With My Face to the Rising Sun: Islam and the Construction of Afro-Christian Tradition in the United States

Abstract

Islam, according to Lincoln and Mamiya, represents an important challenge to 20th century African American Christianity (the Black Church). However, Islam may have also played a role in facilitating the formation of African-American Christianity during slavery. Therefore, it is important to explore speculatively the historical impact of the 10–18% of Africans who were Muslims and who landed alive and as slaves in North America/the United States. More specifically I will examine their role in the negotiation of religious diversity that occurred among African slaves in the construction of culture, community, and, by extension, religious tradition. This paper will explore (1) the cultural toolkit of African Muslims and its possible expression in areas of African-American Christian tradition, (2) assess those areas where Muslim influence is known and evident—for instance in the Sea Islands, and (3) point to the areas where oral tradition, practice, and political activism underscore the potential for identifying Muslim contributions. This paper will also acknowledge the difficulty in making assertions about Muslim influence while at the same time suggesting areas of further research in the African American Christian tradition.

Keywords:

• African survivals
• Baptist
• Bible
• Black Church
• cultural toolkit
• Islam/Muslim
• Qur'an

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this article were presented to the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion and to a Baptist-Muslim Dialogue at Andover Newton Theological School. In addition to the student research support of Tionna Haynes and Lauren Lacy, I am grateful to colleagues who responded to this article, particularly Lawrence Mamiya, Sakhi Kahn, Muhammad Shafiq, Thomas Longstaff, David Strohl, and James Jones.

Notes

Cornelia Walker Bailey with Christena Bledsoe, God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man (New York: Doubleday, 2000).

Sylviane A. Diouf, Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).

Bailey, God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man, 158–59.

Diouf, Dreams of Africa, 168–169.

It might be better to think in terms of multiple Islams coming from multiple African societies. Islam survived in a variety of orientations involving conflict, cooperation, symbiosis, and syncretism for nearly half a millennium before coming to the New World by way of the Middle Passage.

C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African American Experience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990).

Michael A. Gomez, Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Allan D. Austin, African American Muslims in Antebellum America (New York: Garland Publishing Company, 1984); Allan D. Austin, African Muslims in Antebellum America: Transatlantic Stories and Spiritual Struggles (New York: Routledge, 1996); Sylviane A. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (New York: New York University Press, 1998).

The low estimate of 40,000 is based on the estimates of historians such as Curtin, Creel, and others who argue that approximately 400,000 Africans came to North America. Creel and others point out that those who were Muslim may have been concentrated among peoples from Sierra Leone and the Senegambia whose rice growing skills and animal husbandry skills made them active targets of slaveholder recruiting practices.

C. Eric Lincoln, The Black Muslims in America (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1973). See also, Edward E. Curtis, IV, Islam in Black America: Identity, Liberation, and Difference in African-American Islamic Thought (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002).

Julie Dash with Toni Cade Bambara and Bell Hooks, Daughters of the Dust: The Making of an African American Woman's Film (New York: The New Press, 1992), 77. This quotation is taken directly from the screenplay and includes the camera and staging instructions exactly as Julie Dash has written them.

Ibid., 134–135.

Ibid., 144.

Margaret Washington Creel, A Peculiar People: Slave Religion and Community Culture Among the Gullahs (New York: New York University Press, 1988).

Dash, Daughters of the Dust, 36.

This article focuses only on the United States. The emergence of the Baptist, Methodist, and other protestant iterations of the Black Church is a distinct U.S. phenomenon with consequences throughout the Black Atlantic, especially in the British Caribbean. This focus on the Muslim presence is an attempt to highlight one thread in the emergence of this distinct phenomenon.

Professor Sanneh has discussed this phenomenon with reference to the role of Afro-American missionaries in Africa. The process of “local assimilation” is relevant to the spread of Christianity across cultural barriers and boundaries. Lamin Sanneh, “Prelude to African Christian Independency: The Afro-American Factor in African Christianity.” Harvard Theological Review, 77 (1984):1–32. doi:10.1017/S0017816000014188.

My use of the terms “transcultural” and “transculturation” comes from “the Cuban folklorist Fernando Ortiz Fernandez” by way of Charles Mann's popular history of the Columbian Exchange. He writes, “Fernandez coined the awkward but useful term ‘transculturation’ to describe what happens when one group of people takes some—a song, a food, an ideal—from another.” Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (New York: Random House/Alfred A. Knopf, 2011).

For a detailed discussion of Bilali and his descendants, see Michael A. Gomez, Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 143–184. His chapter, “Founding Mothers and Fathers of a Different Sort: African Muslims in the Early North American South,” provides a detailed description of Bilali's life and is augmented with his interviews with his descendants, especially Cornelia Bailey whose last name, according to her, is an Anglicized transliteration of Bilali.

Ira Berlin, The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations (New York: Viking/Penguin Group, 2010).

Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992[1976]), 46.

Lincoln and Mamiya, The Black Church in the African American Experience, 389.

Ibid., 389.

Linda Heywood and John Thornton, “Pinpointing DNA Ancestry in Africa: Most African Americans Hail from 46 Ethnic Groups,” The Root. Posted October 1, 2011, http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2011/10/tracing_dna_not_just_to_africa_but_to_1_tribe.html (accessed December 29, 2013).

Lincoln and Mamiya, The Black Church. See also Austin, African American Muslims in Antebellum America and African Muslims in Antebellum America..

Austin, African Muslims in Antebellum America, 3.

Austin, African American Muslims in Antebellum America, 35.

Judith A. Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

Austin, African Muslims in Antebellum America, 36.

Austin, African Muslims in Antebellum America, 81–113.

Bailey, God, Dr. Buzzard and the Bolito Man, 159 and 237.

In a personal conversation, Lawrence Mamiya suggested that Van Deburg's Bu Allah may also have been Bilali Mohammed mislabeled.

William L. Van Deburg, The Slave Drivers: Black Agricultural Labor Supervisors in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 22–23.

Ibid. Emphasis in the original.

Thomas L. Webber, Deep Like the Rivers: Education in the Slave Quarter Community, 1831–1865 (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978).

Diouf, Servants of Allah.

For the discussion of the six basic components of a religious worldview, see Ninian Smart, Worldviews: Crosscultural Explorations of Human Beliefs (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1983).

Alex Haley, Roots: The Saga of an American Family (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1976).

Diouf, Servants of Allah.

Austin, African Muslims in Antebellum America, 38.

I take the term “toolkit” from Ann Swidler, “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies.” American Sociological Review 51 (April, 1986):273–286.

Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).

F.E. Peters, Children of Abraham: Judaism|Christianity|Islam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982).

Richard Brent Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 4–5. See also Aminah Beverly McCloud, African American Islam (New York: Routledge, 1995).

John S. Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, Anchor Books, 1969).

Diouf, Servants of Allah.

Henry Louis Gates, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

Diouf, Servants of Allah.

According to Colby College Muslim advisor and adjunct professor, Sakhi Kahn, a person who has memorized the Qur'an is labeled a hafiz and granted special honor; not only does the hafiz ascend to Paradise but also his or her family and community.

Fauziya Kassindja and Layli Miller Bashir, Do They Hear You When You Cry? (New York: Random House/Dell Publishing, 1998).

Walker, God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man, 162–168. In a chapter titled “God Resides in the East,” Walker actually describes the influence of Muslim practices as she also describes a process of becoming Christian that parallels that of Fauziya Kassindja's.

David M. Tucker, Black Pastors and Leaders: The Memphis Clergy, 1819–1972 (Memphis, TN: Memphis State University Press, 1975).

Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).

Janet Duitsman Cornelius, When I Can Read My Title Clear: Literacy, Slavery, and Religion in the Antebellum South (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991).

This connection between Jesus and “Moses and the prophets” is specifically highlighted in two spirituals that highlight the story of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16:19–31 (KJV). The two spirituals are “Rocka My Soul in the Bosom of Abraham” and “I Got a Home in That Rock.”

See Webber, Deep Like the Rivers, and Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I A Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1985) for examples of women's prayer and spirituality in the slave community.

See Harold A. Carter, The Prayer Tradition of Black People (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1976).

Howard Thurman, With Head and Heart: The Autobiography of Howard Thurman (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979).

In order to illustrate the musical “kinship” between the singing style of the muzzein [(muezzin or muzim) the person who sings the call to prayer and sings the reading of scripture in the mosque] and African American sacred music, I sometimes use Mustafa Ozcan Gunesdogdu's recording of the Adhan (call to prayer) followed immediately by a recording of Trinity United Church of Christ's recording (“Chicago Sings”) of the Isaac Watts meter hymn, “I Love the Lord He Heard My Cry.” The scale (pentatonic) and the elongated blue notes (melisma) are practically the same.

While references to practices observable in the twentieth century go beyond my focus on slave religion, my earlier research on the Sanctified Church—black Holiness, Pentecostal, Apostolic, and Deliverance denominations and congregations was also an exploration of the way in which church formation functioned as a defense of traditions coming out of slave religion such as the holy dance. Some of these church founders were the children of former slaves, for instance C.H. Mason, who actively defended the traditions assaulted by more conservative Baptist, A.M.E., and other protestant missionaries, both black and white.

My Muslim students now go to websites that calculate the appropriate time for breaking their fast.

See Earl Ofari, Let Your Motto Be Resistance: The Life and Thought of Henry Highland Garnet (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972).

In addition to Raboteau's Slave Religion and Webber's Deep Like the Rivers, a helpful description of the antagonism between black Christianity and white Christianity during slavery can be found in Mechal Sobel, Trabelin' On: The Slave Journey to an Afro-Baptist Faith (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979).

See Webber, Deep Like the Rivers, for discussions of slaves' critique of “slaveholding priestcraft.”

Peters, Children of Abraham, 69.

Turner, Islam in the African American Experience, 4–5.

Middleton Harris with Morris Levitt, Roger Furman, and Ernest Smith, The Black Book (New York: Random House, 1974); W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Terri Hume Oliver, Eds., The Souls of Black Folk: Authoritative Text, Contexts, and Criticism (A Norton Critical Edition) (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1999 [1903]). Middleton Harris's presentation of the Arabic word saut as a homophone for “shout” is drawn from the work of Lorenzo Dow Turner.

In addition to Mintz and Price, The Birth of African American Culture, see also Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993) 7.

Margaret Washington Creel's work carries an important reminder of the importance of secret African societies and funeral practices in shaping the organizational culture of the Sea Islands. I use the term “convocational” because of the ritual dimensions of these organizations along with the dress requirements, especially the frequent requirement of white clothing.

Peters, Children of Abraham, 215.

Gomez, Black Crescent, 183.

Ibid., 183.

These allusions to hidden contributions are borrowed from Jacqueline Tobin and Raymond G. Dobard, Hidden in Plain View: The Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1999) and Diane Peckenold, Ed., Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). While reputable historians, for instance David Blight, seriously question the Tobin and Dobard thesis, theirs is a helpful metaphor for the purposes of this article. See http://www.nytimes.com/learning/teachers/featured_articles/20070124wednesday.html for a glimpse of the controversy (accessed December 30, 2013).