Early Islamic Influence in Louisiana

The inspiring story of West African slaves, their Islam and their legacy.

"During the infamous Atlantic slave trade, thousands of Muslims from the Senegambia and Sudan were kidnapped or captured in local wars and sold into slavery. In America, these same Muslims converted other Africans and Amerindians to Islam."

So begins an enlightening monograph of Dr. Clyde-Ahmad Winters, former professor of African and Islamic Studies at Iowa State University, entitled "Afro-American Muslims-From Slavery to Freedom" that beautifully documents the pervasive influence of Islam throughout the slave-holding south, from the early 1500s up through the present.

As the great Port of New Orleans was a major point of entry for merchant ships, holds bursting with human, African cargo, the Port was also, unbeknownst to many, a major point of entry for captured Muslims (most often prisoners of local wars) who certainly brought with them their only possession unable to be stripped from them by their captors, their religion--Islam.

The historical record of shipping manifests attests to the fact that the majority of slaving merchant vessels that deposited their goods at the mouth of the Mississippi took on their cargoes from those areas of West Africa with significant, if not predominant, Muslim population.

As the Islamic belief system forbids suicide and encourages patient perseverance, the middle-passage survival rate of captured African Muslims was quite high.

For example, one such courageous survivor was Ibrahima Abdur Rahman, son of the king of the Fulani people of the Senegambia region, named "The Prince" by his master Thomas Foster of Natchez, Mississippi. Abdur Rahman came through the Port of New Orleans, was sold at auction and became a man of renown on the Foster Plantation. He eventually petitioned his freedom via President John Quincy Adams and returned to Africa after 46 years of enslavement. His is just one of thousands of such stories of African Muslims in the south.

While countless captured African Muslims pretended conversion to Christianity to escape the master's wrath, many held onto their religious beliefs until death. Dr. Winters documents that some African Muslims wrote out by hand from memory the entire Qur'an, the Muslim holy book. Remnants of these writings still exist today in museums in parts of the once slave-holding south.

Today, the call to prayer by the Muslim muezzin still sweetens the air of Louisiana, as dozens of mosques add to the state's urban landscapes--10 in New Orleans alone. The African legacy survives.

Source: The New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corporation