It was the belief of many Europeans that the African’s they enslaved were illiterate. African culture relied heavily on oral tradition, and there was not writing system. African Muslims were literate. Being able to read Arabic is very important in Islam because its followers rely on the Qur’an for an understanding of the religion and as a guide for life. Islam stresses the importance of literacy, although the prophet Muhammad couldn’t read or write. The Qur’an is very explicit about the need for study.
“ Those to whom We have given the Book study it as it should be studied.”
(Q 2: 2-121)
There was a great striving for literacy and knowledge in West Africa. In the town of Timbuktu in Mali had 150 schools. One of the first things done by religious leaders, who established the theocracies of Bundu, Futa Jallon, Futa Toro, and Sokoto, was to build more schools to increase and encourage higher learning. By the end of the 19th century the French estimated that 60 percent all Senegalese were literate in Arabic. Futa Jallon had 300 Qu’ranic schools and northern Nigeria had 20,000 schools, reported French and British colonial read and write Arabic and ajami. Ajami is the name given to African languages transcribed in Arabic alphabet. They were devoted readers of the Qu’ran and many of them knew it word for word. Among these literate West African Muslims hundreds of thousands of them ended their lives as slaves in the New World. Their literacy played an important role in the shaping of their community, their relationship with non-Muslims, their search for freedom, and the rebellious movements they led or participated in.
Islam in the New World: Muslim Slaves
The institution of slavery was nothing new to Muslim and non-Muslim Africans. In fact many Africans had either been slaves or were slaveholders while in Africa. Slavery in African however was very different from the type of slavery that took place in the Americas. In West Africa most slaves were captives of war. Slaves in the Americas were kidnapped and purchased. Non-Muslim state criminals were often enslaved. Often they these slaves were debtor who pawned themselves or members of their families as compensation for their unpaid debts. Rulers often added new categories of crime that they thought a punishment of slavery was fit.
African slaves were used in a number of ways. Some worked as soldiers, palace guards, porters, concubines, and domestic workers. Many slaves worked as agricultural labors. Slaves usually lived with their owner’s and worked partly for their owners and partly for themselves. Sometimes they lived in slave villages and worked as sharecroppers.
Islam neither condemned nor forbade slavery but it stated that enslavement was lawful under two conditions. Condition one being if a slave was born to slave parents and two if he had been a pagan prisoner of war Captives could legally be made slaves if they were a pagan or kafir who had refused to convert to Islam. Freeing slaves as a mark of piety is talked about in several way in the Qur’an. Muhammad was a slaveholder, but he freed his slaves and later established structures to regulate slavery in Islam. Bilal was an Ethiopian slave who was among the first converts to Islam. Muhammad freed Bilal and appointed him as the first muezzin.
Muslims made up at least 15 percent of the slave population in North America in the 18th and 19th centuries. They were often from the urban, ruling elite of West Africa. These West African Muslims brought the first Islamic beliefs and practices to the United States. They practiced subtle forms of resistance to Christianity by keeping their African names, writing in Arabic, fasting, wearing Muslim clothing, and writing and reciting from the Qur’an.
Job Ben Solomon, a Maryland slave of Fulani Muslim origins who lived from about 1700 to about 1773. He is one of they best know Muslim slaves in history. 1730 while making a trip to the coast to buy paper and sell two of his father’s slave to English traders, he was captured. Mandingos, who were enemies of Fulani’s, sold Job into slavery. He worked on plantations in Maryland, where white children mocked him while he tried to recite his prays in the woods. He escaped but was soon captured and put in prison. Job struggled to maintain his Muslim identity. In 1733, arrangements were made for Job to go to England because of his intelligence and ability to write and speak Arabic. While in England Job wrote several copies of the Qur’an from memory and translated other Arabic materials for the Royal Society. In 1731, Thomas Bluette an English minister who had heard of Job’s knowledge of Arabic and his devotion to Islam arranged a meeting between the two. In 1734 Bluette published Job’s biography in London. The royal African Company arranged to send Job back to Africa. They used him in their trade of slaves for gold and rum. Eventually, he returned to Bondu where he helped Melchour De Jaspas, an Arabic- speaking Armenian and representative of the Royal African Company, with his explorations in Africa from 1738 to 1740. Job Ben Solomon died in 1773.
Yarrow Mamout, a slave from Georgetown, Virginia, who was close to 100 years old when his portrait was painted in 1819 by American artist Charles Wilson Peale. Little is known about Yarrow’s life however it is known that he was a slave to the Bell family in Georgetown and was eventually freed because of his diligence. In 1819, he owned a house in Georgetown and had saved enough money to buy stock in the Columbia Bank. There is no evidence that Yarrow wrote Arabic, he did however dress in Muslim style clothing and observe the dietary laws of Islam.
Muslim prince Abd al-Rahman Ibrahima, from Fouta Jallon (in present-day Guinea) was a Muslim. He was the son of a chieftain of the Fula tribe. Ibrahima studied the Qur’an, and attended school in Timbuktu. He was married with children. He helped an injured Irish ship surgeon, Dr. Cox in 1781. In 1788, in a battle with the Mandingo tribe, he was captured and traded to white men for guns. Ibrahima sailed to Mississippi to work on a tobacco plantation. He was renamed Prince and his long hair was cut off. He later met Dr. Cox who offered to help. The American Colonization Society bought and purchased land now known as Liberia in Africa. Ibrahima finally earned his freedom in 1829.
Two other African Muslim mentioned in historical writings are Bilali, a Georgia Sea Island slave who lived in the early 1800s. Bilal passed on Muslim traditions to his 19 children and was known for his ability to speak and write Arabic. When he died, he left an Arabic manuscript that he had written, and his pray rug. A copy of the Qu’ran was placed in his coffin. Fulani Muslim scholar Omar ibn Said, who was a slave in North Carolina, is also mentioned in historical writings. He lived from 1770 to 1864 and pretended a conversion to the Christian faith of his master.
By the eve of the American Civil War, the Islam of the original African Muslim slaves had began to vanish, because Muslims were not able to develop institutions to perpetuate their religion in 19th-century America. After they died, their version of Islam disappeared.
New American Islam and Pan-Africanism
In the late 19th century the Pan-Africanism of Liberian nationalist Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832-1912) provided the intellectual framework for the confluence of Islam and Black Nationalism in the United States in the 20th century. Pan-African ideas of Edward Wilmot Blyden are the important keys in understanding how and why the racial separatism. He used the example of Islam in West Africa as the model for racial separatism and signification in his Pan-African ideology. He argued that as a global religion for black people, Islam should be preferred over Christianity. Additional influences were the internationalist perspective of the Universal Negro Improvement Association of Marcus Garvey and the Great Migration of more than one million black Southerners to Northern cities at the beginning of the century.
Urbanization, migration, and immigration were important factors that sensitized African Americans to Islam in the 1920’s. The migration of southern blacks to the northern and midwestern cities from 1915 to 1930 resulted in the new religious, political, economic, social, and psychological needs in the African American community. This also encouraged the growth of new urban religions and political movements.
In Newark, New Jersey, in 1913, Noble Drew Ali, who called himself a prophet of Islam, founded the Moorish Science Temple of America. The Moorish Temple of America was originally called the “Canaanite Temple.” Noble claimed to be the second prophet of Islam. The movement spread over the next decade. An estimated 30,000 people were members. There were temples established in Detroit, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Lansing, Cleveland, and other cities. Noble moved to Chicago, where he set up the permanent headquarters of his movement. In 1928, he changed the name to Moorish Science Temple of America. Moorish Americans wore black fezzes and white turbans. They carried nationality cards and as their symbol they used a red flag with the five-pointed star in the center, something like the Moroccan Flag. They claimed they were not black but olive-skinned Asiatic people who were descendants of Moroccans. The scared text of the Moorish Science Temple of America was the Holy Koran, or the Circle Seven Koran, which was written by Noble in 1927. He wrote several versions the book and noted that his four sources were the Qur’an, the Bible, The Aquarian Gospels of Jesus Christ, and Unto Thee I Grant. Noble cared little about orthodox Islam. He did emphasize the dietary laws of Islam. In order to stop people from eating pork said that pork was a dietary symbol of oppression, because slaves were force to eat it doing slavery. Noble understood that the name and the symbols of the religion and some Qur’anic principles could be appropriated to construct a new genealogy and ethnic identity for black Americans.
The Nation of Islam: Beginning leaders
The Nation of Islam, an organization influenced by Noble Drew Ali, was founded in Detroit, Michigan, in 1930 by Wallace D. Fard, who claimed to be a Muslim missionary from Arabia. Fard acquired a following and began having meetings in the Detroit neighborhood known as Paradise Valley. As he got a closer to the African American community of Detroit he began to tell them about their vices. Things like adultery and alcohol consumption that are forbidden by Islamic law, smoking and dancing which some Muslims prohibited. He encouraged people to work hard, put their families first, respect authority, and to conduct their businesses affairs with honesty and dignity. People listened to Fard because they believed what he said and taught to be true. He was said to have a kind and wise manner, and people thought he offered solutions to their problems.
Wallace D. Fard revealed himself to be a prophet who had a startling message of African American identity and destiny. Using citing from the Bible Fard taught about the great religions of Africa, and Asia. He understood that the Bible was the religious book best know to his followers and used to verify his description of the black people’s history and white’s peoples doom. Fard’s teachings attacked the white race, Christianity, and the teachings of the Bible. Using the Book of Revelations, he told his follower about the impending War of Armageddon. According to Fard’s teachings the War of Armageddon would be the final conflict between black and white people. The only hope for black people to win the war was to convert to their what he called “natural religion and reclaim their original identity as Muslims.”
Fard said the he was a prophet of Allan from the holy city of Mecca but he portrayed himself as a Christ-like figure. To make his image more believable he sometimes performed tricks that his followers thought were miracles. One said miracle happened when a group of Fard’ followers put strands of their hair together in a circle, and with a single strand of his hair Fard lifted the piles. Some of his followers believed that this was sign of the Messiah who said, “ lift me up and I will draw all men unto me.” His following continued to grow throughout Detroit. Meetings were so crowed that they had to rent out a hall, which became the first Temple of Islam.
In August of 1931 Fard at the former Universal Negro Improvement Association hall, hundreds of people gathered to heard his words. He preached that the word “nergo” was a mislabeling for people of African decent. He said that the word was created by whites to separate African Americans from their original Asiatic roots. Fard declared that African Americans were not Americans but Asictics whose ancestors had been taken from the African-Asiatic world by European slave traders in the name of Christianity. He told the people in the audience of their “real” name history and destiny. According to him African American people were the “lost-found member of the tribe of Shabazz.” The story captivated his audience. Fard wrote of this in his book Teaching for the Lost Found Nation of Islam in a Mathematical way.
The Black men in North America are not Negroes, but members of the lost tribe of Shabazz, stolen by traders from the City of Mecca 379 years ago. The prophet came to America to find and bring back life to his long lost brethren, from whom the Caucasians had taken away their language, their nation, and their religion. Here in America they were living other than themselves. They must learn that they are the original people, noblest of the nations of the earth. The Caucasians are the colored people, since they lost their original color. The original people must regain their religion, which is Islam, their language is Arabic, and their culture, which is astronomy and higher mathematics, especially calculus. They must live according to the law of Allah, avoiding all meat of “poison animals,” hog, duck, geese, possums, and catfish. They must give up completely the use of stimulants especially liquor. They must clean themselves up -b both their bodies and their houses. If in this way they obeyed Allah, he would take them back to the Paradise from which they had been stolen- the Holy City of Mecca.
(W.D. Fard, Teaching for the Lost Found Nation of Islam in a Mathematical Way.)
Elijah Poole heard the message of Fard and soon became his most enthusiastic student of Islam. Fard gave Elijah the name Elijah Karriem, which later became Elijah Muhammad. For African American Muslims that slave name was a signification associated with Slavery. If this reason Fard gave new names and new political and cultural identities to his converts. Elijah went on to become Fard’s chief minister of Islam and successor of the Nation of Islam.
Elijah Muhammad was born in Bolds Springs, Georgia and was the son of a Baptist preacher. . At the age of 26, he moved with his wife Clara and their two children to Detroit. In all Muhammad had eight children, Emmanuel, Nathaniel, Herbert, Elijah II, Wallace, Akbar, Ethel, and Lotta. There in 1930, Elijah meet Fard, he soon became Fard's chief assistant and in 1932 went to Chicago where he established the Nation of Islam's Temple, Number Two, which soon became the largest. Like Fard, Elijah required that all convert change there last name to X in order to wipe out their slave names. The X signified the original identity that was lost when black people were taken from Africa by their enslavers. Fard had taught Elijah that black and white people did not come from the same God. According to Fard white and black people were fundamentally different. He said that in nature black people were righteous and divine, and that whites were wick “ blue-eyed devils. This type of idea is what separated the Nation of Islam from other Muslim communities, and other African American political and religious groups.
Elijah Muhammad helped establish schools for the education of Muslim children. Fard taught is followers that they were not a part of the United States and they should take their children out of the public schools and send them to the University of Islam to study Arabic, the Qu’ran, black history, astronomy and higher mathematics. In 1934, the Michigan State Board of Education disagreed with the Muslim's right to pursue their own educational programs, and the Muslim teachers and Temple Secretaries were jailed on the false charge of contributing to the delinquency of minors. Elijah Muhammad said he committed himself to jail after learning what had happened. The charges were later dropped, and the officials were freed and Elijah received six months' probation to take the Muslim children out of the Islamic school and put them back in public schools. He moved to the city of Chicago in September of that same year.
Fard was also harassed by the police and was forced out of the city of Detroit and moved to Chicago where he continued to face imprisonment and harassment by the police. In 1934 Fard vanished completely, there are several rumors as to what happen to him but on one is certain. When Fard disappeared that year, political and theological rivals accused Elijah of foul play. Elijah organized his own movement, in which Fard was anointed as Allah and Elijah Muhammad became known as Allah's Messenger.
After years of traveling up and down the east coast and severing a prison sentence for allegedly evading the draft, Elijah returned to Chicago. From Chicago, the Nation of Islam expanded in membership and moved to new heights. Among the many new members to Islam included Malcolm X and his family.
Malcolm X later El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, helped bring the Nation of Islam many followers through his preaching. He also became know as a militant leader and became well know throughout the U. S. because of his many public speeches and interviews. In 1963, Elijah Muhammad suspended Malcolm from the Nation of Islam after giving a speech in which he suggested that President Kennedy's assassination was a matter of the “chickens coming home to roost.” He then formed a rival organization of his own, called the Muslim Mosque, Inc. In 1964, after a pilgrimage to Mecca, he announced his conversion to orthodox Islam and his new belief that there could be brotherhood between black and white. In Feb. 1965, he was shot and killed in a public auditorium in New York City. His assassins were identified as Black Muslims, but this is a matter of controversy.
After Elijah Muhammad’s death in February of 1975 several changes in the social, intellectual, and spiritual direction and development of the Nation of Islam took place under the leadership W. D. Muhammad, Elijah’s son. During this period all concepts of racism, and the glorification of Fard were rejected, and the organization was renamed the American Muslim Mission. In May 1985 W.D. Muhammad announced the dissolution of the American Muslim Mission in order that its members might become a part of the worldwide orthodox Islamic community. The centralized leadership and organization that had previously characterized the movement thus came to an end, although its network of mosques and their attendant religious, educational, and economic programs continued to function.
Since 1978 Louis Farrakhan has led a revived group of the Nation of Islam to a position of national significance, as evidenced by his organization of the Million Man March in Washington, D.C., in 1995. Like Elijah Muhammad, Farrakhan has made some connections to the Islam of the Middle East, but he has not changed the original teachings of the Nation of Islam to join the Islamic mainstream.
