If African Americans were allowed to keep their original African culture..
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K.Dot
African American
New Orleans is always a trip to me when I visit. They about that life.
K.Dot
African American
JahFocus CS
Get It How You Get It
"Trade," aka: João I saw those cacs had guns, João I wanted guns to smash rivals to his kingdom, so he converted for political purposes to get access to them, aligned himself with the Portuguese, and ushered in a slave trade. You can use whatever euphemism you want breh, but as I said, Christianity had no presence in West or Central Africa that is not connected to proto-colonialism and colonialism. The Kongo Kingdom went on to become a colony, as did the rest of Angola, the Congo, and West and Central Africa.
Islam's presence in Africa has been marked by the same type of shyt, excluding the colonialism of another state (I mean to say that Saudi Arabia was not setting up colonies there). I'm not one of the dudes who thinks Islam is a native religion. It is also foreign to West and Central Africa.
The roots of Christianity was planted in Kongo and Angola as far back as the 1480's, which was even before Columbus stumble bummed his ass into the New World. Most slaves were not even shipped to the Americas until between the years 1600 and 1790, so many of the people of Kongo and Angola were already Christian when they go the Americas.
African Christianity in Kongo | Essay | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Fwiw, most slave owners during the majority of the period of slavery did not care that the slaves were not Christian. In fact many slave owners provided their Muslim slaves with Korans. Most of this conversion junk did not happen until the "Second Great Awakening", which was in the 1800's. Many abolitionists pushed it on the slaves during that period.
Religious Transformation and the Second Great Awakening [ushistory.org]
From the 1600's and into the 1800's there are multiple examples of the slave owners not caring what religions their slaves had, including Islam. Many slave owners actually provided their slaves with Korans and some of those Korans have been donated to major universities throughout this Country. The Muslims seem to be the slaves that were forcibly converted by force to Christianity by the English, Portuguese and Spanish in the Americas and that was probably due to the Muslims constantly leading slave revolts.
The Stono Rebellion was led by Angolan Christians who could speak English.
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I don't think this was much of a possibility of us keeping our customs tbh
My grandmother was skilled in knowledge of Voudon, which was passed on through the females of my family (except my mother) from my maternal ancestor who tutored under Marie Laveau and her daughter in NOLA.
From my recollection of my convos with my grandmother and my great grandmother when I was much younger, a lot of white folks were terrified and somewhat awed by practitioners..they even passed laws in NOLA regulating the utilization of spells back then but this was in the late 1800's, after the conclusion of the Civil War. Voudon was b*stardized and catholicized way before then as a way to protect some of the traditions and satisfy the white slave owners zealousness in "getting all that Africa of us" as my grandma would say. I'm being extremely basic with this response.
IllmaticDelta
Veteran
upwards of 30% of aframs, african, ancestors were muslims
http://archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/200604/muslim.roots.u.s.blues.htm
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Portraits of African born, Muslim slaves in the USA
Abdul Rahaman, 1828
Engraving of crayon drawing. A Muslim Fulbe, Rahaman was born in Timbuktu around 1762; as a child he moved to the Futa Jallon region in the present-day Republic of Guinea. Educated in Arabic and the Koran, in 1788/89, when around 26, he was captured during warfare and taken far from his homeland to the Gambia. Sold to the British, he was then taken to the Caribbean island of Dominica, where he briefly stayed, and from there to New Orleans, followed by Natchez. Enslaved for about 40 years in the U.S., mostly in Natchez, he was manumitted in 1828, and traveled to various parts of the eastern U.S. on his way back to Africa; he ultimately reached Liberia, where he died in 1829.
Omar Ibn Said (Sayyid), mid-19th cent.
A Moslem from the Futa Tora area of present-day Senegal, Omar Said was captured in warfare and shipped to Charleston, S.C. in 1806/07, just before the abolition of the slave trade. He spent about 24 years enslaved in South and North Carolina. He originally wrote his account in Arabic in 1831, at around the age of 61; an English translation appeared after his death in 1864.
Yarrow Mamout, 1819
Yarrow Mamout was born in Africa around 1736 and was a teenager when enslaved and brought to America, apparently no later than 1752. His African homeland and ethnicity are unknown, and although he was brought to the Virginia-Maryland area, little is known about his early years in America. He ultimately lived in Washington D.C. and during his old age was well known in the Georgetown area, where he was manumitted from slavery in 1797. He was known as a devout Muslim and hard worker, and was able to accumulate some property. He lived the rest of his life in Georgetown, where he died in 1823 at the age of about 88.
Job Ben Solomon, 1750
Engraved drawing. A Fulbe from the eastern region of present-day Senegal, Solomon was a Moslem and literate in Arabic. At around the age of 29, while on a trade mission (which included two slaves he was going to sell to the English), hundreds of miles from his homeland, he was captured, sold to the English, and shipped from the Gambia to Maryland. There he worked on tobacco farms for about a year, went to England, and ultimately found employment with the Royal African Company in Gambia, where he died in 1773 at the age of around 72.
Muhammad Ali ibn Said (North East Nigeria-Chadian)
Salih Bilali
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The First Muslim-American Scholar: Bilali Muhammad
An unfortunate misconception among today’s American Muslim community is that Islam has only been present in America for less than 100 years. Many American Muslims are children of immigrants who came to the United States from the Middle East and South Asia in the mid-nineteenth century, and thus wrongly assume that the first Muslims in America were those immigrants. The reality, however, is that Islam has been in America for far longer than that. Besides possible pre-Colombian Muslim explorers from al-Andalus and West Africa, Islam arrived on America’s shores in waves through the Atlantic slave trade from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. While hundreds of thousands of slaves arrived in America during this time, the stories of only a few have been preserved and are known today. One of the most enduring and unique is that of Bilali Muhammad.
The Slave Trade
A slave auction advertisement from Charleston, South Carolina in 1769.
As European nations began to colonize the New World in the 1500s, a demand for cheap labor arose. Plantations, mines, and farms needed workers throughout North and South America, and the native population of the New World proved unsuitable due to their lack of immunity to European diseases. As a result, European powers such as Britain, France, Portugal, and Spain looked south, towards Africa, for a source of slave labor they could exploit.
Thus, European slave traders began arriving at ports in Africa, looking to buy slaves. Generally, Europeans did not go and capture slaves themselves. Instead, they would commonly pay local rulers to go to war with other African states, capture warriors, and sell them to be taken to America. The African rulers would be paid commonly in weapons, which would further perpetuate the cycle of violence and enslavement. The entire system worked to handicap Africa’s social, political, and economic development, and the results of this genocide are still felt in Africa today.
Estimates vary, but over 12 million Africans were probably forcibly taken from their homelands to serve as slaves in America, with as many as 20% of them dying on the trans-Atlantic journey known as the Middle Passage. Since much of the slave trade was focused on West Africa, a large number of those slaves were undoubtedly Muslim. The savanna kingdoms of Mali and Songhai had long been centers of Islamic civilization in West Africa and a huge Muslim population existed in the region.
Bilali Muhammad
One of the many Muslim slaves taken to America was Bilali Muhammad. He was from the Fulbe tribe and was born around 1770 in the city of Timbo, in what is now Guinea. He came from a well-educated family, and received a high level of education himself in Africa before being captured as a slave some time in the late 1700s. He was fluent in the Fula language along with Arabic, and had knowledge of high level Islamic studies, including Hadith, Shari’ah, and Tafsir. How he was captured is unknown, but he was originally taken to an island plantation in the Caribbean, and by 1802, he arrived at Sapelo Island, off the coast of Georgia in the southern United States.
At Sapelo Island, Bilali was fortunate enough to have Thomas Spalding as a slave owner. While conditions across the South were horrendous for slaves, who were forced to work throughout the day and were commonly denied such basic necessities as clothes and stable shelter, Spalding gave certain freedoms to his slaves that were absent elsewhere. He did not push the slaves to work more than six hours per day, had no white slave drivers, and even allowed his Muslim slaves to practice their religion openly, a rare freedom in the deeply Christian South. Bilali was even allowed to construct a small mosque on the plantation, which very well may have been the first mosque in North America.
Because of Bilali’s relatively high level of education, he rose to the top of the slave community, and was relied upon by his owner to take care of much of the administration of the plantation and its few hundred slaves. Perhaps the most remarkable account of Bilali Muhammad’s leadership and trustworthiness occurred during the War of 1812 between the United States and the United Kingdom. Spalding reportedly left the plantation with his family, fearing a British attack, and put Bilali in charge of the plantation’s defense. He even gave Bilali 80 muskets to defend the island with, which were distributed among the plantation’s Muslim population. Bilali kept true to his word and managed the plantation while his owner was gone and turned it back over to Spalding after the war. The fact that a slave owner trusted his slaves so much as to give them control of the plantation along with weapons speaks volumes about the character and trustworthiness of Bilali Muhammad.
The Bilali Document
As a well-educated Muslim from West Africa, Bilali no doubt brought his Islamic education with him to America. This is evidenced by a thirteen-page manuscript he wrote and gifted to a southern writer, Francis Robert Goulding, before he died in 1857. The manuscript was written in Arabic, and was thus unreadable for most Americans for decades. It made its way eventually to the Georgia State Library by 1931, who attempted to decipher the manuscript, which was popularly believed to have been Bilali’s diary.
The Bilali Document of Bilali Muhammad
After years of effort that involved numerous scholars as far away as al-Azhar University in Egypt, scholars finally managed to decipher the manuscript. It turned out that it wasn’t a diary at all, but was actually a copy of passages from a treatise on Islamic law in the Maliki madhab written by a Muslim scholar of fiqh, Ibn Abu Zayd al-Qairawani in Tunisia in the 900s. The Risala of Ibn Abu Zayd was a part of the West African law curriculum prevalent in Bilali’s homeland in the 1700s when he was a student. When he came to America as a slave, he was of course unable to bring any personal belongings with him, and thus his copy of the Risala was written entirely from memory decades after he learned it in West Africa. This exemplifies the level of knowledge present in West Africa, even as it was ravaged by the Atlantic slave trade.
The Bilali Document is thus probably the first book of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) ever written in the United States. And while Islam slowly died out among the African American community in the United States in the nineteenth century, it is important to recognize and appreciate the stories of the the first American Muslims. They were not a small, inconsequential group. They numbered hundreds of thousands and despite almost insurmountable difficulties, they struggled to preserve their Islamic heritage under the oppression of slavery. The story of Bilali Muhammad is a perfect example of the efforts of this early American Muslim community, one that could inspire American Muslims of the present, whether they be of African descent or not.
The First Muslim-American Scholar: Bilali Muhammad
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilali_Document
Interesting perspective. THo just because you practice the same faith, you still have other barriers/obstacles when it comes to relating to these muslim immigrants. They're not letting you into their "circle" and accepting you with open arms just because you both carry a quran
Tho, Islam has never interested me in any way shape or form. I'd likely adapt vodoun before i adopt islam. Too restrictive of a religion IMO but to each his own
IllmaticDelta
Veteran
You are engaging in some serious revisionism.
Just so you know it Kongo was long established long before the Portuguese ever stumbled across Kongo. Kongo controlled their region without any help from the Portuguese. So I am not sure where you are getting this gun stuff from, because it was not guns from the Portuguese that helped the Kingdom of Kongo to capture their region.
You seem to be unaware of the fact that there was ongoing trade between the Kingdom of Kongo and Portugal, which is how religion came into the mix. The letter from King Afonso to the King of Portugal even mentions that trade. Then you conflated colonialism which happened later to stuff that was occurring in the Kingdom of Kongo centuries earlier.
Fwiw, Islam has been just as detrimental to Africans as Christianity. Hell the wars in Senegambia between the Fula, Wolof and Mandingos, who were all heavily Muslim; decimated that whole region and provided lots of slaves to the United States and the Caribbean. It was the Mandingos that drove the Fulani east into Nigeria, which is where the Fulani engaged in Jihads under Fulani Muslim Cleric Usman Dan Fodio. Those Jihads collapsed the Yoruba and Hausa kingdoms, which in turn provided millions of slaves to the Caribbean and South America. The Fulani also carried out Jihads in Cameroon, which provided countless Tikar (Bamileke, Bamoun, etc.) slaves to the USA. The fukking Fulani was carrying out those bullshyt Jihads in many cases against other Muslims. That is not even going into the fukkery that Muslims did in East Africa.
So like I wrote earlier. Islam has been just as detrimental to Africans as Christianity.
I really don’t see how anyone can say Christianity WASNT forced upon slaves and used as a way of control
I think y’all are just christian is who don’t want to admit that
I really don see how anyone can say that Islam WASNT forced upon most Africans and used as a way of control.
I think y'all are just muslim who don't want to admit that