AhlulBayt News Agency (ABNA): With the arrival of Black History Month, the Muslim community in Bermuda has shared reflections stressing the need to reexamine Islam’s historical role in Black identity, describing it as an authentic and ancient component of African history and the Black diaspora.
According to community activists, Islam is often portrayed as a foreign or recent phenomenon, while in reality its roots in Africa date back to the seventh century CE, when cities such as Timbuktu, Gao, and Djenné became major centers of learning, where Africans studied law, medicine, science, poetry, and theology.
Historical estimates indicate that a significant number of Africans transported to the Americas through the transatlantic slave trade were Muslims, some of whom could read and write Arabic and had memorized the Qur’an. Although slavery suppressed the public practice of Islam, faith survived through private prayers, fasting, and moral discipline, continuing as a form of spiritual resistance.
Muslims in Bermuda say the island’s own history is part of this broader African diasporic narrative, and that today’s Muslim community sees itself as the heir to a much older tradition. One senior member of the Bermuda Muslim community said, “When I embraced Islam, I did not feel that I had adopted something new; rather, I remembered something very old.”
These reflections also emphasize Islam’s message of human equality, a principle affirmed by the Prophet Muhammad (p.b.u.h) in his Farewell Sermon, in which racial superiority was rejected. A historical example frequently cited is Bilal al-Habashi, the formerly enslaved African and Islam’s first caller to prayer, who became a symbol of Black dignity and leadership in early Islam.
According to Bermuda’s Muslims, Islam re-emerged strongly among Black communities in the twentieth century, particularly in the United States and the Caribbean, offering many a spiritual path independent of the racist legacy of colonialism. Figures such as Malcolm X, by highlighting Islam’s universality, played a major role in this spiritual return.
Today in Bermuda, although the Muslim community is small, it is diverse and largely of African descent, and its members view their presence as part of a historical continuity of faith rather than a new phenomenon.
In closing, Muslims in the territory stressed that commemorating Black History Month should present a fuller narrative of the past, one that includes pre-slavery knowledge, faith under oppression, and spiritual return in the face of historical barriers, contributing to greater justice, equality, and human coexistence.
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