Large scale conversion of American slaves to Islam?

The history of Islam in America is usually divided into two periods: the decades before WWI and the last couple of decades. But there is evidence of Islam before that time, stretching all the way before the Revolutionary War. Muslims were taken as slaves and there were several freedmen war heroes that were Muslim. Is it possible for one of these freedmen to spread the word about Allah or for captured Muslims to do so? Would the slaveowners be against it?

And, if it's possible, what are the possible ramifications for slavery, discrimination, and Black movements.

I appreciate any input.
 
in the bad ol' days o racism, ye shalt knew ta for da Africans, even if they are clearly good fellow Christians, getting horrible discriminations and disadvantages compared to whites.

Now, put the very same men with very different religion, the muslim (ex) slave will suddenly found his end on the rope of a lynch mob, especially if he openly preach about the word of Allah to his fellow Africans...
 
I remember reading about how slaves in Brazil converted to Islam and at some point tried to revolt. Needless to say they were put down with violence.

I can't imagine the Americans being any lighter on the slaves about it.
 
Not possible. There is zero institutional support to create the conditions of large scale conversions. Converting to Islam offers no benefit to non-Muslim slaves. It's even possible conversion would be generate harsher treatment by the slave owners. The slave owners have zero interest in seeing it spread, and are likely to be hostile towards it. There are no free Muslim groups that would support or encourage it and lots of Christian groups who would work to convert the slaves instead. There are no Korans to be printed or distributed even assuming the slaves were literate, and if it was it'd be in Arabic in a different language and alphabet that the slaves could even potentially read. Even oral transmission is hard because few speak Arabic, and the slave population will become English speaking over a large enough time period. There is no one to teach the slaves proper Islam. It is also hard for anyone to live as devout Muslim - no one can go on a Hajj, no one will know the true direction of Mecca for the daily prayers, no one can eat a proper halal diet.

It's possible that small societies of crypto-Muslims would emerge out of those slaves already Muslim when they arrived, and perhaps a few others they convert along the way (and this probably did happen) out of friends. But it would not be sustainable, and it would collapse either in their own lifetimes or in the new one or two generations after them. Not enough knowledge could be preserved and communicated to perpetuate it.
 
This is where I point everyone to the Bilali document and to Professor George Junne's article Neither Christian nor Heathen. The TL:DR summary: some of the Muslims brought to British North America and the Caribbean as slaves were literate, some of those tried to preserve their faith, and there was actually sporadic communication with imams in Africa (although this was of course infrequent and unreliable). In the Gullah/Geechee country, where most of the slaves came from the same part of Africa and where they had more freedom than other slaves to arrange their off-duty lives, Islamic practices were maintained for two or three generations, and while there are no Gullah Muslims today, there are cultural survivals that can be traced to Islam.

With that said, any propagation of Islam under American slave traditions would be nearly impossible. As has been pointed out, the second-generation slaves would lose literacy and the Arabic language, and since there was little communication between slaves from different plantations, they'd have no easy way to spread the faith to their neighbors. Any such effort would also have to contend with the active promotion of Christianity by the plantation owners.

Maybe, if emancipation could somehow occur in the late 18th or early 19th centuries, followed by a period when the Gullah were essentially left alone, Islam could survive there. A group of Muslim slaves successfully going maroon might be another option. In either of those cases, though, isolation and lack of literacy would mean that folk-Islam rather than orthodox Islam would prevail.

Failing that, another POD might be if the American slave system were more like the Brazilian one. Slavery in Brazil was different - slaves of the same ethnic group tended to be kept together, there were more urban slaves with literacy and freedom of movement, and there was a large free black community that belonged to the same religious-social brotherhoods that the slaves did. Preservation of Islam was much easier in that environment than in the United States. Outside special cases such as Gullah country, though, I'm not sure how to arrange such a change in the structure of American slavery.
 
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