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Muslim Identity in the Archaeological Record of American Enslavement Kacie Allen

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Muslim Identity in the Archaeological Record of American Enslavement Kacie Allen African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter Volume 12 Article 2 Issue 3 September 2009 9-1-2009 Looking East: Muslim Identity in the Archaeological Record of American Enslavement Kacie Allen Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/adan Recommended Citation Allen, Kacie (2009) "Looking East: Muslim Identity in the Archaeological Record of American Enslavement," African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter: Vol. 12 : Iss. 3 , Article 2. Available at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/adan/vol12/iss3/2 This Articles, Essays, and Reports is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter by an authorized editor of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Allen: Looking East: Muslim Identity in the Archaeological Record of Ame September 2009 Newsletter Looking East: Muslim Identity in the Archaeological Record of American Enslavement B y Kacie Allen* Abstract A significant number of those Africans enslaved in the Americas were Muslim. Archaeological investigation has yet to be made concerning their stories. This article explores the archaeology of Islam to provide a foundation for understanding the materiality of Muslim identity as it appears in the context of American enslavement, and the historical circumstances which resulted in significant numbers of African Muslims becoming enslaved in the Americas. Drawing on the documentary record, it relates a selection of the life stories of enslaved African American Muslims. In pursuit of a critical, explanatory, and emancipatory archaeology, I undertake an examination of artifacts recovered from contexts of African and African American enslavement in North America. A model of Diaspora analysis is applied to a case in Long Island, New York, which weighs Islam as a potential cultural influence for a particular set of artifacts. It is evident that distinctly Muslim expressions are visible in the archaeological record at sites of African enslavement in the Americas. Moreover, future African Diaspora studies should consider the influence of the traditions of Islam as those projects attempt to recover meaning from the archaeological record. * Kacie Allen completed this study in May 2009 as her senior honors thesis as a requirement for her degree in Anthropology/Religion at the New College of Florida with the thesis supervision of Prof. Uzi Baram. This article presents an edited version of her study. The figures in this study are reproduced here with permission. 1 Published by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst, 2009 1 African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter, Vol. 12 [2009], Iss. 3, Art. 2 Table of Contents Page I. Introduction 3 II. A Critical and Emancipatory African Diaspora Archaeology: Acknowledging a Muslim Presence among Enslaved African Americans 7 III. The Archaeology of Islam and the Circumstances of African Muslim Enslavement 22 IV. The Power of Words: Stories of Enslaved Muslims in the Americas 40 V. Blue Beads and Little Things: Muslim Artifacts in America 66 VI. Interpreting Material Expressions of Identity 95 VII. Conclusion 101 Bibliography 104 Figures Fig. 3.1 Map of major states in West Africa in the 16th century 31 Fig. 3.2 Timeline of West African conflicts resulting in Muslim enslavement 34 Fig. 4.1 Photograph of Omar ibn Said 48 Fig. 4.2 Photograph of Katie Brown on Sapelo Island 52 Fig. 4.4 Photograph of the mosque at Timbo in the 1930s 57 Fig. 4.5 Portrait of “Abdul Rahaman” 59 Fig. 5.1 Map of Hermitage Plantation: standing structures and archaeological sites 70 Fig. 5.2 Copper-alloy hand charms from the Hermitage 71 Fig. 5.3 Hand charm recovered at Poplar Forest 72 Fig. 5.4 Cabins at Behavior and New Barn Creek, 1857 map 73 Fig. 5.5 Map showing arc of slave cabins south of Kingsley Plantation house 74 Fig. 5.6 Blue beads recovered from beneath cabin floors, Kingsley Plantation 76 Fig. 5.7 Strands of beads found at Latting’s Hundred, Huntington, New York 90 2 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/adan/vol12/iss3/2 2 Allen: Looking East: Muslim Identity in the Archaeological Record of Ame I. Introduction On the day of Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009, a journalism crew traveled to Sapelo Island off the coast of Georgia to talk to Cornelia Walker Bailey, a writer, preservationist, and the descendent of an enslaved Muslim man known as Bilali. His life story is related in full later in this study. In short, he was a Fula from Timbo, Futa Jallon, in the highlands of present- day Guinea-Conakry. He was enslaved and brought to the Bahamas, and then after 1803 brought to Georgia where he spent most of his captivity managing the plantation of Thomas Spalding on Sapelo Island. A few of his descendents were interviewed in the 1930s for the Georgia Writer’s Project commissioned by the Works Progress Administration. Bilali and his family were remembered for their distinctly Muslim practices. He had many children to whom he passed on African names, terms, and traditions that were clearly Muslim. The journalists visiting Sapelo in January of 2009 were surprised at what they found in the churches there. They reported “that men and women commonly sit on opposite sides of the church during services as in a mosque, and all shoes had to be removed in services until recently,” and that “the churches face Mecca and people are buried facing Mecca” (Martin 2009). Islam equipped Bilali and others with the spiritual means to both resist and accommodate their captive circumstances, to structure their worlds, to bring a system of order to the turmoil of slavery. Islam as a religion does not persist today on Sapelo Island. Its residents, even those who count themselves among Bilali’s descendents, do not identify as part of the worldwide umma. And yet the way Islam as a tradition was embraced, inherited, and alternatively faded there is worthy of note. Bilali’s legacy lives today, as Sapelo’s residents pray toward the east, albeit no longer with bare-soled feet. Historical archaeology has many goals, among them the supplementing and challenging of history known through the documentary record and the reconstruction of life ways of people in the past. The cumulative evidence wrought through both processes is a central concern of this article. The goals of archaeological research necessarily change with the time period and region involved. This continuous shift in goals often also mirrors the concerns of the present. Yet, Barbara Little (2007: 22) identifies a thread which connects the discipline’s goals, “of finding the present-day meaning of the historical past and making the past meaningful and useful.” Both the characteristic of reflecting present-day concerns, and the interest in making the past meaningful 3 Published by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst, 2009 3 African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter, Vol. 12 [2009], Iss. 3, Art. 2 and useful, account for the previous absence and current presence of interest in the subject of this article. The result of two concerns of the last few decades is an increase in scholarly interest in African American Islam. One is the increasing development of African American archaeology. The other is the rising demand for information about Islam as the United States’ involvement with predominantly Muslim countries becomes increasingly complex. It is in this atmosphere, while a student in Professor Chad Seales’ “Introduction to Islamic Civilization” course, that I first heard an enslaved African Muslim’s story. The story of Omar ibn Said (related in detail in P a r t I V ), a Muslim scholar who found himself enslaved in North Carolina in 1807, transformed what I knew of American slavery, history, and ultimately archaeology. More than ever before, I became acutely aware of the silences of official histories. Despite all the details known about his life, his story is not told in America’s public schools. There is something telling about Little’s revelation that our interest in the past is drawn from our concerns in the present. At the time I began my research, I naively believed that it would be difficult to discover the stories of enslaved Muslims in America. It was not. It was scholarly interest in the subject which was difficult to unearth. There are only a handful of volumes published on the subject even today, albeit some are amazing resources (see Austin 1984; Gomez 1998, 2005). I became interested both in official history’s silence on the subject of enslaved African Muslims in America, and the nature of their experience. It seems that the concerns of the present have not yet stirred archaeologists to ask questions about the enslaved Muslim presence in the Americas. Historical archaeology’s interest in reconstructing past life ways includes attention to understanding past worldviews. The object of this study is to explore the material culture of Muslim identity in the context of enslavement in the Americas. I am interested in Islam as a worldview, a system of meaning, which for some enslaved African Americans would have shaped their world, from objects, food, and clothing to the actions of their days. Like Barbara Little (2007), I am intrigued by the way we connect with selective parts of the past, and yet I remain unsettled by it. This stems from my interest in an emancipatory approach to archaeology, one which recognizes its potential to effect positive social change. Dean Saitta (2007: 14) suggests that archaeology may be emancipatory if it places a priority on 4 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/adan/vol12/iss3/2 4 Allen: Looking East: Muslim Identity in the Archaeological Record of Ame “the consequences of knowledge-claims for everyday life, for how we want to live and for the building of a genuinely pluralistic community characterized by mutual understanding and respect.” I am unsettled by the disrespect inherent in silencing a people through the omissions of official histories.
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