Legal Representations of Muslim Slaves by American Courts and Legislative Bodies: 1650–1861

Abstract

This paper is the first specific exploration of Muslim slaves in front of American courts and legal mechanisms more broadly from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth century. As hundreds of thousands of slaves who came to America had Muslim backgrounds, many of those Muslim slaves found themselves in front of legal regimes and American courts. However, the Muslim identities of these slaves, despite the importance that their religious beliefs might have had for them, were rarely discussed in the case law or not mentioned at all. Drawing from Patterson’s notion of the “socially dead” slave, this paper draws on numerous examples from cases like Amistad to cases dealing with wills and estates to note that the ties to Islam in these cases were obfuscated and minimized. The social death of Muslim slaves in the way that the court documented their experiences silences the voices of American Muslim slaves who reacted in unique ways to their condition of slavery.

Notes

1. “Hunt v Monger, McIlwaine 240, October 1670”, in Judicial Cases Concerning American Slaves and the Negro, ed. Helen Caterall, Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution, 1926, p. 94.

2. Ibid.

3. Kais Dukes, “ك ل م: Qur’an Dictionary” (2011), online: Language Research Group, University of Leeds http://corpus.quran.com/qurandictionary.jsp?q=mlk (accessed 4 February 2017).

4. The Qur’an, Surah 6, Verse 50.

5. John Pierre Entelis, ed., Islam, Democracy, and the State in North Africa, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997, p. 10.

6. Ibid.

7. The Qur’an, Surah 43, Verse 77.

 

8. Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban, Islamic Law and Society in Sudan, London: Frank Cass, 1987, p. 5.

9. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982, p. 13.

10. Sylviane Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas, New York: New York University Press, 2013.

11. Brent Singelton, “The Ummah Slowly Bled: A Select Bibliography of Enslaved Muslim in the Americas and the Caribbean”, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Vol. 22, 2002, p. 401.

12. Helen Caterall, ed., Judicial Cases Concerning American Slaves and the Negro, Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution, 1926.

13. “Slaves and the Courts, 1740–1860”, online: Library of Congress http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/sthtml/sthome.html (accessed 1 January 2016).

14. United States v. Libellants and Claimants of the Schooner Amistad, 40 U.S. 518 (1841).

15. Dora L. Costa & Matthew E. Kahn, “Forging a New Identity: The Costs and Benefits of Diversity in Civil War Combat Units for Black Slaves and Freemen”, Journal of Economic History, Vol. 66, 2006, p. 942.

16. Entelis, Islam, Democracy, and the State, op. cit., p. 111.

17. Ibid., p. 113.

18. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, op. cit.

 

19. Ibid., p. 5.

20. Ibid.

21. Destiny Peery, “The Colorblind Ideal in a Race-Conscious Reality: The Case for a New Legal Idea for Race Relations”, Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy, Vol. 6, No. 2, 2011, p. 474.

22. Kambiz Ghanea-Bassiri, A History of Islam in America, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 61.

23. Feisal Abdul Rauf, “Five Myths about Muslims in America” (April 2011), online: Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-muslims-in-america/2011/03/30/AFePWOIC_story.html (accessed 2 January 2016).

24. Entelis, Islam, Democracy, and the State, op. cit., p. 70.

25. Y.N. Kly, “The African-American Muslim Minority 1776–1900”, Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, Vol. 10, No. 1, 1989, p. 156.

26. Thomas Bluett, “Some Memoirs of the Life of Job, the Son of Solomon, the High Priest of Boonda in Africa” (2015) online: Documenting the American South http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/bluett/bluett.html (accessed 14 December 2015).

27. Ibid., p. 2.

28. Entelis, Islam, Democracy, and the State, op. cit., p. 61.

29. Ibid., p. 72.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid., p. 22.

32. Ibid., p. 52.

33. Ibid., p. 83.

34. Ibid.

35. Ibid.

36. Entelis, Islam, Democracy, and the State, op. cit., p. 94. Note as well that orthodox Muslim slaves would have understood that the commandments of Ramadan would not apply to them as both hard laborers and under circumstances of duress.

37. Ibid.

38. Phillip D. Morgan, Slavery in the Development of the Americas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 308.

39. See Hadith 20 on modesty from Nawawi’s Al Arba’een, at: http://dailyhadith.abuaminaelias.com/2014/04/16/hadith-on-modesty-men-and-women-should-not-look-at-each-other-naked/ (accessed 1 March 2017).

40. Entelis, Islam, Democracy, and the State, op. cit., p. 104.

41. Ibid., p. 72. Also note the general prohibition in the classical formulation of orthodox Sunni Islam for Muslims to consume pork or alcohol as found in the Qur’an at 2:73 and 5:93.

42. Entelis, Islam, Democracy, and the State, op. cit., p. 26.

43. Ibn Ashur, Treatise on Maqasid al Shariah, Herndon, VA: International Institute of Islamic Thought, 2008, p. 110.

44. Entelis, Islam, Democracy, and the State, op. cit., p. 27.

45. Ibid.

46. Ibid.

47. Ala Alreyyes, trans., A Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar Ibn Said, Madison, WI: Wisconsin University Press, 2011, p. 3.

48. Ibid., p. 63.

49. Ibid., p. 67.

50. Imam al-Shafi, Kitab ul Umm, Vol. 6.

51. Entelis, Islam, Democracy, and the State, op. cit., p. 194.

52. Ibid., p. 193.

53. “Maund v M’Phail, 10 Leigh 199, April 1839”, in Judicial Cases Concerning American Slaves and the Negro, ed. Helen Caterall, Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution, 1926, p. 193.

54. The Qur’an, Surah 18, Verses 60–82.

55. The Qur’an, Surah 18, Verse 72.

56. Jamiah al Tirmidhi, Book 47, Hadith 3441.

57. William Waller Hening, ed., The Statutes at Large (October 1705), Vol. 3, 447 p. XI. See also: http://vagenweb.org/hening/index.htm (accessed 18 November 2015).

58. Marie Failinger, “Islam in the Mind of American Courts: 1800 to 1960”, Boston College, Journal of Law & Social Justice, Vol. 32, Nos 1/2, 2012, p. 5.

59. J. Hamilton, Negro Plot: An Account of the Late Intended Insurrection among a Portion of the Blacks of the City of Charleston, South Carolina, Boston, MA: Joseph Ingraham, 1822 in “Slaves and the Courts, 1740–1860”, online: Library of Congress http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/sthtml/sthome.html (accessed 19 November 2015).

60. Walter Rucker, The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formation in Early America, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana University Press, 2006, p. 249.

61. Douglas R. Egerton, He Shall Go Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2004, p. 145.

62. Walter C. Rucker, “‘I Will Gather All Nations’: Resistance, Culture, and Pan-African Collaboration in Denmark Vesey’s South Carolina”, Journal of Negro History, Vol. 86, No. 2, Spring, 2001, pp. 132–147, p. 135.

63. The Qur’an, Surah 2, Verse 154.

64. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Black Rebellion: Five Slave Revolts, Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 1998, p. 121.

65. Ibid.

66. Ibid., p. 135.

67. See, http://law.justia.com/cases/massachusetts/supreme-court/volumes/6/6mass358.html (accessed 18 January 2016).

68. Andrew Wheatcroft, Infidels: A History of the Conflict between Christendom and Islam, New York: Random House, p. 197.

69. See, ibid.

70. Sir Hamilton Gibb, Mohammedanism: An Historical Survey, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969, p. 1.

71. See books such as Mary Cable, Black Odyssey: The Case of the Slave Ship Amistad, London: Penguin, 1977; Marcus Rediker, The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery and Freedom, New York: Viking, 2012.

72. Howard Jones, Mutiny on the Amistad, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987, p. 9.

73. Ibid., p. 108.

74. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas, op. cit.

75. Rucker, The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity, op. cit., p. 105.

76. Ibid., p.109.

77. Allan D. Austin, African Muslims in Antebellum America: Transatlantic Stories and Spiritual Struggles, London: Routledge, 1997, p. 42.

78. John Warner Barber, A History of the Amistad Captives, New Haven, CT: EL & JW Barber, 1840. Online: Documenting the American South (2004) http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/barber/menu.html (accessed 3 January 2016).

79. Ibid., p. 9.

80. Ibid., p. 4.

81. Ibid., p. 20

82. The Qur’an, Surah 6, Ayah 60.

83. Wheatcroft, Infidels: A History of the Conflict between Christendom and Islam, op. cit., p. 15.

84. Ibid., p. 19.

85. Michael Stevens, State Records of South Carolina: Journals of the House of Representatives, 1789–90, Charleston, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1984, online: World Public Library http://www.worldlibrary.org/articles/moors_sundry_act_of_1790 (accessed 5 January 2016).

86. Ibid.

87. Ibid.

88. Ibid.

89. Michael Gomez, Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 149.

90. Terry Alford, Prince Among Slaves: The True Story of an African Prince Sold into Slavery in the American South, New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

91. T.H. Gallaudet, A Statement with Regards to a Moorish Priest, New York: Fanshaw, 1828. Online: Documenting the American South http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/gallaudet/gallaudet.html (accessed 3 January 2016), p 3.

92. Ibid.

93. Ibid.

94. Ibid.

95. Walt Whitman, “Chanting the Square Deific”, in The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse, eds. D.H.S. Nicholson and A.H.E. Lee, 1917, Online: Bartelby http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/gallaudet/gallaudet.html (accessed 14 December 2016).