO:  We have met four Muslims who lived and prayed in America before, during, and just after the nation’s founding: Job ben Solomon in the woods of Maryland, Bilali Muhammad on Sapelo Island, Omar ibn Said with the autobiography that opens in the voice of Allah, and Yarrow Mamout, painted as a free man in Georgetown. We asked what it cost to keep the faith with no community, no mosque, and no book but the one held in memory. Now we ask why America forgot — and what it means that we remember.

What America Chose Not to Remember

The story of Islam in pre-revolutionary America is also, necessarily, a story about what America chose not to remember. The intellectual tradition of West African Islam, its universities, its manuscripts, and its centuries of scholarship were inconvenient for a nation that had built its economy on the premise that the people it enslaved were not quite fully human. This man complicates the story: a man who has memorized the entirety of a revealed text, studied jurisprudence for twenty-five years, and writes legal commentary in his cell. He is easier to manage without history if his faith is superstition and his homeland is darkness.

This is why Job ben Solomon, Omar ibn Said, Bilali Muhammad, and Yarrow Mamout are not in the American history textbooks most of us were given. This is why the phrase “Black Muslim” still reads, in too many contexts, as a recent development, as if a tradition that predates the republic had somehow appeared overnight in a Newark temple in 1913 or a Detroit storefront in 1930.

It did not appear overnight. It survived.

There is one more man to name before we close this first chapter of a long story.

Abdul Rahman Ibrahim ibn Sori was the son of Ibrahima Sori, the almami, the political and religious leader of the Fula people of Futa Jallon in what is now Guinea. He was a prince; he spoke at least five languages and was the head of a 2,000-man army. He was captured in battle in 1788, sold to slave traders, and transported to Natchez, Mississippi, where he spent forty years enslaved on a cotton plantation. 

In 1826, a newspaper editor in Natchez named Andrew Marschalk recognized a letter that Abdul Rahman had written in Arabic and sent it to the Sultan of Morocco. The Sultan responded, requesting his freedom. A campaign ensued, involving President John Quincy Adams and Secretary of State Henry Clay, and in 1828, Abdul Rahman Ibrahim ibn Sori, at the age of sixty-five, after forty years of bondage, was freed.

He had to fundraise to purchase his wife’s freedom. He was never able to purchase his five sons. He and his wife left America and traveled to Africa. He died in Liberia in 1829, one year after his manumission, before reaching his homeland.

At the time of his freedom, he had been in America for forty years. He had never stopped praying.

The Long Islam*

This series takes its name from a phrase: the long Islam. It is an insistence. It is a refusal of the short memory that has defined most accounts of Muslim life in America. The long Islam begins before the republic. It begins in the ships crossing the Atlantic. It begins in the woods of Maryland, where Job ben Solomon made a prayer cap. It begins on Sapelo Island, where Bilali Muhammad wrote Arabic law in the margins of his enslavement.

It begins with men and women whose names we know and thousands whose names we will never recover. It begins, as all of Islam begins, with the act of remembering: اقرأ. Iqra. Read. Recite. Carry this.

We are carrying it.

In the coming weeks, this series will trace Black Muslim life across 250 years of American history, from survival to movement, from transition to the living, fractured, creative, defiant ummah of the present. But all of it rests on this foundation: before the republic, there was already salah on this soil. Before the Constitution, there were people here who had already memorized the Al-Fatiha. Before the nation decided who belonged and who did not, there were Muslims in America who had already answered that question for themselves.

They belonged to Allah.  They were here.

About This Series

The Long Islam: 250 Years of Black Muslims in America is an eight-part essay series published by Sapelo Square as part of the We Were Here Before the Republic campaign, June–November 2026. 

Essay Two: “Praying Through the Peculiar Institution” coming soon.

Sapelo Square is the leading digital platform for Black Muslim life, thought, and community in America.

Support this work at sapelosquare.com  •  #BlackMuslims250  •  #TheLongIslam  •  #WeWereHereFirst

 

*A Note on the Title: What We Mean by The Long Islam

In 2005, the historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall published an essay in Journal of American History that fundamentally reshaped how scholars understand U.S. social movements. “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past” argued that compressing the Civil Rights Movement into its so-called classical period, Rosa Parks, Montgomery, Selma, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was not merely an oversimplification. It was a political act. A shorter movement is easier to declare finished. A shorter movement can be commemorated rather than continued. Hall’s intervention was methodological and moral at once: extend the timeline, she insisted, and you extend the obligation.

The Long Islam borrows that methodology and applies it to Black Muslim life in America.

The standard periodization of African American Islam begins, at the earliest, with Noble Drew Ali’s Moorish Science Temple in 1913, with the Nation of Islam’s founding in 1930, Sheikh Daoud Faisel’s Islamic Mission of America in 1939, or, in popular imagination, with Malcolm X’s emergence in the late 1950s. Each of these starting points has the same effect Hall identified in civil rights historiography: it renders Black Islam a twentieth-century phenomenon, a response to a racial crisis, and a movement with a beginning that implies an eventual end.

The historical record does not support this periodization. The scholarship of Sylviane Diouf (Servants of Allah, 1998), who documented the Islamic practice of enslaved West Africans with painstaking archival rigor; of Michael Gomez (Black Crescent, 2005), who traced the continuous arc of Black Muslim identity from the Middle Passage forward; and of Kambiz Ghanea Bassiri (A History of Islam in America, 2010), who situated that arc within the full sweep of American religious history, demands a longer frame. Islam did not arrive in Black America in the twentieth century. It arrived in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, in the bodies of West African Muslims who were enslaved and transported to a land that did not yet have a name.

The Long Islam takes that longer frame seriously. It treats Black Muslim history not as a series of discrete movements but as a continuous tradition, one that has been suppressed, survived, fractured, rebuilt, and, in 2026, remains very much alive. The eight essays in this series trace that tradition from its documented origins in the pre-revolutionary period to the present moment. They are written with the conviction that a community that knows its full history is harder to erase than one taught to begin in the middle of its story.

We begin at the beginning of this story.

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.