In January 1835, when Brazilian police raided the homes of African-born residents in the city of Salvador following a failed slave uprising, they found something that unsettled them. Among the weapons, the white tunics, and the prayer beads, the officers discovered small folded packets – pieces of paper covered in Arabic script, sewn shut inside leather pouches and worn against the skin of the rebels. Brazilian police reports, preserved to this day in official archives, documented these objects clearly: amulets, Quranic manuscripts, and devotional texts written in Arabic, carried by the insurgents into the streets of Salvador.
These were taweez: written Islamic amulets, folded and sealed in leather, believed to carry divine protection. And the 1835 Male Revolt – the largest urban slave uprising in the history of the Americas was not the first time they had crossed the Atlantic.
A Population That History Erased
Historians now estimate that between ten and thirty percent of all Africans brought to the Americas as enslaved people were Muslim. They came primarily from ethnic groups including the Fulani, the Mandinka, the Hausa, the Wolof, and the Yoruba – peoples with centuries-long traditions of Islamic scholarship, Quranic literacy, and a living culture of written sacred objects. To understand that tradition and its living continuation, visit taweez.eu.
The Mandinka had a particularly deep tradition of amulet-making. Their Muslim clerics, known as marabouts or karamokos, wrote Quranic verses on slips of paper and sewed them into leather pouches worn as protective talismans. This practice was documented by European travelers who passed through the region in the 17th and 18th centuries. The Mande-speaking communities of West Africa were also the origin of the object that came to be called gris-gris in the Americas – a direct descendant of the Islamic written amulet tradition, made of Quranic passages folded inside a small sewn sack, worn close to the body for protection.
Among the Wolof – another predominantly Muslim people from the Senegambia region, the connection to the Americas began even earlier. A group of enslaved Wolof landed in Hispaniola as early as 1522, making them among the very first Africans to arrive in the New World. By one estimate, the Wolof, Mandinka, and Tukulor together made up nearly 30% of the African population of colonial Mexico by 1549. They arrived with their faith, their Arabic literacy, and their written protective tradition intact.
The Man in the Portrait
The most visually striking piece of evidence for what enslaved Muslims carried across the Atlantic hangs today at the National Portrait Gallery in London.
In 1733, a West African Muslim nobleman named Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, known in England as Job ben Solomon, sat for his portrait by the painter William Hoare. It is the earliest known British oil portrait of a freed slave. In the painting, Diallo is shown in traditional West African dress. Hanging around his neck is a copy of the Quran he had written from memory.
Diallo’s story is documented in detail. Born around 1701 into a prominent family of Muslim clerics in Bundu, present-day Senegal, he was captured in 1730 while on a trading journey and sold into slavery in Maryland, where he was put to work on a tobacco plantation. He refused to abandon his faith. He prayed five times a day. When the children of the household saw him pray and threw dirt at him in mockery, he fled. He was recaptured and jailed.
In jail, he wrote a letter in Arabic to his father in Africa. That letter was intercepted, translated by an Oxford professor of Arabic, and eventually reached James Oglethorpe – the founder of the colony of Georgia and a deputy governor of the Royal African Company. Oglethorpe was so struck by the letter that he arranged for Diallo’s freedom to be purchased and for him to be brought to England. In London, Diallo copied the Quran three times from memory, met King George II and Queen Caroline, was elected to the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society (whose members included Isaac Newton and Alexander Pope), and had his memoir published in 1734.
He returned to Africa in July 1734, a free man.
The portrait with the Quran worn around the neck, its pages folded and bound is itself an image of the written sacred tradition that enslaved Muslims brought to the Americas and fought to preserve. For Diallo, it was inseparable from his identity. When the painter William Hoare asked what clothes to paint him in, Diallo insisted on his traditional dress. When Hoare said he couldn’t paint clothing he had never seen, Diallo described it to him. In the words of Thomas Bluett, who published Diallo’s memoir: Diallo consented to be painted on the condition that the painter would not draw God, “whom no one ever saw” – a pointed theological comment that survived in print for nearly three centuries.
The Male Revolt: Taweez as Evidence
The 1835 Male Revolt in Salvador, Bahia, is described by scholars as the most important slave uprising in Brazilian history. It was organized primarily by Yoruba-speaking Nago Muslims and Hausa Muslims, collectively known as Male – from the Yoruba word imale, meaning a Yoruba Muslim.
The rebellion was planned during the last days of Ramadan, specifically for January 25, 1835 – which in the Islamic calendar that year fell on Laylat al-Qadr, the Night of Power, commemorating the revelation of the Quran. The leaders were captured the night before, after a freed African woman named Sabina da Cruz discovered the plan and informed the authorities. Despite this, groups of armed rebels took to the streets of Salvador in the early hours of January 25.
When the uprising was suppressed, authorities found on the bodies and in the homes of the rebels the material culture of an Islamic community that had been functioning in Bahia for decades. The official police report, which was reproduced in major Brazilian newspapers of the time, detailed clearly: insurgents wore white tunics that Muslims in Bahia reserved for private religious contexts. They carried amulets consisting of papers with Quranic passages and prayers, folded and placed inside leather pouches sewn shut. According to records from the period, these objects were made and distributed by alufas – the Brazilian Portuguese corruption of al-fuqaha, the Arabic plural for Islamic scholars.
These were taweez. Made by enslaved scholars, worn by enslaved people, carried into a rebellion launched during the holiest night of the Islamic calendar.
After the revolt, the Brazilian authorities moved systematically. Any Arabic writing found in the possession of an African-born person became grounds for arrest. The laws mandating the conversion of enslaved people to Catholicism were strictly enforced. The alufas who had been making taweez for the community were deported or imprisoned. The Harvard Religious Literacy Project notes that in the aftermath, security forces throughout Bahia seized every item associated with Islam. The community that had sustained the written protective tradition was dismantled piece by piece.
The Gris-Gris: When the Taweez Lost Its Name
The most widespread trace of the Islamic written amulet tradition in the Americas is found in the word gris-gris.
The gris-gris originated in the Muslim Mande communities of West Africa – the same communities that produced the Mandinka and Bambara peoples who constituted a large portion of the Senegambian enslaved population brought to North America. It was an Islamic amulet: Quranic verses written on paper, folded and enclosed in a small sewn sack, worn for protection. Due to reports by European travelers in the Volta Basin region of present-day Ghana, it is documented that Mande-speaking peoples called Dyula played a central role in creating and distributing Islamic written charms. The word itself derives from Mande languages and is believed to mean “magic.”
The practice arrived in the Americas with the enslaved. In Louisiana, Haiti, and the Caribbean, it took root. But separated from the scholarly infrastructure – from the Arabic-literate marabouts and alufas who wrote the texts – the gris-gris evolved. In Louisiana by the early 1800s, it had acquired associations with Voodoo and counter-magic that had no equivalent in its West African Islamic origins. In New Orleans, Louisiana court records from 1773 show enslaved people convicted for using gris-gris among the earliest legal mentions of the practice in American records. By 1849, authorities recorded the arrest of an enslaved man for carrying a human finger wrapped in flannel, believed to bring luck.
In Haiti, the gris-gris retained more of its original protective intent, functioning within Haitian Vodou as an amulet with positive purposes. The divergence between Louisiana and Haiti reflects the different social conditions in each colony – not a difference in origin.
What the gris-gris documents, across all its variations, is the trajectory of the taweez tradition after the destruction of its sustaining community. The form survived. The Arabic text, over generations, did not.
Why History Forgot
The erasure was not organic. It was deliberate.
From the very beginning of colonial America, Muslim Africans were specifically identified as a problem. The Spanish Crown issued five separate pieces of legislation in the first fifty years of colonization to prevent Muslims from entering the New World. The reasoning was recorded: Muslim Africans were disproportionately literate, organized, and capable of sustained collective resistance.
In Brazil, the aftermath of 1835 was a comprehensive campaign of cultural destruction. Arabic documents of any kind were criminalized. Mandatory conversion to Catholicism was enforced. The scholar-class that had produced taweez for their communities was deported or imprisoned. By the 1920s, the last Muslims of enslaved African origin in Brazil had died. As late as 1910, it is estimated there were still around 100,000 African Muslims living in Brazil – a community that within a generation was gone.
In North America, the mechanism of erasure was different. Enslaved Muslims found themselves unable to transmit their tradition to their children. The forced dispersal of families, the prohibition on Arabic literacy, the absence of Islamic schools, and decades of pressure to convert to Christianity meant that by the third generation, the grandchildren of enslaved Muslims sometimes did not know their grandparents had been Muslim. The historian Sylviane Diouf, in her landmark study Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas, documented that the last semi-practicing Muslim of enslaved background in Brazil died as late as the 1920s and that across the Americas, not a single community today practices Islam as transmitted by the enslaved African generations.
In Trinidad, a common word for any Muslim is still Mandinga, from the Mandinka. In Guyana, the word fullaman, derived from Fulani remains in use for any Muslim, regardless of origin. These words are the fossils of the Islamic presence that the slave trade brought and the colonial system spent two centuries trying to erase.
The taweez made that crossing. In leather pouches worn against the skin of Fulani scholars, Mandinka clerics, Hausa rebels. In the folded papers found on dead bodies in the streets of Salvador in January 1835. In the Arabic lines written on a prison wall in North Carolina by a man who had memorized the Quran in Futa Toro.
History forgot because it was ordered to forget. The documents, the portraits, and the words that survived tell a different story.