“It would appear that the Muslim community, where it existed, had some impact upon the stratification of African and African American society. Given that it was a slave society, such stratification began with the perceptions of the slaveholders. Vis-à-vis other Africans, Muslims were generally viewed by slaveholders as a ‘more intelligent, more reasonable, more physically attractive, more dignified people.’ Phillips has written that planters found the Senegalese to be the most intelligent, as they ‘had a strong Arabic strain in their ancestry.’ William Dunbar, a prominent Natchez planter, specifically preferred Muslims from northern Nigeria as opposed to Senegambians, but they were Muslims nonetheless. The belief in the superiority of the ‘Mohammedans’ was apparently a consistently held view throughout the colonial and antebellum periods. As an example, Salih Bilali is described as ‘a man of superior intelligence and higher cast of feature., To a great extent, this view of the Muslim was informed by the physical appearance of the Fulbe and certain Mande speakers, whose features were believed to be phenotypically closer to Europeans than other Africans. European travelers invariably commented upon Fulbe features: Gray and Dochard described them as ‘much resembling the European,’ as did Callie, whereas Jobson stated that the Fulbe were ‘a Tawny people, and have a resemblance right unto those we call Egyptians.’” Michael A. Gomez “Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South” Page 82
Posted on: Thu, 25 Jul 2013 23:50:49 +0000
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