How African Muslims Survived In America – History Bites #09

Adnan Rashid

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Channel: Adnan Rashid

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Salam Alaikum everyone Adnan Rashid back with another episode of history bites. Today, I will recommend a very inspirational powerful book on Muslim history. Before I do that, I want to advise and remind everyone to subscribe to my YouTube channel and follow the links in the description to support my history related work. Now to the book. This is the book I was going to recommend today. It is titled servants of Allah, African Muslims and slaves in the Americas. And the author is Sylviane ad of Sylviane ad have has done an absolutely amazing job in documenting in documenting the history of Muslims kidnapped from West African countries for almost 400 years. And then these

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Muslims are taken across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas. It is estimated by scholars that almost 11 to 100 million Africans were kidnapped during this four century 400 years period of Atlantic slave trade, right. And about 30% of these Africans kidnapped from West African nations were Muslims. A lot of these Muslims lived absolutely inspirational lives in the USA, in particular, the United States of America, right. And they struggled to keep up with their religion because they were facing extreme brutal conditions. The masters were mostly racist European settlers who had settled in the USA, and they had sugar plantations, and they are domestic use for these kidnapped people use

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the slaves, and almost 30% of them were Muslims. Some of the stories are absolutely mind blowing fascinating, heroic stories, which you can read in this particular book that the person depicted on the title,

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title page or title, the cover of the book is Solomon. Sorry, are you mean Solomon Diallo? Are you mean Solomon, they all they all know also known as job Ben Solomon. And there was a book published by the Oxford University Press on his biography, and the book is titled, The fortunate slave. But this book is a very different book, it documents the history of many other Muslims who lived in the Americas during this period and struggled to keep their religions. And some of them are writing manuscripts in their own hands, like these ones, like Arabic manuscripts written in the USA, by these Muslim Africans kidnapped from Africa and put into slavery. Right? And who are these people

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who are writing these manuscripts? One of them is this gentleman called

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Omar bin Saeed who was born in 1770. And he died in 1863. And this is his original photograph, just before he passed away, right. He was a Muslim, kidnapped on West Africa. And he survived. As a Muslim. He kept his religion he struggled to keep his religion. Sylvia ad off documents his fascinating history in this book, also, a YouTube bins for a man was taken from Africa in 1731, to Maryland, and then he ended up in London, and he wrote Korans, in his own hand, he transcribed Korans in his own hand, and this particular portrait was painted in London by one of the British artists. Now, what was he doing in London? How did he end up in London? You will, you will have to

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really read this book to find out. Okay, this is a very powerful book, a very inspirational book for anyone interested in the history of Islam in the USA. And I'm not talking about the history of Islam in recent decades. I'm talking about the history of Islam in the USA, for the last 500 years how these Muslims struggled to keep their religion under extreme, brutal conditions. Right? They were facing extraordinary odds. They masters were mostly racist, brutal, European settlers, who were trying to change their religion by force. They were trying to forcefully convert these Muslims to Christianity and these Muslims struggled to keep whatever they knew of their religion. Some were

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scholars, others were laymen, but they tried their best to keep the religion and to read more on this, please read this very, very important book servants of Allah. Salaam Alaikum. Don't forget to subscribe to the channel and support our history related work by following the links in the description as salam aleikum wa rahmatullah.