Servants of ALlah
...ers, or criminals were among the Muslims who landed in the New World" (p. 11). Diouf's study is more hemispheric in scope and anthropological in method than the previous work done in this field by Allan D. Austin (African Muslims in Antebellum America [New York, 1984, 1997]) and Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South [Chapel Hill, 1998]). Like Gomez, Diouf shows an impressive sensitivity to the African Islamic context of slavery that is grounded in an original examination of French documents. She situates the captivity of several of the notable Muslim slaves who left narratives of their experiences in the complex religious, political, and social conflicts in West Africa after the disintegration of the Wolof empire. The religious principles and practices of African Muslims, including their literacy, mobility within wider pan-African circuits, and experiences with jihad and slavery, promoted the rise of a broader cultural identity. They constituted part of an intellectual elite who resisted enslavement by Christians both before and after undergoing the Middle Passage. Diouf's major thesis is that the experience of enslavement in the Americas deepened rather than destroyed the religious fervor of Muslim believers. Organizing her book around the premise that enslaved Muslims were not disposed to reject their belief systems, Diouf locates evidence that they went to great efforts to preserve the pillars of Islamic ritual because it allowed them "to impose a discipline on themselves rather than to submit to another people's discipline" (p. 162). These behaviors distinguished Muslim slaves from other Africans, and Diouf attentively seeks out references to such Islamic cultural practices as the wearing of turbans, beards, and protective rings; the use of prayer mats, beads, and talismans (gris-gris); and the persistence of Islamic dietary customs. She associates the saraka cakes cooked on Sapelo Island in Georgia with sadakha or meritorious alms offered in the name of Allah and conjectures that the circular shuffling of the ring shout might be an American recreation of a sha'wt or circumambulation of the Kaaba during the pilgrimage in Mecca. The literacy of Muslim slaves was one of their distinctive cultural traits, which enabled them not only to remain connected with religious expression, but also to rise in rank (and even return home) by distinguishing themselves as Arab rather than African. Arabic literacy generated powers of resistance because it served as a resource for spiritual inspiration and communal organization. "A tradition of defiance and rebellion" (p. 145) and martial experience that Muslims brought with them to the Americas, Diouf suggests, not only prompted the Spanish to pass anti-Muslim legislation in the sixteenth century but also provided essential leadership in the Haitian Revolution and the uprisings in Bahia, Brazil. This focus on Islam as a resource of cultural resistance to slavery portrays enslaved Muslims as agents in a world that remained inaccessible rather than as subordinate to their masters. Indeed, Diouf depicts Muslim slaves in heroic superlatives; theirs is "a story of courage, insuperable faith, fortitude, and V...