The Arabic Pages Slavery Could Not Silence

By Arafa Alhammadi

In the popular imagination, the earliest Muslims in America often appear as recent arrivals.

They are pictured stepping from 20th-century ships or aeroplanes, carrying a religion assumed to be new to the continent. Yet centuries before modern immigration transformed the United States, Muslims were already present in North America not as welcomed travellers, but among the Africans forced across the Atlantic through slavery.

Some had studied the Qur’an.

Some understood Islamic law.

Some could read and write Arabic with a proficiency that astonished the people who claimed to own them.

A small number left manuscripts behind.

Those pages survived in archives, private collections, and libraries. Some were misidentified for decades. Some were treated as curiosities rather than testimony. Yet together they disturb one of slavery’s most persistent illusions: that the enslaved arrived without intellectual histories and received civilization only after reaching America.

The Arabic script tells another story.

They Did Not Arrive Empty

The enslaved Africans transported to North America came from societies with their own political systems, scholarship, commerce, agriculture, religions, and intellectual traditions.

Among them were Muslims from regions of West Africa where Islamic learning had existed for centuries. Estimates are necessarily uncertain because slave traders did not conduct a religious census of their captives. However, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture cites estimates suggesting that approximately 20 to 30 percent of Africans brought to North America during slavery may have been Muslim. The museum’s discussion of surviving Muslim artifacts presents the figure as an estimate, not an exact count.

That caution matters.

“African” was never a single cultural identity, and neither was “Muslim.” The captives came from different societies, spoke different languages, and possessed widely varying levels of religious education. Some were deeply learned. Some may have practiced Islam alongside local traditions. Others carried only fragments of religious knowledge.

But even fragments mattered.

In a system designed to rename human beings, sever families, and erase former identities, the ability to write one’s own name or the name of God in a language the enslaver could not read created a private territory.

Arabic could become prayer, memory, record, and shield.

It could also become evidence.

Omar Ibn Said: A Man Writing Inside Captivity

The most famous surviving example belongs to Omar Ibn Said.

Born in West Africa around 1770, Omar described studying for many years before he was captured and transported across the Atlantic in 1807. He was sold in Charleston, escaped, was imprisoned, and eventually became enslaved in the household of James Owen and his brother, John Owen, a former governor of North Carolina.

Omar Ibn Said portrait, 1850s ambrotype

In 1831, Omar wrote an account of his life in Arabic.

The Library of Congress describes it as the only known surviving autobiography written in Arabic in the United States by an enslaved person while still in captivity. The Omar Ibn Said Collection now contains digitized materials in Arabic and English, allowing readers to encounter the manuscript rather than merely hear it described.

But Omar’s autobiography does not behave as a modern reader might expect.

It does not begin with a straightforward announcement of birthplace and parentage. It begins with verses from Surat al-Mulk, the Qur’anic chapter proclaiming that dominion belongs to God.

This choice matters.

Omar was legally treated as property, yet he opened his story with a declaration about creation's true ownership.

Was this resistance?

Was it spiritual refuge?

Was it a learned man using the language most natural to him?

Historical honesty requires us to resist pretending that we can enter his mind completely. But we can recognize the extraordinary tension on the page: a man held in bondage writing that ultimate sovereignty belongs elsewhere.

Omar had also been baptized and was presented by the Owen family as a Christian convert. His surviving writings contain Christian language alongside Qur’anic passages and Islamic expressions. Scholars have debated how to understand these elements. Did they represent sincere conversion, outward accommodation, coercion, layered belief, or a strategic way of writing under surveillance?

The archive does not give us a perfectly tidy answer.

And perhaps that untidiness is itself part of the truth.

An enslaved person did not write from a position of freedom. He wrote while living among people who controlled his movement, labor, and public identity. We cannot interpret his words as though he were speaking in a room where nothing could happen to him.

Bilali Muhammad: The “Diary” That Was Not a Diary

Another Arabic manuscript survived from Sapelo Island, Georgia.

Its author was Bilali Muhammad, an enslaved West African Muslim who lived openly as a Muslim and became a prominent figure within the plantation community where he was held.

After his death, a small Arabic manuscript remained.

Bilali Document manuscript page, Hargrett Rare Book
and Manuscript Library Arabic script

For years, it was commonly called the “Bilali Diary.” But closer examination showed that it was not a private diary describing his daily life. It concerned Islamic beliefs and regulations, drawing on material associated with West African Islamic education and Maliki legal tradition.

That correction changes how we see the document.

A diary would have shown us Bilali recording his circumstances. The manuscript we actually possess reveals something equally powerful: knowledge carried across the Atlantic and reconstructed from memory under slavery.

The Digital Library of Georgia identifies the document as a brief Arabic manuscript concerning Islamic regulations. The surviving pages are held through the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Georgia.

Bilali’s manuscript reminds us that books can survive in more than one way.

A physical volume may be destroyed, lost, or taken.

But a person who has memorized its teachings may become its temporary library.

Ayuba Suleiman Diallo: The Letter That Changed a Life

Several decades before Omar wrote his autobiography, another educated West African Muslim used Arabic writing under enslavement.

Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, known in English records as Job Ben Solomon, was born into a family of Muslim religious leaders in West Africa. In 1731, he was captured and transported to Maryland, where he was forced to work on a tobacco plantation.

After attempting to escape, he was imprisoned. There, his ability to write Arabic attracted attention.

Ayuba wrote a letter intended for his father. Through an unusual chain of events, the letter reached people connected to the Royal African Company in Britain. His education and social background became recognized, and he was eventually taken to England, freed, and returned to West Africa.

His case was exceptional.

Most enslaved people who displayed intelligence, literacy, or spiritual discipline were not rewarded with freedom. Literacy could invite suspicion and punishment. Ayuba’s release depended not only on the humanity others suddenly recognized in him but also on social connections, commercial interests, and the value Europeans placed on his elite background.

His story therefore contains an uncomfortable question.

Ayuba Suleiman Diallo oil painting
by William Hoare, 1733
National Portrait Gallery London

Why did his education have to be proven before his humanity became negotiable?

The portrait painted of Ayuba in England in 1733 is among the earliest surviving British portraits of a named African sitter. The National Portrait Gallery describes him as an educated man from a family of Islamic leaders who was captured and enslaved in Maryland.

The portrait is striking, but the letter matters more.

The painting shows how an English artist saw him.

The Arabic showed that Ayuba already possessed a voice.

What the Enslavers Could Not Read

Arabic literacy could create an unusual imbalance.

The enslaver controlled the body but could not necessarily read the page.

An Arabic document might be mistaken for a magical object, an exotic curiosity, or meaningless marks. Christian observers sometimes assumed Qur’anic passages were versions of the Lord’s Prayer or evidence of conversion. Texts were collected without being properly translated, and manuscripts could sit for years beneath labels that misunderstood their contents.

This linguistic gap gave some enslaved Muslims a limited private space, but we should not romanticize it.

A language the enslaver could not understand might protect a thought, but it could not abolish the plantation. Literacy did not cancel chains. Scholarship did not guarantee recognition. Religious knowledge did not prevent families from being separated or people from being sold.

Yet writing allowed some individuals to interrupt the language imposed upon them.

Plantation documents recorded human beings as property, labor, age, price, and physical condition.

Arabic manuscripts recorded something else: prayer, education, memory, law, identity, and the consciousness of the person inside the category.

The slave ledger said, “This person belongs to someone.”

The Arabic page answered, “This person belongs to a history.”

The Archive Preserved Exceptions and Hid the Majority

The manuscripts that survived are precious, but they can mislead us if we forget why they survived.

People such as Omar, Bilali, and Ayuba became visible partly because their literacy attracted the attention of powerful white observers who collected their writings, described them, or incorporated them into their own records.

Thousands of others left no known manuscripts.

Some could not write. Some wrote materials that were destroyed. Some transmitted knowledge orally. Some concealed their religion. Some adapted their practices until later generations no longer recognized their Islamic origins. Some may have been remembered only through family traditions whose historical roots became difficult to verify.

Archives do not preserve human lives equally.

They favor the unusual object, the literate subject, the encounter with power, and the paper someone considered worth keeping.

Therefore, surviving Arabic manuscripts cannot tell us exactly how every enslaved African Muslim lived. They offer narrow openings into a much larger world.

But a narrow opening is not a small discovery.

Through it, we can see that the religious history of early America was more diverse than the conventional story admits. We can see that Arabic was written in America by Africans long before many modern institutions existed. We can see that the intellectual life of enslaved people did not begin when outsiders noticed it.

Most importantly, we can see the danger of confusing absence from the archive with absence from history.

Writing Beyond the Name Given to You

Slavery attempted to impose a complete definition.

It renamed people, assigned prices to them, controlled their movement, and treated their past as irrelevant. The system depended not merely on forced labor but on the authority to describe the enslaved person entirely.

The Arabic manuscripts broke that authority.

Not completely. Not safely. Not enough to free everyone who wrote.

But they created a record the system did not fully control.

Omar Ibn Said wrote from inside captivity and opened with divine sovereignty.

Bilali Muhammad reconstructed Islamic teaching far from the scholarly world in which he had first encountered it.

Ayuba Suleiman Diallo wrote a letter intended for home, and the page travelled farther than he could.

Their experiences were different, and they should not be flattened into one heroic legend. Ayuba ultimately returned to West Africa; Omar died in North Carolina; Bilali remained on Sapelo Island. Their beliefs, circumstances, and relationships to power were not identical.

What joins them is not a simple story of triumph.

It is the survival of authorship under a system committed to reducing people to objects.

Perhaps that is why the pages remain so affecting.

They do not merely prove that some enslaved Africans were Muslims or that some could write Arabic. They force the reader to confront how much knowledge, faith, and interior life existed where the official record preferred to see only labor.

The handwriting survived.

Behind it stands an immeasurable silence: all the people who remembered, prayed, taught, resisted, and thought but whose pages were never preserved.

References and Further Reading

• Library of Congress. “Omar Ibn Said Collection.” Explore the digitized collection

• Library of Congress. “The Life of Omar ben Saeed, Called Morro, a Fullah Slave in Fayetteville, N.C.” View the manuscript record

• National Museum of African American History and Culture. “African Muslims in Early America.” Read the Smithsonian feature

• National Museum of African American History and Culture. “Muslim Artifacts at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.” Explore the museum article

• Digital Library of Georgia. “Bilali Manuscript.” View the archival record

• Martin, B. G. “Sapelo Island’s Arabic Document: The ‘Bilali Diary’ in Context.” The Georgia Historical Quarterly, 1994. View the journal record

• National Portrait Gallery. “Ayuba Suleiman Diallo by William Hoare.” Explore the portrait and historical context

• Diouf, Sylviane A. Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas. New York University Press, 1998; anniversary edition, 2013.

• Austin, Allan D. African Muslims in Antebellum America: Transatlantic Stories and Spiritual Struggles. Routledge, 1997.

Continue the Conversation

Before reading this history, did you know that enslaved African Muslims had written Arabic manuscripts in America? What else might be missing from history simply because the surviving archive did not know how or did not wish to read it?

I welcome readers’ reflections, historical questions, family stories, alternative interpretations, and opportunities for intellectual, creative, and research collaboration. If this essay reminded you of an overlooked history or left you with a question worth investigating, you are warmly invited to write to me.

Arafa Alhammadi
Arafa Writes™
Divergent Life Architect™ | Independent Researcher, Writer, and Human Behavior Strategist
Founder of AW Collective Nexus™ and THLab™

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