Far from Mecca

Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean

Aliyah Khan

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781978806665
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Far from Mecca: Globalizing the Muslim Caribbean is the first academic work on Muslims in the English-speaking Caribbean. Khan focuses on the fiction, poetry, and music of Islam in Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica. Combining archival research, ethnography, and literary analysis, Khan argues for a historical continuity of Afro- and Indo-Muslim presence and cultural production in the Caribbean. Case studies explored range from Arabic-language autobiographical and religious texts written by enslaved Sufi West Africans in nineteenth-century Jamaica, to early twentieth-century fictions of post-indenture South Asian Muslim indigeneity and El Dorado, to the attempted government coup in 1990 by the Jamaat al-Muslimeen in Trinidad, as well as the island's calypso music, to contemporary judicial cases concerning Caribbean Muslims and global terrorism. Khan argues that the Caribbean Muslim subject, the "fullaman," a performative identity that relies on gendering and racializing Islam, troubles discourses of creolization that are fundamental to postcolonial nationalisms in the Caribbean.

1 • BLACK LITERARY ISLAM

Enslaved Learned Men in Jamaica and the Hidden Sufi Aesthetic

Imagine, said Magistrate R. R. Madden in 1837 Jamaica, the “stealing away of a person … as much a nobleman in his own country as any titled chief is in ours … for example, educated at Oxford.… Fancy the poor youth marched in the common slave coffle to the first market-place on the coast. He is exposed for sale: nobody inquires whether he is a patrician or a plebeian: nobody cares whether he is ignorant or enlightened.”¹ Madden was an Irishman sent to Jamaica to enforce the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act that set the stage for Emancipation Day on August 1, 1834, and the later near-slavery “apprenticeship” scheme that did not end until 1838. He was an abolitionist who believed slavery was “the misfortune of Jamaica, the crime of the mother-country.”² But Madden’s imagination, like those of some white Europeans and North and South Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was captured not by the degraded human circumstances of the average enslaved, illiterate black “plebeian,” but by the written narratives and “Moorish” physiognomies and dress of a type of person to whom whites could relate: the literate, enslaved African Muslim in the Caribbean, Brazil, and the United States, the originary fullaman.

This chapter traces a genealogy of Muslim writing and poetics in the Anglophone Afro-Caribbean, from the autobiographical and religious writings of Muhammad Kabā Saghanughu and Abū Bakr al-Siddīq—both Islamically educated West African Muslims enslaved in early nineteenth-century Jamaica—to, after a gap of a century and a half, the poetry of Afro-Guyanese Muslim Muhammad Abdur-Rahman Slade Hopkinson (1934–1993), in his collection Snowscape with Signature (1993).³ Paul Lovejoy and translator Yacine Daddi Addoun dub Kabā’s unnamed ca. 1820 Arabic autobiographical and theological treatise the Kitāb al-salāt (The Book on Praying), as the work shows the influence of the traditionalist Qādiriyya and pacifist Sūwarī brotherhood’s Islamic Sufi teachings.⁴ The earliest version of Abū Bakr’s autobiography and the one he translated from the Arabic is a fragment within Madden’s A Twelvemonth’s Residence in the West Indies, During the Transition from Slavery to Apprenticeship (1835), and notes Abū Bakr’s Islamic training. Hopkinson’s poems in Snowscape with Signature invoke medieval Sufi mystics and the late eighteenth-century Moroccan teacher Shaykh Mawlāy al-‘Arabī ad-Darqāwī, who gave his name to the ascetic Darqāwā branch of the Shādhilīyyah brotherhood.⁵

The story of Black Muslim Caribbean poetics and religious and aesthetic inspiration is deeply rooted and perpetuated in the literary traditions of Sufism, the so-called mystical strain of Islam, and Sufi tarīqa (order) brotherhoods in West Africa. I show that in its defining aesthetic and religious engagement with tensions between the spiritual and the material, the sacred and the profane, and superficial and hidden truths, a Sufi sensibility pervades the texts and worldview of this chapter’s African and Afro-Caribbean Muslim writers, whether they openly identified themselves as Sufi or not. My underlying argument is that in the Islamic Afro-Caribbean literature discussed here, Sufi-influenced emphases on the idea of hidden truth (bātin) and literary practices that encourage union (tawhīd) with the love and oneness of the Beloved/Allah provide ways of articulating and surviving enslavement and its legacy, the omnipresent Caribbean agony of traumatic loss of freedom, bodily autonomy, and cultural and religious knowledge. In addition, the common Sufi emphasis on brotherhood and the teaching of Islam and the Sufi path of enlightenment to one’s followers and countrymen is present in most of the works discussed here (Hopkinson’s poetry appears more ascetic and individualist, but he too has a pedagogical Islamic project). I will not delve into the lengthy religious history of global Sufism, but rather into the way the works and writers discussed show the influence of both classical Arab and Persian Sufi literature and later political-religious African Sufism.

The distinction of being the first Muslims in the Americas does not fall to those Africans forcibly relocated by the transatlantic slave trade. As noted in the introduction, the first likely Muslims whose New World presence can be substantiated were Moriscos, enslaved Iberian and North African Moors on Spanish missions of exploration and conquest to the Americas. The most famous of these was the enslaved Moroccan adventurer Estevanico, a survivor of the 1527–1536 Narváez expedition, whose story was recorded in Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s 1542 account of the expedition.⁶ Hisham Aidi also notes the colonial literary transmission of the legendary Iberian a moura encantada (the enchanted Mooress) from sixteenth-century Iberian folktales to Cuban poetry and Brazilian fiction, and, far less poetically, King Ferdinand’s 1512 order to send Moriscas as prostitutes to the Americas to prevent sexual relationships between Spanish colonists and indigenous women.⁷ Migration of Moriscos to the New World was otherwise restricted.⁸ Like the later wave of enslaved Africans in the Americas, none of the Moriscos left Muslim descendants.

In the era of the transatlantic slave trade, Sylviane Diouf suggests that though followers of Islam were a religious minority, there may have been “hundreds of thousands of Muslims in the Americas.”⁹ In estimating the numbers of Muslims brought to the United States, historians including Michael Gomez and Edward Curtis find “tens of thousands” (or 10 percent) more persuasive.¹⁰ As difficult as it is to estimate the numbers of Africans who embarked upon slave ships and did or did not survive the Middle Passage, it is impossible to know how many enslaved Africans might have been Muslim, even with some knowledge of how many slave ships departed Muslim-majority areas. What we do know is that, though a continental minority, there were many Muslims of many ethnicities and tribal affiliations in West Africa, particularly in the Senegambian and Guinean slave-trading regions. Nehemia Levtzion shows that Islam first entered Africa with traders, through an eastern Indian Ocean coastal route that dates from 780 C.E., and a northern Sahara Arab route that began much earlier but reached a critical mercantile mark in the tenth century.¹¹ Clerics came after merchants. Literary Islam reached a height in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with 150–180 predominantly Sunni Mālikī Qur’anic schools in Timbuktu and international engagement with Sunni Shāfi’ī Egyptian scholars and the Mecca Arabian hajj.¹² Maghrebian Sufism arrived in Timbuktu in the fifteenth century.¹³ Rudolph Ware emphasizes that Islam is as historically African as it is Arab or Asian, and that Senegambians’ approach to Islamic education emphasizes bodily disciplinary practices and memorization of the Qur’an, thereby possessing and embodying the Word of God and the Prophetic example “as a kind of inalienable spiritual good.”¹⁴

For Kabā and Abū Bakr, Islam and Sufi tarīqas constituted the large part of the religious landscapes into which they were born. Through the actions of charismatic leaders and marabout holy men and scholars, Sufi brotherhoods grew in the Maghreb from the seventeenth century onward and in West Africa throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, encouraging literacy and Islamic learning as well as military jihāds against polytheism, monarchy, and corruption. The jihāds resulted in the founding of Islamic states in Nigeria and the Sahel, and the capture and enslavement in the Americas of Hausa, Yoruba, and other West African Muslims.¹⁵ Like many other contemporary Afro-Caribbean Muslims, however, Hopkinson converted to Islam. At the beginning of their Muslim lives, the two continental Africans did not choose Islam; they were born Muslims with centuries of familial and literary relationships to Islam. But choice is involved in the incomprehensibly hard work to retain one’s cultural and religious heritage under conditions of chattel slavery. As Addoun, Lovejoy, Gomez, and Magistrate Madden himself have pointed out, the writings of enslaved Muslims in Jamaica show possible feigned or partial syncretic conversion and dissimulation to hide adherence to Islam. The primary means of selecting for an audience of fellow enslaved Muslims and hiding the content of writing from missionaries and slaveholders was to write in Arabic.¹⁶ I will return to this discussion, but first wish to properly name the Islamic survival tactic of religious dissimulation: it is taqīyyah (prudence), an Islamic theological and jurisprudential concept permitting hiding one’s religion if there is a threat to one’s life. The doctrinal and juridical guidelines for taqīyyah are loose, and, other than bigotry and misunderstanding, that is one reason why the concept has received traction in contemporary anti-immigrant U.S. circles as proof of Muslim migrants constituting a fifth column. Historically, taqīyyah is a tactic most commonly known for its use by minority Shi‘a under threat by Sunni majorities, and by Muslims during the Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula, but I suggest it is also appropriate to enslaved Africans hiding their Islam in the New World.

Kabā and Abū Bakr, the first fullamen, were engaged in a project of preservation and to a lesser extent propagation of West African Islam, including its Sufi leanings, in the Caribbean. Hopkinson finds in Islam and Sufi poetry spiritual and artistic inspiration. Their works add Muslim answers to Afro-Caribbean questions of lost ancestral histories that are often imagined through the syncretic Afro-Caribbean and African American religious and spiritual practices evolving from Yoruba, Fon, Ewe, Akan, Kongo, Bantu, and other polytheistic African religions—most featuring ancestor veneration—and sometimes their interaction with Christianity and particularly Catholicism. The African diaspora religions include Santería (Regla de Ocha or Ifá, Lucumí), Candomblé, Umbanda, vodou, Obeah, Myal, Hoodoo, Conjure, and others (Rastafarianism has a different and more recent anticolonial Jamaican history).¹⁷ These religions have become postcolonial metonyms for Afro-Caribbean identity, in service of an articulation of modernity that places the slave trade as the beginning of history for the African diaspora in the Americas. Colin Dayan, citing African Islam, critiques the way in which, in Paul Gilroy’s seminal work on the Middle Passage that articulates the tropes of the Black Atlantic, Black Modernity, and the slave ship as chronotope, “the slave experience becomes an icon for modernity; and in a strangely magical way, the Middle Passage become...