Exploring Islam in America
By Dr Akbar Ahmed
American University
Washington, DC
Last October, Mrs Cornelia Bailey, a leading member of a tiny community of African Americans living on Sapelo Island off the Georgia coast, passed away.This remarkable woman was aspokeswoman, storyteller, historian and preserver of her people’s unique culture known as Gullah-Geechee.
The community’s roots go back to the time of slavery, when the area was owned by Thomas Spalding, a planter and US congressman from Georgia who grew cotton, sugarcane and rice using African slave labor.
Following the abolishment of slavery after the US Civil War, the people of Sapelo remained, but their number steadily grew smaller.
What made Bailey and the community even more unique was their Muslim background. Bailey herself was a direct eleventh-generation descendant of Bilali Muhammad, a Muslim slave originally from West Africa who was taken first to the Caribbean and then to Sapelo in the early nineteenth century, where he became the head “enforcer” over the other slaves.
Bilali Muhammad left us a document known as the “Bilali Diary”, a manuscript he wrote entirely in Arabic characters, although the language he used is not standard Arabic. His manuscript reveals a scholarly, pious, and intelligent man who clung to his identity and dignity.
Fascinated by this background, I set out with my team of researchers to meet MrsBailey and stay with her community while conducting research for my book on Islam in America, Journey into America:The Challenge of Islam (2010).
I was aware that a large percentage of slaves brought from Africa to America were Muslim—some scholars give a figure of 30-40 percent and even higher. But what interested me was seeing what remained of Islam, considering the slave-owners’attempts to obliterate original identities.
Mrs Bailey took us to Hog Hammock, where her tiny community lived, and to our lodgings in her quaint, if austere, house turned hotel. Over a long interview late into the night, Mrs Bailey allowed us glimpses into her community.
Mrs Bailey recalled her grandmother telling her, “We were Christian by day and Muslim by night”.As Baptist preachers only arrived once a month to teach Christianity, Sapelo’s residents were largely left to continue their Islamic practices. With each generation, however, the links with Islam faded.
Even the meaning of the eponymous name, Bilal, after whom her ancestor was named, was lost. When I recounted the story of Bilal and his devotion to the Prophet (PBUH)—and the reason why Mrs Bailey’s ancestor would be called Bilali in the first place—she confessed she had not heard of it.
Hazrat Bilal (RA)was an Abyssinian slave, I told Mrs Bailey, who converted to Islam and in spite of being tortured refused to abandon his faith. Bilal’s voice was legendary for its soothing and exquisite quality. The Prophet (PBUH) had a special love for Bilal and appointed him the first Muezzin(the one who gives the call to prayer)in Islam.
Eyes glistening with tears, Mrs Bailey seemed to soften and said, “I love my Muslim background; ignoring it would be like cutting off an arm”.
For Mrs Bailey, history was a struggle to preserve as much of her people’s identity as possible. Her African Baptist Church was a response to the mainstream Baptist Church dominated by the white majority and established to assert the congregants’ unique identity and distinct ancestry from Africa, including some possibly Islamic roots, she said.
Even though worshippers were Christian,once they entered the church, for example, the men went to a section on the left and women to one on the right. They also took their shoes off, and the men and women covered their heads. The church was called a “prayer house” rather than a church, an echo of the meaning associated with the term “mosque.” Churches face the east, she explained because the sun rises in the east and the “devil” resides in the west. Even as Christians, they said their prayers facing east.
Mrs Bailey remembered a long tradition of washing hands and feet, which comes directly from the Muslim Wudu. Modesty was pronounced among women, and after puberty arms and legs were covered. She recalled her grandmother not eating pork, although it slowly entered their diet out of necessity, but still in small, reluctantly eaten, quantities. She mentioned stories of her ancestors and grandmother praying five times a day. Divorce was strongly discouraged, and even today men and women are not allowed to “live in sin”.
Into the long night with the Atlantic wind howling outside, Mrs Bailey painted some graphic images of the brutality that slaves suffered—that of a pregnant mother’s belly being slit open and the fetus trampled under the boots of the slave owners was particularly disturbing. She said black ministers talked of “forgiveness” constantly, but “sometimes I don’t feel like being so Christian. Sometimes, I want the Old Testament, an eye for an eye”.
In the middle of this long, depressing conversation, Mrs Bailey said something that I almost missed but forced me to sit up as its significance sunk in. She said she would like to “reverse the ships.” For a moment, I thought she meant that the descendants of the Africans should be allowed through some magical process to go back in time to Africa and prevent the ships from landing in the first place. Her meaning was entirely different and more sinister: she would like to enslave whites, she said, to put them in “shackles” in order to do to them what they had done to the Africans. We were stunned into silence.
At a time when many Americans are questioning and debating the place of Islam in America,Sapelo and Mrs Bailey confirm that Islam has been part of the United States from the beginning. Islam, as many African Americans remind me, is an important part of African American culture and there are many African American Muslims today who feel they have “reverted” to the religion of their ancestors. It is time for Americans of all backgrounds,and Muslims around the world, to understand and appreciate these historical roots.
(The writer is the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at American University, Washington, DC, and author of Journey into Europe: Islam, Immigration, and Identity)
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