Since fighting alongside the Patriots in the American Revolution, Black Muslims in America have contributed immeasurably to the quest to advance their nation towards its ideals despite facing unspeakable injustice. Recently, Black Muslims have been at the forefront of racial justice, including Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison, who successfully prosecuted the case against the police officer whose murder of George Floyd last May catalyzed a wave of global demonstrations.
Considering Black Muslims’ seminal contributions, I was keen to investigate the dynamics of Islam in one of America’s oldest Black communities—the Gullah.
The Gullah, also known as the Geechee or Gullah Geechee, are a distinct Southern ethnic minority descended from African slaves who toiled in cash crop plantations on the coastal plain and islands of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida. Their ancestors’ geographic isolation spawned a unique creole culture drawing from various African polities.
Because a significant swath of Gullahs has genetic roots in historical Muslim regions such as Senegambia and the Windward Coast, Islam has played a key role in Gullah history. In fact, the Gullah possess the first settlement of Muslims in America who have artifacts as proof of their Islamic practices.
I pursued my fieldwork on Gullah Muslims at American University during the course “Researching Islam,” taught by Dr. Akbar Ahmed, an anthropologist and former ambassador who has been hailed by the BBC as “the world’s leading authority on contemporary Islam.” Ahmed has lamented the way in which Muslims have been construed from a monolithic lens in the popular psyche since 9/11 and impressed upon my class the importance of holistic, targeted inquiry in understanding American Muslims. So when I initially sought to appraise the experience of Black Muslims at large, he suggested that I narrow my focus to the Gullah.
As I read literature about Gullah Islam, I concocted a question: how have Gullah Muslims maintained their heritage and way of life in response to social and racial marginalization? Incorporating the deductive research approach I learned in class, I formulated an initial thesis, postulating that such marginalization has had an edifying effect on Gullah Muslim heritage and prompted their coalescence to withstand and resist marginalizing social forces with pretensions of superiority. To probe the verity of my thesis, I knew that successful ethnographic analysis would demand interviews with actual Gullahs. The COVID-19 pandemic precluded me from conducting in-person fieldwork, so I found institutions online with potential connections to Muslims along the Gullah Coast, eventually finding the first Gullah Muslim I interviewed, Dr. Amir Touré.
Dr. Touré is a reputed historian and academic from Savannah, Georgia. His Gullah roots go back more than two centuries to slaves from Sierra Leone and Nigeria. Attracted to Islam’s egalitarian principle that “the king is no greater than the beggar before the Most High,” he converted to Islam as a teenager. He described his conversion as a “reversion” given the fact that Islam was the faith of many Gullah slaves before its repression by white slaveowners. Touré connected me with my second interviewee, Ms. Karen Fowles, another Savannahian who is a substitute teacher and social service administrator. In recognition of her compassion and piety, her friends call her “Saaudah,” the appellation of one of the Prophet Muhammad’s wives. When describing the Islamic “genetic memory” of the Gullah, Fowles reflected that she was reconciled to Islam during her youth amid the ferment of the civil rights movement, citing the faith’s simplicity and classlessness compared to the doctrinal complexity and “whiteness” of Christianity.
When I asked Touré how he and Gullah Muslims have responded to external marginalization, he initially demurred. He decried the encroachment of commercial interests on traditional Gullah land. In recent decades, developers have constructed resorts, golf courses, and residential communities, transforming the Gullah Coast into a destination for millions of tourists and seasonal residents annually. They have exploited legal loopholes which allow them to seize land because the Gullah have long owned land communally and thus lack clear land titles. Despite the menace of whom he dubbed “cultural parasites and vampires,” Touré exudes some optimism: he and other Gullah launched what has been an incrementally successful movement last year pressuring regional developers to rename subdivisions that are called “plantations.”
The Gullah region once extended from SE North Carolina to NE Florida. Image: Flash Gordon 1 / Wikimedia/ Public Domain
Ms. Fowles’s response to the prompt I first posed to Dr. Touré was even more dire. In addition to land sequestration, she warned that the Gullah are in a cultural crisis. “Gullah is a sense of community, a sense of collectiveness, and we’re losing our collectiveness,” she bemoaned, attributing the Gullah’s communal decline to gentrification, the exodus of younger Gullah from their historic lands, and the breakdown of the nuclear family. Although she no longer physically protests due to age, she has responded to discrimination on social media from a pan-African perspective that encompasses championing the cause of all Black Americans.
My initial thesis posited that Gullah Muslims have doggedly upheld their heritage and way of life in response to social and racial marginalization and united through institutional avenues to defend and immunize themselves against such marginalization. Reflecting on my fieldwork, I would deem this partially valid with caveats. Gullah Muslims have indeed weathered societal headwinds collectively, as evidenced by the vitality of predominantly Gullah mosques in the region. Yet, Gullah Muslims have coalesced into organizations with Gullahs from all religions.
This is not by implication unfortunate, as such unity is arguably in concord with Islam’s universalist ethos. Gullah Muslims such as Touré and Fowles support anti-discrimination efforts by virtue of the Gullah Geechee Nation, an organization with a unique constitution and head of state who champions the welfare of Gullahs. My fieldwork confirmed the observations of academics such as the University of Tennessee’s Melissa Hargrove, who has written about how the Nation’s quasi-government suggests a desire to rekindle a collective ethnic ethos in response to dislocating social forces.
However, many Gullah, Muslims included, have been absorbed into mainstream American culture. In fact, a few distant Gullahs have ceded communal landholdings to developers for financial benefit, uprooting their relatives. As Touré indignantly noted, “Some of us have no problem disrespecting [our] legacy for a few coins, for a few pennies… [It] is detrimental to all of us because it conveys the wrong idea about who we are and our people.” However, although a conspicuous minority of Gullah abandon and pawn their forebears’ heritage, the emergence of aforementioned institutions has infused Gullah culture with resolve and vigor in the face of adversity.
Although the conclusion of my inquiry into the cultural endurance of Gullah Muslims is not absolute, one thing is clear: the story of the Gullah is a parable worthy of the attention of minority communities everywhere, Muslim and otherwise, that face demonstrable uncertainties.
The pan-African syncretism of the Gullah can inspire the American Black community to reawaken its ancestral connections in unity through the experiential reformation and revival of shared observances such as Kwanzaa. Gullah Muslims’ rejection of exclusivism and an immutable, one-dimensional worldview can serve as a blueprint for European Muslims who have struggled to mold an organic, culturally attuned faith. Without regard to race, creed, or nationality, it is my fervent hope that the plight of the Gullah can enlighten us all.
Bravo, my dearest nephew. You are a gift to all humankind.