A welcome and timely work on a subject of great importance. By combining materials in African Islam with New World sources and thereby linking both sides of the Atlantic, the author provides a fresh angle on studies of the Diaspora. Readers will find in the book a great deal of information presented in a clear, lively style. Lamin Sanneh, D. Willis James Professor of Missions and World Christianity, and Professor of History, Yale University.

An excellent work on African Muslim slaves in the New World. Diouf has demonstrated what vigorous scholarship and creative imagination can do to reconstruct the lives and times of these men and women of Africa. Sulayman Nyang, Professor of African Studies, Howard University.

An accessible, lucid account of an important and complicated aspect of African enslavement in the Americas, and a provocative and effective reading of the interaction of African Muslims with the American slave institution. Diouf explodes myths, establishes the facts, and sustains an argument for the presence of Islamic influences in certain artistic and religious traditions of Africans in the Americas. This will become an important book. Molefi Kete Asante, author of The Afrocentric Idea.

Everywhere in the Americas, the African Muslims left influential footsteps that Diouf intelligently uncovers. Here are enlightening stories and statistics for anyone attempting to fully understand the settlement and impact of the Old World on the New and on today. Allan D. Austin, author of African Muslims in Antebellum America.

The Muslims' literacy clearly set them apart from the rest of the slaves and became as distinctive as a physical trait. A slaveholder was so impressed with his literate slave, for example, that he mentioned only this characteristic when he put a notice in the Charleston Courier of February 7, 1805, to advertise him as a fugitive. Thirty-year-old Sambo was a "new negro" who had absconded with another African and a native-born woman. He was, reported his owner, a man "of grave countenance who writes the Arabic language." It would be interesting to know how the slaveholder came to learn about his new slave's literacy, as well as what, and under which circumstances, Sambo - a common name among Hausa - had been writing.

Illiteracy among men and women was not restricted to the slave quarters. Many male colonists and most women could neither read nor write, because literacy in European cultures was reserved for the wealthy males. The furthest some societies went was to allow the poor and women to read for religious reasons - so that the Bible could be accessible - but not to write. As a result, a large number of American colonists who came from what were considered the lower European classes were illiterate or barely literate. In the colonies themselves, education was reserved for the privileged few; the movement toward mass literacy started only in the nineteenth century. Prior to that, in Brazil for instance, "the simplest rudiments were so little diffused that not infrequently wealth ranchers of the interior would charge their friends of the seaboard to secure for them a son-in-law who, in place of any other dower, should be able to read and write."

Because the literacy rate was high in Muslim Africa, and because of a concentration of learned Muslims in America, as discussed in chapter I, the literacy rate among Muslim slaves was in all probability higher than it was among slaveholders. As Gilberto Freyre, the Brazilian scholar, remarked, "in the slaves' sheds of Bahia in 1835, there were perhaps more persons who knew how to read and write than up above in the Big Houses."

This situation was sometimes used to the advantage of the owners, who relied on their slaves' skills. Such was the case with Abu bakr al Siddiq's owner in Jamaica, who had him keep his property' s records in Arabic. But the disparity in education of master and slave also created animosity. To some illiterate or barely literate masters, having slaves who could read and write was vexing. In that regard, Theodore Dwight, the secretary of the American Ethnological Society, observed that "several other Africans have been known at different periods, in different parts of America, somewhat resembling Job-ben-Solomon in acquirements [e.g., of literacy and education] ; but, unfortunately, no full account of any of them has ever been published. The writer has made many efforts to remedy this defect, and has obtained some information from a few individuals. But there are insuperable difficulties in the way in slave countries, arising from the jealousy of masters, and other causes." Further, Dwight mentioned that writer and ethnologist William Hodgson, who had resided in North Africa, tried to make inquiries about the literate Muslims in the American South but had to abandon the undertaking "in despair," due to the hostility of their masters.

The hostility toward the literate Africans that many slaveholders expressed did not arise from the fear that their property would somehow trick them by forging passes or getting access to useful news. Even though Brazilian slaveholders discovered that the Africans' literacy in Arabic could indeed by hazardous to their safety, the animosity described by Dwight had another origin. In the eyes of the slaveholders, the Muslims' literacy was dangerous because it represented a threat to the whites' intellectual domination and a refutation of the widely-held belief that Africans were inherently inferior and incapable of intellectual pursuits. The Africans' skills constituted a proof of humanity and civilization that did not owe anything to the Christians' supposed civilizing influence. If these men and women could read and write, if they were not the bland slates or the primitive savages they had been portrayed to be in order to justify their enslavement, then the very foundation of the system had to be questioned. This issue was so potent that, as discussed in the previous chapter, North Americans felt compelled to deny the Africanness of the "outstanding" Muslims and to portray them as Arabs.