Enslaved African Islam died out without continuous fresh arrivals of African-born Muslims

Evidence

Despite the large number of African Muslims enslaved in the United States, Islam was eventually extinguished among their heirs. Three factors led to this outcome. First, White Protestant slave owners believed Islam was a false religion created by the devil such that most prohibited their slaves from practicing it. Second, all enslaved African people were subject to coerced conversion to Christianity as a means of saving their purportedly heathen souls. They were given European names and prohibited from giving their children African or Muslim names. Protestant preachers taught the slaves that Islam was one of the primitive African pagan practices that must be shed in order for their souls to be saved. They instructed slaves, and eventually freed Blacks, to shed all remnants of their purportedly heathen African origins through conversion to Christianity. Although some slaves incorporated their Muslim beliefs into their Christian practices or only pretended to convert, Muslims’ inability to practice their communitarian religion accomplished what the slave owners wanted: the elimination of Islam among Blacks in America. … Finally, even those Muslims who secretly practiced their faith could not pass it on to their children or grandchildren due to the sale of their offspring. Rarely could a Muslim man find a Muslim spouse, raise the children Muslim, and keep the children long enough to pass on the religion. Absent Islamic schools and religious leaders, American-born African slaves could not learn how to recite their Quranic prayers or the tenets of the faith without parental teaching. … Thus what kept Islam in America during the antebellum era was the continuous arrival of enslaved Africans. When the last African-born Muslims died in the early twentieth century, Islam as practiced in West Africa effectively disappeared within African American communities. Around the same time, however, a new political movement was growing that would appropriate Islam as a Black Liberation ideology against White supremacy and the myriad legacies of slavery. The domestic backlash would merge anti-Black racism with Orientalism. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 576

Categorization

• QUESTION: How many US slave narratives or records document Muslim practice among African-born slaves, and how much Quranic literacy survived oral traditions to Reconstruction?
• DEEPTHINKING: The mechanism of religious extinction — no fresh arrivals, no spouse pool, no schooling, enforced renaming — is a general account of how communitarian religions die under coerced assimilation, applicable well beyond this case.
• XREF: Connects to scholarship on why Santeria/Vodou/Candomble syncretized and survived but Islam specifically did not — the communitarian vs. initiation-based structure difference. — connects to: African Muslim slaves preserved Islam until Protestant abolitionism pulled them into Christianity
• ADDENDUM: Directly relevant to the ‘On Sacrifice’ article’s treatment of coerced conversion and the destruction of religious practice under slave regimes.