Encountering Islam in Belize: A travelogue
Very little is known about the Muslims and this too has been a history buried as the Caribbean region is said to have come into contact with the outside world on October 11, 1492 when Christopher Columbus landed on the island of San Salvador. Over the years historians were preoccupied with European Christian domination and […]
Very little is known about the Muslims and this too has been a history buried as the Caribbean region is said to have come into contact with the outside world on October 11, 1492 when Christopher Columbus landed on the island of San Salvador. Over the years historians were preoccupied with European Christian domination and cultural superiority. They didn’t present the story of the African Christians who were brought talk less of the Muslims. For the Muslims, as they would want people to believe, they said the Muslims embraced the faith in the nineteenth century with the coming of indentured labourers from India and then in the twentieth century with arrival of traders from the Middle East.
In reality, the history of Islam and Muslim peoples in the Caribbean goes back to “over one thousand years, predating European contact by over six centuries. Muslims have had a long and intimate relationship with this region and at present represents a potentially decisive factor in the future,” says Dr. Abdullah Quick in his book, Deeper Roots.
The Faith of Remembrance
The people of the Caribbean had rich religious traditions of ancient and deeply held beliefs and practices. These did not vanish from the minds and hearts of the enslaved. Instead, the people remembered significant portions of their religious traditions and carried these with them on the Middle Route. So Islam has been part of the Caribbean region for quite many years. When they could, the enslaved re-established those traditions in their new American homes. In the Caribbean and Latin America today, it is common to see religious practices that are very much like those one would have seen in African countries centuries ago.
The Caribbean region comprised up of thirty-one countries which are classified linguistically into four regions including 19 English-speaking countries, 5 French-speaking countries, 3 Spanish-speaking countries, and 4 Dutch-speaking countries. Out of a total population of about 35 million, it is presented that only about 300,000 are Muslims. Small but significant concentrations of Muslims can be found all over the Caribbean basin. The largest Muslim populations are in the English-speaking countries of Guyana, where they comprise roughly 13% of the overall population; and Trinidad & Tobago, where they comprise just about 8% of the overall population; as well as in Suriname, which is a Dutch-speaking country, where there are nowadays about 120,000 Muslims, who comprise approximately 28% of the overall population.
The fact that majority of the Muslims had been brought to the Caribbean in shackles did not made them to forget their historical and cultural roots. For, a lot of them came with the literacy known with Islam a tradition of scholarship that served to create the atmosphere that led the slaves to revolt against the colonialists in the Caribbean. This is explained by Muhammad Shareef, in his writing, The Islamic Slave Revolt of Bahia, Brazil (1998), Pittsburgh: Institute of Islamic-African Studies, p. 8. That the Muslims who shipped then were literate to have known the effect of colonialism as “in West Africa the spread of Islam was accompanied by a rise in literacy,” stated Shareef. Muhammad Shareef has thoroughly researched this phenomenon and even linked the revolt in Brazil to what the African slaves must have known or experienced in the Jihad of Usman Dan Fodio that swept the Hausa land in the 18th century.
It is easy for a faith to wane when it is met by suppression but the conviction will certainly go on. Despite the hardship encountered as slaves Muslims who were brought to the Caribbean kept the faith. One account worthy to be cited here was the narration attributed to the accounts of Reverend Bridges which Sultana Afrozi cited in his paper, “The Moghul Islamic Diaspora: The Institutionalization of Islam in Jamaica”. Afrozi revealed Reverend Bridges’ anguish over the strong conviction of the Islamic faith of many of the slaves in, for instance, Jamaica, who had been baptized by him who despite pressure to get them to ditch their age-old practices and faith kept unbending and resorted to be with Islam their religion.
Several accounts have been reported of Muslims secretly keeping the faith who were brought from the Islamic nations of Mandika, Fula, Susu, Ashanti and Hausa, while working as slaves in the Jamaican plantations. As early as the tenth and eleventh century, that is way back before the commencement of the Atlantic trade Islam had made a significant impact in the West and Central Africa – Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Mali, Benin, Ghana, and Nigeria. Therefore, the chances would be of slaves maintaining their identity and slavery system not allowing them to practice their religion openly or the African culture with which they deeply attached to could do much negative impact.
From the beginning of 20th century the Caribbean region saw a new dynamism most especially in the early 1930s when the Anjuman Suntal Jamaat Association (ASJA) was formed in order to maintain the mosques in Trinidad and Tobago and free the Muslims of “Qadiani” influence which had managed to infiltrate their societies. Followed then was the United Sadr Islamic Anjuman (USIA) formed in Guyana. The arrival of also, in the late thirties, forties and the fifties, of Islamic teachers and missionaries from India and Pakistan to the Caribbean helped to boost Islam where they are developing the Arabic language and holding tutorial classes. The Nations of Islam has also played a key role mostly among the African American communities that dot the landscape of the region as many adherents of its teachings could still be found in Jamaica, Bermuda, and of course Belize. I shall discuss this soon.
The Arrival of Islam
The arrival of Islam has not been documented fully in Belize most of the history to date exists only as oral account from few individuals. That is why there are different historical accounts with regard to when it came into the country or rather when it was re-introduced again which is preferable in this context. According to a Dr. Jerome, a Belizean sociologist, there is true evidence that some of the East Indians of Muslim descent who arrived in British Honduras that came to the colony as early as 1858, in the aftermath of the 1957 Indian mutiny (Sepoy Revolt) a chunk of them were Muslims. Those who staged the uprising were Indian soldiers of the British Army, drawn mostly from the Muslim units from Bengal. After containment of the rebellion some mutineers (along with their families) were sent to the Caribbean. There are stories that some were sent to Guyana, and it is believed some were sent to British Honduras as well. But he added that most of the ancestors of East Indians in Belize came to the country as indentured servants during the 1880s through Jamaica as we mentioned in the beginning. Some were said to even arrive through Guatemala, a country neighbouring Belize. A small percentage of these arrivals were also Muslims, Dr. Jerome asserts.
For reasons cited above, sometime after arriving to the shores of British Honduras the descendants of some of the East Indians stopped practicing the Islamic faith of their ancestors, “perhaps because of the way they were integrated into a Belizean society,” opined Dr. Jerome. This scenario couldn’t therefore give the chance to the Indians in Belize to pass their faith to their children like what some did in Trinidad, Guyana and other parts of the Caribbean.
Before the 1960s therefore there was no trace of Islam in Belize. It was interestingly however in the 1960s that the climate of growing dissatisfaction with the colonial rule in Belize that saw the emergence of many political movements. In many countries several movements sprung up that fought for the independence of their homelands from the British and other systems of foreign domination. Mobility of ideas came to occupy the landscape of Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. This led to the establishment of groups like the PAC (People’s Action Committee) in Belize, for example, that came into being in May 1962 due to the patriotic efforts of Said Musa (former Prime Minister), Assad Shoman (former Belizean Minister of Foreign Affairs) and other few well enlightened people which directly confronted “capitalism and racism” with that serious demand for the right of all Belizeans to own “parts of their own fertile lands”. So, it must be agreed that part of these efforts and similar others resulted in self-consciousness and ideologies began to move in especially Belize City.
Of course popular demand for self-rule took the centre stage and became the principle. However the political parties that have captured that essence in their foundation were reported to have lost appeal among the many segments of the Belizean society hence UBAD (United Black Africans for Development) was formed in 1962 as a “Black Power” response at the peak of other efforts taking place at the time in most the Americas among the people of African descent with the eloquent speeches of Malcolm X under the Nation of Islam. Even with the unfortunate assassination of Malcolm X his ideas have already been institutionalized. It continued to resonate among the youth searching for a viable platform for emancipation.
Integrating these ideas into the Belizean politics had proved abortive as efforts to have a party under this kind of umbrella were thwarted even when UBAD was formed as a party in July 1970. Thus, the teachings of the Nation of Islam would appeal ordinarily to some of the nationalists who had already participated in some kind of “Black Nationalism”. So they found a new faith that suited them in Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam.
A relevant account has it that it was in 1961 that Charles X Eagan was deported from the United States. While incarcerated in prison in the United States, Eagan came in contact with the teachings of the Nation of Islam and started spreading what he knew about it after his deportation back to Belize. So, when he returned to Belize he started teaching what he knew about Islam to other persons and Ismail Omar Shabazz and Rudolph Farrakhan joined him, and together they formed the first attempt to introduce Islam back into Belize. The first advertisement of the Muslim meeting was released in 1962 in the Belize Times which invited members of the public to series of Islamic meetings to be held at the Liberty Hall on Barrack Road, Belize City.
According to Evan X Hyde, a popular Belizean writer, it was Ismail Omar Shabazz who first converted to the Nation of Islam, which was introduced to Belize, British Honduras in the early 60s by the late Ibrahim Abdullah, then known as Charles X Eagan. This was confirmed by Rudolph Farrakhan who said that, in one of his journeys he met Shabazz who told him to meet him at Court House Warf that he [i.e. Rudolph] was going to hear something. He remembered Rudolph elaborated sitting at the Court House’s window listening to the Charles Eagan on the subject of alcohol and gambling. Then the teachings started moving north to south giving out pamphlets in addition to open meetings in Corozal, Orange Walk, Stann Creek and Punta Gorda.
(Continued next week)
Kawu-Bala just came back from Belize, Central America where he served under the Federal Government’s Technical Aid Programme.