Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas

by Sylviane A. Diouf

Overview

Illuminates how African Muslims drew on Islam while enslaved, and how their faith ultimately played a role in the African Disapora

Servants of Allah presents a history of African Muslims, following them from West Africa to the Americas. Although many assume that what Muslim faith they brought with them to the Americas was quickly absorbed into the new Christian milieu, as Sylviane A. Diouf demonstrates in this meticulously-researched, groundbreaking volume, Islam flourished during slavery on a large scale. She details how, even while enslaved, many Muslims managed to follow most of the precepts of their religion. Literate, urban, and well-traveled, they drew on their organization, solidarity and the strength of their beliefs to play a major part in the most well-known slave uprisings. But for all their accomplishments and contributions to the history and cultures of the African Diaspora, the Muslims have been largely ignored. Servants of Allah—a Choice 1999 Outstanding Academic Title—illuminates the role of Islam in the lives of both individual practitioners and communities, and shows that though the religion did not survive in the Americas in its orthodox form, its mark can be found in certain religions, traditions, and artistic creations of people of African descent. This 15th anniversary edition has been updated to include new materials and analysis, a review of developments in the field, prospects for new research, and new illustrations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781479847112
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	10/04/2013
Edition description:	Anniversary
Pages:	351
Sales rank:	458,609
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Sylviane A. Diouf is an award-winning historian of the African Diaspora. She is the author of Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons and Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas—named Choice Outstanding Academic Book in 1999—both with NYU Press. Her book Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America received the 2007 Wesley-Logan Prize of the American Historical Association, the 2009 Sulzby Award of the Alabama Historical Association and was a finalist for the 2008 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. She is the editor of Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies and the co-editor of In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience. A recipient of the Rosa Parks Award, the Dr. Betty Shabazz Achievement Award, and the Pen and Brush Achievement Award, Diouf is a Curator at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library.

Table of Contents

Contents Acknowledgments ix
Introduction to the 15th Anniversary Edition 1
1 African Muslims, Christian Europeans, and the
Transatlantic Slave Trade 20
2 Upholding the Five Pillars of Islam in a Hostile World 71
3 Th e Muslim Community 99
4 Literacy: A Distinction and a Danger 159
5 Resistance, Revolts, and Returns to Africa 210
6 Th e Muslim Legacy 251
Notes 285
Select Bibliography 315
Index 327
About the Author 341
Illustrations appear as a group following page 142.

What People are Saying About This

Jason Zappe

Servants of Allah opens a new door on the African Diaspora and provides readers with even more insight into Islam, as well as enslaved Africans. Diouf's study greatly enhances current literature on the Diaspora.
— Jason Zappe, Copley News Service Dec '98

Sylvie Kande

This historical study is ground-breaking not only in its theme but also its approach, which can be described as pan-Africanist to the extent that it relates the histories of these deported Muslims to the political upheavals of medieval Africa...; forges links between the varied sites of their dispersal from the 16th to the 19th century...; and examines the issue of return to Africa and the lineage (or the absence thereof) of this first American Islam.
— Sylvie Kandé, QBR Jan/Feb '99

Editorial Reviews

"Servants of Allah opens a new door on the African Diaspora and provides readers with even more insight into Islam, as well as enslaved Africans. Diouf's study greatly enhances current literature on the Diaspora."

Copley News Service Dec '98 - Jason Zappe

"Sylviane Diouf'sServants of Allah is a welcome contribution to our understanding of a critical moment in the African Diaspora. Her focus is the collective experience of African Muslims enslaved in the New World. Diouf's premise is that Muslims maintained their religious and cultural integrity, indeed their identity, in the face of daunting oddsThe author's insight into Islamic almsgiving in the form of saraka cakes in the Georgia Sea islands is intriguing. The section on Muslim dress in the third chapter is well presented. Perhaps the most fascinating parts of the work concern the probability that Muslim holy books were transferred from the Old World to the New via networks of black sailors and that the blues are most likely informed by the musical creativity of West African Muslims."

Journal of Southern History

"Sylviane A. Diouf's book makes a major contribution by focusing on Muslim participation in the slave trade and Muslims' impacts on the Americas...Diouf presents a convincing and original picture of the life of enslaved Muslims, who, she claims, remained primarily servants of Allah than subjects of Christian masters...The chapter on resistance and revolts is especially interesting. According to the author, Muslims, as a result of their literacy and military skills, played essential roles in the Haitian Revolution and the early-nineteenth-century revolts in Bahia. Diouf's well-written and interesting book opens new avenues of inquiry and research. It will interest and perhaps inspire students of the African diaspora and slavery in the Americas."

Journal of American History

"Servants of Allah is constructed in a highly classical manner: the sobriety of its analysis lets the facts speak for themselves, with a minimum of editorializing; it is structured logically and symmetrically in a manner that illuminates the nodal point of the Muslim's distinctiveness within the slave system, namely, their mastery of writing....Servants of Allah has a wealth of arguments that provoke reflection and that will not leave the reader indifferent or lacking in references for further reading"

Quarterly Black Review

"For scholars and non-scholars, Servants of Allah provides a sweeping but accessible introduction to the history of Islam across the Western Hemisphere and over the entire four-hundred year history of enslavement."- Journal of Islamic Studies

“A must read for anyone interested in the early history of Islam in the African American community. Diouf goes beyond generalities and sheds light on the lives of transplanted Muslims who have become an important block in the rewriting of the history of Islam in the United States, providing heroic examples of adjustment and survival in a hostile environment.”-Yvonne Haddad,Georgetown University

" Servants of Allah remains an important scholarly work, significant in retrieving historical memory and as a testament of religious endurance under dislocation, separation, and enslavement. Beyond the familiar assumptions of struggle, survival, and liberation, the book points to the vigorous intellectual life of Islam in which New World Muslim Africans participated. Diouf has put her finger on a critical impulse when she draws out the transnational dimensions of Islamic scholarship that sustained learning and practice among the besieged Muslim Africans, which makes the irony of the decline of Muslim life during slavery in the Americas all the more striking."-Lamin Sanneh,Yale University

From the Publisher

Servants of Allah does not subscribe to current theoretical fashions. Servants of Allah seeks to debunk the stereotypical image of the enslaved African in the Americas. Many, especially those who were Muslims at the time of capture, were learned and able to read. Because this imagery was contrary to the required projection of the African, Ms. Diouf indicates, the slaveholding establishment tried to regard African Muslims as Orientals, Arabs, or Moors, by virtue of a well-known tautology: Since the African was by definition barbaric, an educated slave could not be African. Through writing, certain Muslims protested against the enslavement of their friends and families; thanks to the written word, some of them returned to Africa.

bn.com

Servants of Allah is constructed in a highly classical manner: the sobriety of its analysis lets the facts speak for themselves, with a minimum of editorializing; it is structured logically and symmetrically in a manner that illuminates the nodal point of the Muslim's distinctiveness within the slave system, namely, their mastery of writing....Servants of Allah has a wealth of arguments that provoke reflection and that will not leave the reader indifferent or lacking in references for further reading.
— Quarterly Black Review

Sylvie Kande

Sylviane A. Diouf has written a sophisticated and important book on the history of West African Muslims in the New World. The author's cogent analyses of source materials from Old World-West African Islam and New World-transatlantic slave communities establishes a strong and persuasive case for rich and extensive Islamic influences in black religious and cultural traditions in Brazil, the United States, and the Caribbean islands. This creative and refreshing interpretation of West African-Islamic spiritual continuities in the African Diaspora is fascinating and very readable. The author's major contribution lies in her great insight into the worldview and the ethos of the African Muslim slaves in the Americas.

American Historical Review

Explores the stories of African Muslim slaves in the New World. The author argues that although Islam as brought by the Africans did not outlive the last slaves, "what they wrote on the sands of the plantations is a successful story of strength, resilience, courage, pride, and dignity." She discusses Christian Europeans, African Muslims, the Atlantic slave trade, literacy, revolts, and the Muslim legacy. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Booknews

Diouf's book provokes. Diouf does not merely investigate an antebellum community of Muslims who are 'forced' into captivity; she examines the relationships that existed between individual scholars, clerics and adherents to the message of the Qur'an. Diouf details an extensive range of literal, social, political and religious activity, designed to heal, connect, liberate, empower, create and celebrate, leading ultimately to manifestations of freedom. Servants of Allah is an important and useful text because it contains an impressive catalog of vital descriptions of life in captivity and the struggle for freedom.

Slavery and Abolition

Servants of Allah is a thorough and ambitious attempt to reconstruct the ways the bonds of belief in orthodox Islam assisted hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans to retain their cultural integrity as they were forced to live out their lives in bondage in the Americas. Meticulously constructing her narrative out of hundreds of references to Islamic practices and artifacts from a large variety of sources in several languages, Sylviane A. Diouf assembles solid evidence of the importance of Muslims as a distinct population within slave communities in Brazil, the Caribbean and North America.

William and Mary Quarterly

Servants of Allah has six fact-filled chapters. Diouf deftly covers a regional history of West Africa during the period of the slave trade. She provides us with a contextual setting for all the participants in the trade and asserts the complexities of an already existing slave trade and its difference from what becomes American chattel slavery. She then proceeds to upset further our notions of who slaves were with the phrase "literate, urban, and in some cases well-traveled." Chapter 3 furnishes us with a relatively detailed account of Muslim slave life [in the Americas.] A solid discussion on the importance of names and identity in Islam and the responsibility to maintain that identity in the reality of Christian renaming is one hallmark of this section. This first broad and yet thorough revisiting of a significant and long denied history is absolutely critical for everyone to read.

Journal of the American Academy of Religion