Surviving Enslavement through Islam
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As the stories of Moriscos keeping their Muslim beliefs in the private sphere in Cook’s reading, African Muslims in the Americas “adopted outward signs of the religion that had been imposed on them but secretly retained their own beliefs” (Diouf 78). However, Diouf depicts instances in which Muslims did not only kept beliefs, but practices, even the most challenging ones such as Ramadan. African Muslims enslaved in the Americas were not obligated to fast since the Quran states that believers can abstain to do so if they are in difficult conditions or far from home (Diouf 95). They even made praying collectively possible and found alternatives to some practices not practicable in the context such as the zakah (91) and the hajj (95). This strict practice of Islam they imposed to themselves is interesting in two regards. First, as argued by Diouf, it shows that enslavement made their faith even stronger, yet they had to adapt it to the reality of repression, they were not going to abandon it. As a form of hope, Islam was something enslaved Muslims could rely on to escape reality and comfort themselves (86). Second, the quote from Kélédor: “it was the only thing left to me from my family and my country” (ibid) made me think of Sara Ahmed’s concept of melancholia. By keeping to practise Islam, African Muslims kept memories of their home and past lives, letting it go would be letting go of their identity.
The link I draw with GhaneaBassiri’s reading is using Islam as a form of relief for enslaved Africans, a way of making their lives relatively better, even if this in a complete different way in this reading. This text relies mainly on biographies of African Muslims, thus there is a bias since most stories are of “fortunate slaves” while there were “tens of thousands of them” and larger narrative should be used to complement them (GhaneaBassiri, 16). Still, in the stories, Africans Muslims were considered superior both by themselves and by the slaveholders. For example, slaveholders had a preference for the “Senegalese, who had a strong Arabic strain their ancestry” to command over the others because they were said to resemble the whites and to be instructed (24). They were considered “semi-civilized” and used for trade and to “Christianize” the continent (30). This led to a hierarchy in the African American society, which is a common ruling strategy of whites colonizers, that is dividing a community and conferring privileges to some of them. In these cases, they considered Muslims superior than African pagans due to their conception of the “instructed Muslim” and the proximity of Islam to Christianism. This is also reminding of Bald’s story of the Bengali peddlers in which white Orientalism "favoured" those considered “Orientals” rather than Black, leading the latter to want to pass for them.
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This is an example of an excellent post showing understanding and good spread. Thanks @eva_rajzman.