The Body as Archive: Erasure & Endurance in the Literacies of Enslaved
West African Muslims
Part One: What the Archive Could Not Hold
This essay comes in two parts, published together but designed to be read as a pair of arguments: one making the case, the other proving it.
Part One sets the terms. It names what slavery was actually built to destroy and then makes the essay’s central claim: that enslaved West African Muslims survived that machine of erasure by moving their sacred text out of any material an enslaver could seize and into the one archive beyond confiscation, the human body. Read this part for the theory. Part Two, which follows, tests that theory against four documented lives, against the limits of what the historical record can prove, and against what all of it left behind for the centuries that came after.
1. The Archive of Erasure
Slavery in the Americas was not only a system of forced labor; it was a deliberate machine of deculturalization, engineered to strip enslaved West Africans of the names, languages, and religious practices that anchored them to a self. Slave codes criminalized literacy. Auction blocks scattered kin who shared a mother tongue. Overseers renamed the enslaved at will, erasing genealogies in a single stroke of a ledger. This act was not incidental cruelty but policy: a people presumed to have no books, no names, and no right to gather and pray were presumed to have no interior life worth protecting. The archive that has come down to us reflects this design. Islam among the enslaved has often been narrated, as a result, as a curiosity that vanished, a fragile import that could not survive the Middle Passage and two and a half centuries of bondage. That narrative is itself a product of the archive of erasure. It measures survival only by what could be confiscated or burned, missing what enslaved Muslims had already hidden in the one place no code, lock, or fire could reach: the body.
A hafidth did not carry the Qur’an; he or she was the Qur’an’s carrier, a living manuscript, revelation stored in breath and recitation rather than ink and parchment.
2. The Body as Archive
Before a single ship crossed the Atlantic, West African Islamic education had already solved the problem slavery would later impose: how to preserve a sacred text when the material conditions for keeping books cannot be guaranteed. The answer was hafidth, Qur’anic memorization, a pedagogical tradition built for portability long before the mobile propensity became a matter of survival. A hafidth did not carry the Qur’an; he or she was the Qur’an’s carrier, a living manuscript, revelation stored in breath and recitation rather than ink and parchment. What began as ordinary West African pedagogy became, under slavery, an accidental survival
Alex Haley’s Roots dramatizes this inheritance in its opening scenes: Omoro raising the infant Kunta Kinte to the stars and declaring “Behold, the only thing greater than you,” a witnessing of Allahu Akbar (God is Greater); the boy Kunta greeting his community with as-salaam-alaykum (peace be upon you); the man on the slave ship repeating la ilaha illa Allah (there is no God worthy of worship but God) to endure the crossing; and the enslaved adult found again and again in prostration. Whatever license the miniseries takes as drama, it names correctly what the documentary record independently confirms: education for these enslaved people did not begin on these American shores. This education was rooted in West Africa and carried across the Atlantic, where it was imprinted upon the person, not the bilge.
Western curricular theory recognizes explicit, hidden, invalid, and societal curricula, and the prevailing assumption in much Eurocentric scholarship has been that enslaved Africans possessed, at best, a hidden curriculum, if they were credited with any curriculum at all. That assumption treated West African language, oral history, and religious practice as inauthentic or nonexistent. The historical record, read carefully, argues otherwise. The literacies of enslaved Muslims were frequently explicit, visible, and apparent, hidden in plain sight rather than absent, an inversion captured in two of the ninety-nine names of Allah (God), Al-Batin (the Hidden) and Al-Dhahir (the Apparent), both of which enslaved Muslims embodied at once. Taqiyya, the concealment of belief under threat, shaped how that visibility was managed, but it did not eliminate it.
Salat (ritual daily prayer) survived as bodily discipline that enslavers recorded without understanding. Job ben Solomon prayed openly despite a child’s ridicule and was eventually granted a small structure in which to worship; after being offered a drink at a tavern, he refused it and handed paper instead, writing the name of God where his onlookers could not read it. Bilali carried a prayer rug and wrote in Arabic; his name endured phonetically as “Bailey,” inherited by descendants who carried a sound before they recovered its meaning. Omar ibn Sa’id wrote in Arabic and English on his jail cell wall. Prince Abdur-Rahman and others, ordered to transcribe the Lord’s Prayer, wrote al-Fatiha (the opening chapter of the Qur’an) instead, substituting one scripture for another under the cover of apparent obedience. Lizzie Gray described Christ building “the first church in Mecca,” coded language for the Ka’aba. Dietary restraint, especially the refusal of pork and alcohol, became one of the most visible traces of Muslim identity precisely because it was so difficult to hide. Ajami, which includes African languages rendered in Arabic script and Arabic itself, was remarked upon by observers such as American lawyer and journalist Theodore Dwight, who marveled at the depth of literacy he found among the men he studied, and it demonstrates a form of literacy that the plantation system had no framework for and often refused to believe.
Taken together, these practices constitute a counter-archive: not a hidden curriculum grudgingly inferred by later scholars, but an explicit one, embedded in ritual, memory, language, and the disciplined use of the body itself. The enslavers’ archive recorded confiscation and control; it could not record what had never been reducible to paper. Recovering that counter-archive requires reading the historical record against its own assumptions, treating oral transmission, embodied ritual and phonetic inheritance as evidence rather than as an absence of evidence. Doing so does more than correct a historiographical omission. It insists that the interior, intellectual, and spiritual life of enslaved West African Muslims survived exactly where the enterprise of erasure could not follow: in breath, posture, memory, and the body as a vessel, generation after generation, into the present.
Maryam Sharrieff is the denominational counselor to Muslim students at Harvard Divinity School. She previously served as the Muslim chaplain at various institutions of higher learning and also teaches at Rabata, a faith-based educative organization focused on spiritual and cultural change. Sharrieff’s teaching interests involve death and dying in Islam, healing, the historical legacy of Islam in America, authority and leadership in Muslim women’s scholarship, and race religion. She has degrees in Middle Eastern studies, TV and film, and Italian from Rutgers University and a master’s degree in theological studies from Harvard Divinity School. She is also the new Sapelo Square Politics Editor