Bilali Muhammad

Bilali Muhammad (about 1770 – 1857) was a Guinean Muslim scholar from Timbo in Fouta Djallon who was enslaved as a teenager, held for ten years in the Caicos Islands, and sold in 1802 to Sapelo Island, Georgia, where Thomas Spalding made him the head driver and manager of his plantation. After his death a thirteen-page Arabic manuscript he had written came to light: the Bilali Document, a brief statement of Islamic belief and ritual law drawn from the Risalah of Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani, described by the researcher Muhammed al-Ahari as the "Mother Text" of American Islamic literature. ^{1 2}

He was born in Timbo, in present-day Guinea, sometime between 1760 and 1779, to a well-educated West African Muslim family; Hodgson's account, followed by the Arabic article, gives the year as about 1770. He grew up literate in Arabic and Fula, with knowledge of the Qur'an and, in the Indonesian article's account, of hadith, Islamic law and exegesis. Enslaved as a teenager, he was taken to the Bahamas and sold to Dr. Bell, a Loyalist refugee of the American Revolutionary War, and worked for ten years on Bell's plantation on Middle Caicos. In 1802 Bell sold him to a trader who carried him to Georgia. ^{1 3 2}

His descendant Cornelia Walker Bailey, in her history God, Dr. Buzzard and the Bolito Man, placed his origins in the area of present-day Sierra Leone rather than Timbo; the museum records both traditions. ¹

On Sapelo Island he was bought by Thomas Spalding and appointed head driver, then manager of the plantation, overseeing approximately five hundred enslaved people; his skill as a master cultivator of rice was prized by Georgia planters. The scholar William Brown Hodgson was among those who met him. In the War of 1812, Bilali and his fellow Muslims on Sapelo helped to defend the United States against a British attack. ^{1 4}

He died in 1857, and after his death his thirteen-page Arabic manuscript was discovered. At first taken for a diary, it proved on inspection to be a brief statement of Islamic beliefs together with the rules for ablution, the morning prayer and the calls to prayer, composed from the Risalah of Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani, a legal treatise that formed part of West Africa's Muslim curriculum. Joseph Greenberg published the first partial translation in the Journal of Negro History in 1939–1940, and the text has since been analysed by Ronald Judy, Joseph Progler, Allan D. Austin and Muhammed al-Ahari. The manuscript is held at the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library of the University of Georgia, among the Francis Goulding papers, where it is known as the Ben Ali (Bilali) Manuscript. ^{1 3}

The articles agree in presenting Bilali as a Muslim throughout his life: born into a Muslim scholarly family, keeper of his Arabic learning through decades of enslavement, and author of a treatise of Islamic belief and practice. They do not, however, name a legal school or order for him personally. His manuscript transmits a Maliki legal text because that was the curriculum in which he had been educated in Fouta Djallon; the museum does not convert a schoolbook into a personal affiliation, and so records his school as unknown while preserving the Maliki-curriculum fact here. ^{1 2 5}

A Bilali Muhammad Historical Research Society was founded in Chicago in 1987 and later renamed the Muslim American Cultural Heritage Institute. The English article also warns that some accounts have conflated Bilali Muhammad with other men of similar names, among them Yusuf Benenhaley of South Carolina and the Wahab brothers of Ocracoke Island; he was a distinct person from both. ¹