The Body as Archive: Erasure & Endurance in the Literacies of Enslaved
West African Muslims
Part Two: The Bodies That Held It: Evidence, Limits, and Inheritance in the Record of Enslaved West African Muslims
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 argued that enslaved Muslims preserved Islam by carrying it in memorization, prayer, diet, and name rather than on paper an enslaver could burn. Part Two is where that argument’s abstraction ceases. It turns to four documented figures, Omar ibn Sa’id, Bilali Muhammad, Lamine Kebe, and the Gullah Geechee community, read as a collective case, whose lives are the closest thing this history has to primary evidence. It then confronts the historiographical problem that evidence like this always poses, before closing on what all of it left behind: where the spiritual ground of twentieth-century Black Islam would eventually take root.
Figures We Know
Four portraits make the abstraction palpable.
If the body preserved Islam under slavery, four documented lives make that claim concrete. Omar ibn Sa’id left an autobiography written in Arabic that scholars increasingly read as a theological act rather than a simple personal record. Its most debated feature is a closing section composed in the language of Christian scripture, read by some early observers as evidence of conversion and read increasingly by contemporary scholars through taqiyya, the concealment of Muslim religious belief under threat, or as a strategic negotiation with an audience of enslavers who controlled his fate. Before that autobiography existed, Sa’id had already written directly on the walls of the jail cell where he was first held, literacy asserting itself on the only surface available. 
Bilali Muhammad, enslaved on Sapelo Island, Georgia, produced a document, written in Arabic script, long mischaracterized as a diary or a folk curiosity. It is neither. It is a fragment of Maliki jurisprudential writing, evidence of formal Islamic legal education carried across the ocean and preserved on a Georgia plantation. Bilali is also remembered, by his enslaver’s own descendants, as a man entrusted with defending the plantation and, by extension, the system that held him captive, a moral complexity historians do not smooth over. He carried a sajada, a prayer rug, and used it as intended, for prostration on clean ground, regardless of who was watching; his name endured phonetically as “Bailey,” carried by generations of descendants.
Lamine Kebe, a Fulbe scholar and teacher who was enslaved and later manumitted, was documented by Theodore Dwight, founding secretary of the American Ethnological Society, who noted Kebe’s fluency and his prior vocation as a Qur’an instructor in West Africa. Dwight marveled that a man dismissed as property could read and write a language few of his captors could speak, an admission, however unintentional, that punctured the fiction of enslaved illiteracy. Other observers, encountering Job ben Solomon or Prince Abdur-Rahman, recorded similar surprise, each testimony chipping against its author’s intent at the assumption that enslaved Africans arrived without education.
Taken collectively, the Gullah Geechee community of the Georgia and South Carolina coast offers what the individual portrait cannot: intergenerational transmission. Dietary caution, ring-shout rhythms with plausible West African Islamic resonance, and phrases like “saraka,” rooted in the Arabic sadaqa (charity), persisted along the coast for generations after the last practitioners who understood their full original meaning had died, carried by descendants as inheritance rather than doctrine. The same pattern appears in the historical record more broadly: an enslaved man handed paper in a tavern that wrote the name of Allah, which no one around him could read; men ordered to copy the Lord’s Prayer wrote al-Fatiha instead; and an enslaved woman, Lizzie Gray, who described Christ building “the first church in Mecca,” coded language for the Ka’aba. None of this was accidental. It was devotion that found whatever surface, language, or rhythm was available to hold it.
“What remains, finally, is not paper. It is the body that prayed anyway: foreheads that found the ground, a tongue that kept moist with the shape of words it was forbidden to write down.”
The Historiographical Problem
How do you write the history of a practice engineered to be invisible? This is the persistent difficulty facing anyone who studies enslaved Muslim life. The evidence that survives, a manuscript, a mis-transliterated name, a prayer rug, and a folklorist’s field notes decades after the fact, was never meant to be evidence. It was meant to be devotion, conducted under threat, and its legibility today is often an accident of what an enslaver happened to preserve, what a descendant happened to remember, or what a WPA (Works Progress Administration) interviewer (writer/researcher hired during the Great Depression) happened to ask in the 1930s, albeit with bias, limitations, and power dynamics. A second, related problem compounds the first: much Western curricular theory assumed, by default, that enslaved Africans possessed at best a hidden curriculum, if any curriculum at all, treating West African language, oral history, and religious practice as beneath documentation in the first place. Historians can confirm literacy, ritual practice, and formal Islamic education among a documented set of individuals. What the record cannot always confirm, and what historians must resist, is the temptation to overstate the precise scale of Islamic practice across the broader enslaved population or the exact content of what any community privately believed once its outward practice was forced underground. The absence of paper is not the absence of practice, but it does mean that the historian works with a fraction of a fraction and must acknowledge this.
What Survived, and Why It Matters
What survived was not a complete religion transmitted intact. It was something more deep-rooted: the spiritual conditions for a later revival. The habits of memorization, the postures of prayer, the dietary caution, and the phonetic names created a substrate onto which twentieth-century Black Islam, in its many forms, could take root, because the ground had never actually gone dormant. The isnad, the chain of transmission that authenticates Islamic knowledge, did not require a university or a masjid to survive slavery. It moved through whatever rooms were available: a kitchen table where a grandmother taught a phrase whose full meaning she may or may not have still known, a rice field where a work song carried a call to prayer’s cadence without its name. Folklorists documenting a Levee Camp holler decades later found themselves, without quite intending to, recording an echo of the adhan (the Muslim call to prayer). Transmission continued because it does not require permission, only a body willing to keep active what it had inherited.
This phenomenon matters beyond the historical record itself. It reframes a familiar story of loss into one of continuity: Islam did not disappear under slavery. It went underground, into breath, posture, and memory, and waited, not as a relic to be recovered intact, but as a living underlying layer, ready to surface again. What remains, finally, is not paper. It is the body that prayed anyway: foreheads that found the ground, a tongue that kept moist with the shape of words it was forbidden to write down.
Part One claimed that the body became the archive. Part Two showed what that archive actually held: four lives, a coastal community, and the honest limits of a record that was never meant to be read. Together they carry the essay’s full argument: that Islam did not disappear under slavery. It went underground, into vital force inhalation, posture of prayer, and memory, and waited.
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