The Manuscript Cultures of Africans in 19th Century Brazil: Stories of Conversion, Resistance, and Healing

• In Event: (Re)presenting Afro-Brazil: Contesting National Narratives and Centering Transnational Circuits of Black Knowledge Production

Description for Program

Enslaved Africans formed the first Muslim communities in Brazil. These communities comprised individuals from various ethnic groups, such as the Hausas, Madinkas, and Yorubas. In 1835, they led one of the most significant slave revolts in the Americas: the Malê slave revolt. The subsequent criminalization of the Arabic language and Islamic practices, as well as forced conversion to Christianity and a general lack of interest in Islam among Afro-Latin Americans, have contributed to the invisibilization of Islam in Afro-Brazilian history. This paper offers a re-reading of the Malê manuscripts held at the Arquivo Público do Estado da Bahia, Salvador, to correct the image of the Malês as unlearned Muslims spread primarily by the Musalliyat al-Gharib bi-kul Amr ‘Ajib, the travel narrative in Arabic of Abd al-Rahman al-Baghdadi, an ottoman imam who spend three years in Brazil (1866-1869). The paper shows that amulets made with Islamic numerology, manuscripts containing Quranic verses, and other documents in African languages written in ʿAjamī (modified Arabic script) all attest to the kinds of advanced Islamic knowledge that circulated among enslaved Africans in Brazil, among whom the literacy rate was higher than among their enslavers. Drawing on interviews with Sufi masters in Senegal whose expertise in Islamic numerology I solicited, I uncover some of the esoteric Islamic knowledge found in the Malê documents, which trace to long-standing intellectual traditions in the Muslim world.

Author

• Gana Ndiaye, Yale University