Islam’s Connection to Black America, U.S. Slavery Explored in Mississippi Conferences

Islam’s Connection to Black America, U.S. Slavery Explored in Mississippi Conferences: While Mississippi’s racial politics loomed awkwardly as much as the state flags incorporating the Confederate Battle emblem flying on nearby buildings, scholars gathered in the state capital this past weekend for two conferences, one on the legacy of Islamic West Africa, another on slavery.

Dr. Sylviane Diouf, a writer at New York’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, discussed Islamic scholars who were captured and enslaved, most notably Omar ibn Said, who penned an autobiography.

“Muslims used literacy to maintain their identity, to plan revolts … literacy was subversive in the Americas,” Diouf said. She said their writings “tell us about the triumph of the human spirit … that the transatlantic slave trade did not obliterate it.”