Black Mecca

Editor’s note: This essay is available in our print issue, A Nation Divided. Buy the issue here.

‘According to Islamic tradition,’ writes Curtis, ‘Bilāl was “gifted with a deep, melodious, resonant, and vibrant voice.”’ This voice was invoked by Prophet Muhammad himself, as he ‘decided that Muslims needed some sort of announcement that the prayers were about to begin. Many methods were considered—lighting a fire, blowing a horn, raising a flag, and using a bell or clapper,’ but all the methods were eventually rejected. In the Islamic tradition, Abdullah ibn Zayd, another of Prophet Muhammad’s companions, had a dream in which the adhan was made. The Prophet thus called upon Bilāl to learn from ibn Zayd and perform the first call in which he ‘climbed to the roof of the tallest house around the mosque in Medina,’ and from there issued the call.

‘Perhaps the greatest of these recitations was in 630 C.E.,’ writes Curtis, ‘from the top of the Kaʿba, the sacred house of worship that was, according to Islamic tradition, originally built by Ibrahim. After conquering Mecca without a battle, Prophet Muhammad entered the sacred house and then, emerging from the inside, asked Bilāl to issue the call to prayer.’ Quite significantly, in becoming Prophet Muhammad’s constant companion, Bilāl accompanied him ‘into every battle he fought,’ eventually tracking down and killing his own former enslaver, Umayya.

Bilāl’s life would continue to be evoked by African Muslims across the continent as Islam began expanding throughout the medieval period. One of the most famous invocations is found in the Epic of Sundiata Keita, the thirteenth-century founder and first ruler of the Mali empire. ​​The significance of the call to Bilāl in the epic is not in the amount of time spent discussing him, but in its positionality. Within the first few sentences, Balla Fasséké, the speaker in the narrative, or Sundiata’s jeli, more commonly known as ‘griot’, begins:

Right at the beginning then…Bilali Bounama, ancestor of the Keitas, was the faithful servant of the Prophet Muhammad (may peace be upon him). Bilali Bounama had seven sons of whom the eldest, Lawalo, left the Holy City and came to settle in Mali.

Bilāl’s name appears only twice more in the entire narrative. The former of these final two declarations gives insight to Malinké consciousness of their social status as an emerging regional power in a Muslim and West African context. Fasséké, at a feast meant to boost morale among Sundiata’s army striving to defeat the oppressive Sumaoro Kante and establish what would soon become the Mali empire, assures his audience that ‘the kingship of Sosso is but the growth of yesterday, whereas that of Mali dates from the time of Bilali.’ Fasséké is not only claiming that the kingship of Mali has greater chronological longevity, but also that through lineage to Bilāl, the emergence of Mali was in direct connection with the emergence of Islam. Thus, he asserts Mali as a progenitor of the powerful social and economic force that was developing across Africa.

Though the Mali empire by far was not the first West African Muslim empire—the Senegambian kingdom of Takrur is believed to be the first to fully integrate the religion—Islam being an integral element of Mali’s very founding positioned Mali to become another emblem of Africans’ essentiality to Islam. Mansa Musa I, the fourteenth-century ruler of the Mali empire, has been heralded as one of the richest men in history and recognized in particular for his illustrious pilgrimage to Mecca—a requirement for all Muslims.

Though estimates range, it is believed that Mansa Musa I brought with him an entourage of 60,000 people, as well as enough gold to have inflated Arabian markets for at least 12 years. Upon his return, he built and renovated existing mosques and masjids within the empire. Under Mansa Musa I, Timbuktu became the famous city which officials, scholars, merchants and travellers from all over the Muslim world came to visit.

Mansa Musa I’s rule over Mali at its zenith also pre-empted another critical moment in African Islamic history. In African Dominion: A New History of Empire in Early and Medieval West Africa, historian Michael A. Gomez writes that ​​Mansa Musa I realized the ‘unification of the Niger, Senegal and Gambia valleys,’ under Islam. Thus, Hausaland, to Mali’s east, or present-day northern Nigeria, saw an influx of Fulani/Fulbe people, descendants of the Torodbe from the already Islamized Senegambia, by way of Mali. These groups are the ancestors of ‘Uthman Dan Fodio, the Fulani Islamic scholar who led the effort in enforcing orthodox Islam in the region during the nineteenth century. As a result, Nigeria now represents Africa as the fifth country in the world with the highest Muslim population.

However, this interconnectedness of Islam in Africa extended into the diaspora centuries before the jihad of Dan Fodio. In fact, the Senegambian region, from which Dan Fodio’s ancestors hail, was the source of the very first Africans who landed in the Atlantic world. In Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas, historian Sylviane A. Diouf writes that by 1447, a century after Mansa Musa’s I rule, Arab slave traders were no longer intermediaries for European slave markets, and that enslaved Senegambians were being brought directly from Africa to Spanish and Portuguese markets in particular.

By 1501, these Senegambians in Iberia ‘were the first to be introduced into the New World,’ Diouf explains. The indirect route from the Senegambia to the Atlantic world was purposeful, ‘direct trade with the African coast was forbidden for fear that with Africans coming straight from Africa, Islam would find its way in the colonies,’ she notes. Instead, Africans from the Senegambia, particularly from the Wolof empire, were brought to Iberia to receive ‘a simulacrum of Christian conversion, coupled with nominal religious instruction,’ giving them the title ladinos. Spanish and Portuguese aversion to Muslim influence emerged as a result of Moorish rule over the Iberian Peninsula for almost eight centuries.

Nevertheless, the trade in ladinos could not meet the demand, and shortly after, the trade in Africans brought directly from the coast, or bozales, began. Within 50 years, Diouf discusses, five royal decrees were passed to forbid the importation of African Muslims to the Spanish colonies, suggesting that, ‘the insistent reissuing of the prohibition shows that Muslims nevertheless continued to be imported and to cause concerns and problems in the New World.’

Though the first recorded slave rebellions noted by both Gomez and Diouf began in 1503 with the influx of bozales into the Atlantic, one key ‘problem’ was represented by the 1522 slave revolt in Hispaniola which was largely composed of Senegambians. In Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas, Gomez refers to this as the ‘first collective insurrection of Africans in the Americas.’ He also discusses how by the seventeenth century, Mande-speaking Africans known as Mandingas, the ethno-linguistic group responsible for the founding of the Mali empire, took the place of Wolof-descended Africans as the main group being brought to the Americas, indicating the ‘demise of the West African kingdom of Jolof’. Thus, both Gomez and Diouf stress the interconnectedness between history on the African continent and the types of Africans being brought to the Americas.