Your Original Faith
You were not originally Christian. The faith that was practiced across Al-Maghrib al-Aqsa — the western domain of the Moorish Empire — was Islam, filtered through the Amazigh and Sufi traditions of the people who had inhabited this land for centuries. Christianity was not offered to you. It was used against you as a legal handle — and when you accepted baptism as a legal defense, the colonial system changed the rules to make the defense void.
The most common response when a treaty class member hears "Moroccan subject" is: "I don't want to be Muslim." That response is not about religion. It is about what 400 years of forced conversion did to the mind. The national claim requires no religion. The treaty class can be Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or nothing. The Emperor's domain always included all three.
Moroccan Subject of Al-Maghrib al-Aqsa — protected under the Treaty of Peace and Friendship, 8 Stat. 484 (1836). This is a sovereign relationship. The Emperor's domain included Amazigh Jews of the Atlas Mountains, Amazigh Christians of the Maghreb coast, and Sufi Muslims of the Tijaniyya and Qadiriyya orders — all as subjects. It requires no specific religion.
Whatever you practice — Baptist, Catholic, Muslim, Jewish, or nothing. The treaty does not require you to change this. A Moroccan subject can be Christian. The nationality was suppressed separately from the religion. They must be understood separately. The confusion of the two is not an accident. It is 400 years of deliberate architectural work.
The Arabic controlling text of the 1836 Treaty does not say "Moor." It says "Muslimin." These two words look connected — one appears to derive from the other — but in 1836 they meant something different. The distinction is the difference between an ethnic label that could be suppressed and a political-legal category that could not.
The English text of Article 21 reads: "If any of the citizens or subjects of either of the contracting parties shall be found by any Moor..." The US government's own commissioned Arabist — Snouck Hurgronje, the foremost Dutch authority on Islamic law, contracted to review the treaty text — called the English translation "extremely inept." The reason: throughout the Arabic treaty text, the same Arabic word is translated correctly as "Moslems" in Articles 3, 6, and 10. Then, in Article 21, the same Arabic word is rendered as "Moor" — an ethnic European category that narrowed the class the Arabic text had specified. The Arabic does not say "Moor." It says "Muslimin" — the Arabic plural of Muslim.
"The English translation of Article 21 is extremely inept."— Snouck Hurgronje (Dutch Arabist, commissioned by the US government), in Hunter Miller, Treaties and Other International Acts of the United States of America, Vol. IV (GPO, 1934)
In the 1836 political context, "Muslimin" was not purely a statement of personal religious belief. It was the governing legal category of the Sultan's domain — the word that described ALL subjects under Islamic sovereign authority, regardless of their individual level of practice. The Sultanate administered under Islamic law. To be a subject of the Sultan was to be within the Muslimin framework — a political-national designation, not a religious test. The Alaouite Sultan's domain included Jews of the Atlas Mountains, Amazigh peoples of varied practice, and Arab scholars of the cities — all administered under the Sultan's authority, all within the domain the treaty protected.
The English mistranslation "Moor" narrowed this class to an ethnic category that could be erased through the name chain — Moor became Blackamoor, then Negro, then African American, each step moving further from any recognition. "Muslimin" could not be erased the same way: it is a self-evident category. The colonial classification system could rename a person from "Moor" to "Negro" in a census. It could not rename their religious identity the same way — which is precisely why the colonial apparatus created instruments specifically to destroy it.
The Black Christian Codes, the Code Noir, and the Slave Bible were not primarily religious conversion tools. They were political-national identity destruction instruments. The 1667 Virginia Act closed the baptism defense specifically because EOM subjects were using Christianity as legal protection. The Code Noir administered the same destruction through French colonial law. The Slave Bible — printed in 1807, distributed to enslaved people in the Caribbean — omitted the Exodus narrative (the story of liberation from slavery) and retained only the passages of submission. What was being suppressed was not a religion in the modern sense. It was the political-national identity encoded in the religious practice of the treaty class — the same identity that the Arabic "Muslimin" in Article 21 had named and protected.
The Islam practiced by the treaty class in the 18th and 19th centuries was not the Islam presented to the Black community today. It was Maliki rite — the legal school that governed the Sultan's courts and that Bilali Mohammed preserved in Arabic manuscript on Sapelo Island, Georgia, until at least the 1800s. It was Sufi in its devotional practice — the Tijaniyya and Qadiriyya orders that carried the Amazigh and West African Islamic tradition through North Africa. It was not Ottoman Sunni, not Wahhabi, not Salafi, and not the Nation of Islam — all of which emerged from different geographic, political, and historical contexts centuries later. The "I don't want to be Muslim" response that the treaty class often gives is a response to modern Islam as presented through the lens of 400 years of forced conversion, identity destruction, and colonial conditioning. It is not a response to the Maliki jurisprudence of the Sultan's domain — which is what "Muslimin" in Article 21 actually names.
The treaty class did not start as Muslim. They did not start as Christian. The religious path of the Amazigh people of Al-Maghrib al-Aqsa runs through 4,000 years and includes traditions that the colonial apparatus has systematically erased from the public record. Here is what the record actually shows.
The tradition centered on ancestor veneration, sacred land, cave sanctuaries, and sacred animals. The best-documented window into this practice: the Guanche people of the Canary Islands, Amazigh people who remained isolated from conquest longest. They practiced mummification (parallel to ancient Egypt), maintained a priestly class, and performed complex rituals around death and the afterlife. Their existence proves the Amazigh spiritual world was sophisticated and coherent — not the primitive practice the colonial record required it to be.
This tradition was never erased. It survived under every religious layer placed on top of it. It re-emerged as the marabout/saint veneration tradition within Moroccan Sufi Islam — the shrine culture, the sacred lineages, the baraka passed through proximity to holy people and holy places. The Sufi shrine is the Amazigh sacred site wearing Islamic form. The structure is continuous across 4,000 years.
The primary anchor for this layer: Al-Kahina — Dihya (~640–703 CE). Jewish Agellidt of the Jarawa tribe, Aures Mountains. Agellidt is the Amazigh title for the female sovereign — the feminine form of Agellid, the indigenous title of the Amazigh ruler. She held this title for over 30 years before the Arab conquest arrived. This was not a marginal identity or a transitional moment — it was a fully functioning Jewish governance structure with a sovereign, an army, a territory, and three decades of continuity. When the Umayyad Arab forces arrived, they were not arriving to fill a void. They were arriving to conquer a civilization that already had a head of state, a religion, and a military capacity. Al-Kahina inflicted a major defeat on the Arab army and drove them back for several years before she was finally killed around 703 CE.
The Arab chronicles named her al-Kāhina — "the prophetess." This is the first documented application of the naming mechanism to the treaty class: strip the political title (Agellidt — sovereign, head of state), replace it with a supernatural label that removes the governance claim. Then the Europeans arrived and called her a "queen" — their own monarchical category imposed on an Amazigh political structure that had its own word. She was not a prophetess. She was not a queen. She was a Jewish Agellidt. Every substitute title is evidence of how naming has always worked against this population — the same architectural move that produced "Negro," "Colored," and "Black" from "Moroccan Subject" began here, in the Aures Mountains, when the first invaders renamed the vanquished.
She appears in the enemy's own records because she was too significant to erase. She was not Muslim. She was the Agellidt of the population that would become the treaty class — and she was Jewish.
Judaeo-Berber communities survived in the Atlas Mountains and the Draa Valley for centuries after Islam became the dominant religion of the region. These were not Arab Jews who had migrated. These were Amazigh people practicing Judaism. Their descendants who emigrated to Israel in the 20th century are documented in Israeli anthropological records. The Sultan's domain included Jewish subjects as a formal, protected class under the mellah system. They are part of the treaty class's ancestral world.
The Jewish presence in Al-Maghrib al-Aqsa was not only historical — it was legally documented in the United States government's own treaty-class record. US Consul Felix Mathews, reporting from Tangier in 1880, recorded that "Moorish subjects naturalized in the United States are few, and, with two exceptions, all Israelites." The Moroccan subjects the United States was actively tracking under the treaty framework were predominantly Jewish. The formal protection mechanism — the protégé system under the 1836 Treaty — applied explicitly to "Christians, Mohammedans, or Jews" without distinction (Foreign Relations of the United States, 1879). Virginia's 1667 colonial statute named "Jew, Moor, Mahometan" in the same suppression clause. The colonial system already understood these categories were connected. The treaty class was always religiously plural. The evidence is the US government's own diplomatic record.
Tertullian (c.155–240 CE, Carthage — modern Tunisia) was the first major Christian theologian to write in Latin. He coined the word Trinitas — Trinity. Without his Latin formulation, the entire Western Christian tradition is unrecognizable. He was North African. He was not European. He was not from Rome.
Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE, Thagaste — modern Algeria) — his mother Monica had an Amazigh name, documented. Augustine's theology of original sin and grace built the entire Western church. Catholic doctrine, Protestant doctrine, evangelical doctrine — all of it rests on the theological framework of an Amazigh man from Algeria. When the treaty class was baptized into Christianity in the Americas, they were being brought into a tradition that a man of their own people had largely constructed.
The Donatist movement (4th–5th century CE) — this is the most important and least-taught piece. The Donatists were a specifically North African, heavily Amazigh Christian movement that refused to accept clergy who had collaborated with Roman imperial persecution. They believed the church could not serve both God and Caesar. They were suppressed by the Roman Empire by force — with the eventual, reluctant support of Augustine himself. The Donatists were African Christians resisting the imperial version of their own religion. This is the Amazigh pattern across centuries: the indigenous people adapt a tradition, make it their own, and then resist when an empire tries to weaponize it against them. The Donatists lost to Rome. The Moriscos lost to Spain. The treaty class was forced into the same imperial Christianity their ancestors had already fought and lost against.
The dominant form that developed was the Maliki school — distinguished by its incorporation of local custom ('urf) into legal rulings. This built in the flexibility to preserve Amazigh practice under Islamic form. The Empire of Morocco was never under Ottoman control — this is critical. The Ottoman Empire controlled Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt. The EOM's Maliki-Sufi tradition developed independently, producing a specifically Moroccan, non-Ottoman, Amazigh-inflected Islam that looks and feels different from the Arabian form.
The Sufi orders were the living religion: Shadhiliyya (founded by an Amazigh man from the northern Empire of Morocco, Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili, 1196–1258); Qadiriyya (spread through West Africa — documented enslaved West African Muslims in the Americas belonging to this order); Tijaniyya (founded 1781 on the frontier between the Empire of Morocco and Ottoman Algeria, spread aggressively through West Africa during the exact height of the Atlantic slave trade — the order most relevant to what the treaty class carried into the Americas); Wazaniyya, Darqawiyya — both specifically Moroccan.
The word Muslimin — which appears in the 1836 Treaty — functioned as both a religious term and a national/treaty identifier. The colonial apparatus exploited this dual meaning to make the national identity appear to be a purely religious claim — so that attacking the religion would appear to be attacking only faith, not nationality.
The US government's own commissioned authority confirms this. Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje — the foremost Arabic scholar of the 19th century, engaged by the US government for the official treaty record — found Article 21's English translation "extremely inept." The same Arabic word rendered "Moslems" in Articles 3, 6, and 10 of the Treaty appears as "Moor" in Article 21 — an internal inconsistency the Arabic controlling text does not contain: the Arabic uses Muslimin throughout. The English "Moor" imposed an ethnic boundary. The Arabic "Muslimin" imposed none — it includes all subjects of the Sultan who profess Islam, regardless of ethnicity or current location. Bilali Mohammed, enslaved on Sapelo Island, Georgia ca. 1800 — who preserved the Risala of Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani (the foundational Maliki legal text governing the Emperor's courts) in Arabic — was within the Arabic treaty class by his own religious identity. The colonial name chain operated on the English ethnic category. The Arabic class designation was never formally suppressed. It was never acknowledged.
The Maliki-Sufi tradition of the Emperor's subjects is not what the treaty class was later told to reject. The Empire of Morocco was never Ottoman. Never Wahhabi. Never Salafi. Those movements emerged in different territories, in different political contexts, centuries later. What the treaty class carried into the Americas — preserved in the ring shout, the Praise House, and the Islamic naming conventions documented in the Gullah Sea Islands for generations — was an Amazigh-inflected, Maliki-jurisprudence, Sufi-order tradition. When the colonial apparatus commanded the treaty class to abandon "Islam," it was not asking them to abandon something foreign. It was asking them to abandon the national identity marker — the word in their own treaty that named them — and accept the imposed racial adjective instead.
The papal authorization was already in place: Dum Diversas (1452) and Romanus Pontifex (1455) authorized the enslavement of non-Christians. Sublimis Deus (1537) declared that the original people of the Americas could not be enslaved — an effective self-revocation of the colonial authorization. Spain pressured the Pope into withdrawing its enforcement mechanisms within months, but the declaration itself was never annulled: the root authorization remained self-revoked while the colonies kept going for 328 more years. Inter Caetera (1493) divided the non-Christian world between Spain and Portugal for conquest. The entire canon law framework was built to take what the treaty class had.
The religion was not offered as liberation. It was administered as a reclassification instrument. The national identity went out the door at the same moment the imposed religion came in.
France, 1685
London, 1807
Negro Act, 1740
Louisiana, Mississippi
1820s–1830s
given instead
What the Amazigh-Sufi tradition became in this process: the ring shout (circular counter-clockwise movement documented in Gullah praise houses — structural parallel to the Sufi dhikr circle documented by Dr. Sterling Stuckey in "Slave Culture"). The Praise House (small community-controlled sacred space separate from the plantation church — structural parallel to the Sufi zawiya, the order lodge). The tradition went underground. The form changed. The impulse persisted.
Stockholm syndrome is named directly here because that is what this is. Stockholm syndrome is a documented psychological response in which captives begin to identify with and defend the captor's worldview. The most advanced stage: the captive uses the captor's system against their own liberation — without the captor needing to be present. The architecture becomes self-sustaining.
When a treaty class member hears "you are a Moroccan subject under the 1836 Treaty" and responds "I don't want to be Muslim" — this is Stockholm syndrome operating. The response is to a national claim, not a religious invitation. No one is asking anyone to change their prayer. The response using religion against a national claim proves the architecture is working exactly as it was designed to work: the captor's imposed identity is now being used by the captive to reject the original sovereign identity.
The Willy Lynch letter's authenticity as an 18th-century document is disputed — its language and concepts are more consistent with late 20th-century academic analysis than with 1712 colonial correspondence. The specific document may have been fabricated. The architecture it describes is not disputed because it is observable in current operation on the treaty class: distrust of national identity; religious loyalty to the captor's framework; horizontal violence against treaty class members who assert the national claim; generational amnesia preventing transmission of prior knowledge; the "good enough" trap using civil rights gains to neutralize the treaty argument that would go further.
The treaty class does not need to change its religion. It needs to know the difference between what was always its own and what was administered to it in place of what was suppressed. That difference is the distance between Name 1 (Moroccan Subject) and Name 13 (African American). Name 13 has no treaty. Name 1 does.
The Amazigh and Moorish people of Al-Maghrib al-Aqsa practiced Islam long before any European colonial power arrived. That faith was not foreign to the land. It was the land.
Al-Maghrib al-Aqsa — the Farthest West — was the westernmost extent of the Islamic world. The Amazigh people, the original inhabitants of the entire Maghrib region, developed their own relationship with Islam that was distinct from the Arab political tradition that later claimed leadership of the Islamic world. The Amazigh/Moorish Islamic tradition was Sufi in character — rooted in spiritual practice, knowledge transmission, and community rather than in the imperial politics of the eastern caliphates.
This is the tradition your ancestors carried into the western territory — into what is now called the Americas. It traveled with them in the names they gave their children, in the prayers they maintained, in the community structures they organized, and in the memory of who they were before the colonial apparatus arrived and began the systematic process of renaming, re-categorizing, and re-defining them.
The spiritual and political unity of Al-Maghrib al-Aqsa was real. The Sultan — in the colonial record's Arabized title — was the head of state. The Agellid — the original Amazigh title, meaning emperor of the western domain — was the true designation before the Arab conquest of 708–709 CE displaced the indigenous political structure. The Amazigh people had their own title for their sovereign, their own political tradition, and their own relationship to the land that stretched from the far west of what we now call Africa to the far west of what we now call the Americas.
The faith was part of all of this. Not imposed from outside. Developed from within. And it was precisely that faith — that identity as Muslim subjects of a Muslim sovereign — that the colonial system targeted first.
The colonial legal justification for enslaving you was religious, not racial. Before 1667, the system's first legal handle on you was that you were not Christian.
Every European colonial power operating in the Americas — Spain, Portugal, France, England — shared a common legal tradition that permitted enslaving "heathens" and "infidels." The Catholic Church's papal bulls, beginning with Dum Diversas (1452) and Romanus Pontifex (1455), granted the Portuguese Crown the right to enslave "Saracens, pagans, and other unbelievers." "Saracen" was the European word for Muslim. The legal authorization was specifically targeting the Islamic population.
When the colonial apparatus encountered Moroccan subjects in the western territory — people who were identifiably Muslim through their names, their practices, their community structures, and the records they had maintained — the religious legal handle was the first tool used against them. You could be subjected to colonial authority because you were not Christian. You could be enslaved because you were "heathen." The Islamic faith that was your tradition, your culture, your connection to your sovereign identity — it was the colonial system's first legal pretext for your subjugation.
Your ancestors were not ignorant of this. Many accepted Christian baptism — conversion, often under compulsion, through the colonial mission system in New Spain and the English colonies — specifically because the colonial framework's own stated logic said a Christian could not be enslaved by other Christians. Baptism was, in many cases, a legal defense, not a spiritual transformation. You accepted the colonizer's religion to use the colonizer's rules against them.
It worked. For a time. Until 1667.
When the religious defense started working, the colonial system changed the rules. Baptism was declared legally irrelevant to bondage.
In 1667, the British colonial legislature enacted a statute on EOM land in Virginia specifically designed to close the baptism defense:
"Baptisme doth not alter the condition of the person as to his bondage or ffreedome; that diverse masters freed from this doubt, may more carefully endeavour the propagation of christianity."— Virginia Act, 1667
Read the reasoning embedded in that text: "that diverse masters freed from this doubt, may more carefully endeavour the propagation of christianity." This sentence reveals the colonial system's real concern. Slaveholders had been resisting Christian conversion of enslaved people because conversion might trigger legal freedom. The 1667 Act was designed to reassure those slaveholders: baptize your enslaved people freely, because we have eliminated the legal consequence. Christianize them — use the faith to control and pacify them — without any risk that the faith will free them.
This act did something legally irreversible: it severed the connection between religious identity and legal status. Before 1667, being Muslim was the colonial handle. After 1667, being Christian no longer provided the defense. The new handle — needed immediately — was race. If religion no longer determined bondage, something else had to. The Virginia Slave Code of 1705 provided the answer: race.
The 1667 Act is the pivot point in the history of your identity. Before it: your legal status was tied to your religion. After it: your legal status was tied to the new colonial racial category. Your Moorish/Muslim identity — which had connected you to your sovereign, your treaty, your legal protection — was being actively severed from its legal consequences. Christianity, which had briefly served as your escape route, was now being woven into the colonial control system as another tool. Christianity would tell you to be patient. To forgive. To look to the afterlife. To yield to authority. The same faith that had briefly been your legal defense became the colonial system's spiritual pacification technology.
In New Spain, you were persecuted for being Muslim before conversion — and persecuted again for suspicion of remaining Muslim after it. You could not win.
The British colonies were not alone in this operation. New Spain — the Spanish colonial system in what is now Mexico and the American Southwest — ran the same suppression on a parallel track through different instruments.
In 1539, a Royal Edict forbade Muslims from Spanish colonial territories entirely. In 1543, a reinforcing edict targeted "Moors" specifically, forbidding their passage to the Indies. These edicts were the Reconquista continuing in the New World: the same 700-year war to expel Moors from Iberian Christian territory was being extended into the territories Moors already inhabited in the western domain.
The Spanish Inquisition's reach extended into the Americas through the Archivo General de Indias in Seville — the archive that holds the trial records of Moriscos in the New World. Moriscos were converted Moors: people who had accepted Christian baptism in Spain and, after the Reconquista's forced conversions, had brought that baptism with them to the Americas. The Inquisition prosecuted them for crypto-Islamic practice — for secretly maintaining Islamic prayer, Islamic dietary practices, Islamic community structures beneath the Christian exterior they were required to present.
The Inquisition records are direct evidence of what the colonial system knew and what it feared. The colonial apparatus recognized that the people being classified as "Indian," "Negro," and "Mulatto" were the same people it had been fighting for 700 years in Iberia — the same people whose faith, culture, and sovereign identity it was trying to erase. The Inquisition prosecuted them not for any specific crime but for the possibility that they might still be who they were. The prosecution of identity was the point.
You were persecuted as Muslim. You converted. You were persecuted as a converted Muslim suspected of remaining Muslim. There was no path through the colonial religious apparatus that did not result in persecution. The target was not your faith. The target was your identity — which your faith expressed and which the colonial system needed to erase.
Even within the Islamic world, the original Amazigh political structure was erased. The Empress was eliminated entirely. The western domain was obscured.
The Arab Umayyad conquest of Al-Maghrib — 708–709 CE — brought Islam to the Amazigh people through a political process, not purely a spiritual one. The Amazigh had their own title for their sovereign ruler: Agellid — meaning emperor of the western domain. The Agellid's title carried the geographic designation of the full domain: Farthest West, which extended to the Atlantic and beyond.
The Arab conquest replaced Agellid with Sultan — an Arabic title meaning "authority" or "delegated power." This was not just a word change. The Agellid title had a feminine form: Agellidt — the Empress. The Amazigh political structure recognized female sovereign authority. The last great Amazigh resistance leader against the Arab conquest was a woman — Dihya, called al-Kahina by the Arab invaders — a Jewish Agellidt — the Amazigh title for the female sovereign — who had reigned for over 30 years before the conquest reached her. She was killed approximately 702–703 CE. After her defeat, the Arab political tradition replaced the Agellid structure with the Sultan structure — and the feminine imperial title was eliminated entirely. There was no Sultaness. The Agellidt vanished from the political vocabulary. And with it, the record of a Jewish sovereign who had governed this population for three decades before the first name was imposed on them.
This matters for the story of your faith because it shows that the erasure of your original identity was not a single colonial event — it had been happening in layers, over centuries, from multiple directions. The Arab conquest of 708 CE began the displacement of Amazigh political and cultural structures within the Moroccan domain. The European colonial conquest of 1492 onward continued the displacement in the western extension of that domain. Each layer erased something. Each layer moved you further from the original noun.
Your Islamic faith — as practiced by the Amazigh and Moorish people of Al-Maghrib al-Aqsa — was not the Arab imperial version of Islam. It was the version that emerged from the encounter between the Amazigh people's spiritual traditions and the Islamic revelation. It was Sufi in character, decentralized in practice, and rooted in the western territorial tradition that pre-dated the Arab conquest. This is the faith that crossed the Atlantic with the EOM subjects. This is the faith the colonial system targeted.
There is one more distinction the colonial record requires. Sultan is not a neutral administrative title. It is a pale Arab identifier — the title of the Sharifian ruling class, the Bidan, who claimed descent from the Prophet and sat above the Amazigh population as a governing layer. The Alaouite dynasty that signed the 1836 Treaty with the United States held this Sharifian lineage claim. Moulay Ismail (r. 1672–1727) institutionalized the internal Arab hierarchy explicitly: he conscripted and enslaved dark-skinned Moroccan subjects to build his Black Guard — the Abid al-Bukhari — an army drawn from the population he governed over. The Sultan was not the treaty class. The Sultan was the Arab layer above the treaty class.
The 1836 Treaty was signed by the Sultan — the pale Arab Sharifian title holder. It protected the Muslimin subjects beneath him — the Amazigh population whose last independent sovereign had been a Jewish Agellidt killed over a thousand years earlier. The treaty class is not who signed the treaty. The treaty class is who the treaty protected. That distinction is the difference between the Arab layer and the Amazigh root.
Imposed — Arab
Imposed — Arab
Root — Amazigh
Three layers of naming sit between the treaty class and their original identity. The Arab conquest gave them a Sultan above them and an Islamic administrative identity around them. The European colonial system then took that Islamic identity — the Muslimin of Article 21 — and renamed it across 13 steps into a racial adjective with no treaty connection. But the root has not moved. The treaty class is still the population Al-Kahina commanded. The layers are the record of what was done to them. The layers are not who they are.
The Islamic suppression was comprehensive. What survived it proves how deep the original faith ran — and how hard the treaty class worked to preserve it.
The plantation system's suppression of Islamic practice ran through multiple mechanisms simultaneously: English-name substitution for Arabic names (ship manifest); forced attendance at Christian worship services; prohibition of Arabic literacy and writing; punishment for prayer postures (prostration, facing east, the call to prayer); naming of days and seasons away from the Islamic calendar. The suppression was not incidental. Islamic practice connected the treaty class to the "Muslimin" identity marker in the 1836 Treaty — to the sovereign relation that created the treaty obligation. Suppressing that identity was suppressing the legal standing.
His case establishes three things: (1) Arabic-literate Muslim scholars — of specific West African nations whose identities were likewise erased under colonial classification — were present in the colonial population. He was not an EOM subject; his homeland was Bundu, in Senegambia. (2) Islamic practice was maintained in secret even when openly suppressed. (3) The Arabic literacy that ultimately freed him was the same literacy the colonial system was designed to suppress — the literacy that, in treaty class members, connected them to the 1836 Treaty and the "Muslimin" identity of Article 21.
Bilali Mohammed wrote a manuscript in Arabic that survives at the University of Georgia's Hargrett Rare Book & Manuscript Library. The document — thirteen pages — is a partial transcription of the Risala of Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani: the foundational text of the Maliki school of Islamic jurisprudence, the same legal school that governed the Sultan of Morocco's courts and that authorized the Sultan's legal personality under the 1836 Treaty. A man enslaved in Georgia in the early 1800s — classified as "negro" in the colonial record — was copying out the legal code of the Empire of Morocco in Arabic, on the same soil where the treaty was in force, at the same time the treaty was in force.
Three things make this document compulsory evidence. First: it is not a prayer book. It is a legal text — specifically, the Maliki jurisprudential framework that is the controlling legal tradition of the EOM. The man who copied it was not only maintaining faith; he was maintaining legal literacy in the Sultan's own legal system. Second: it was written on US soil during the period the treaty was operative. Third: the document survived, because the community around Bilali Mohammed maintained Islamic practice and Arabic literacy continuously enough that a subsequent owner preserved it rather than destroying it. The colonial suppression architecture was not complete. The manuscript is proof.
Ibrahima was captured in 1788 and enslaved on a plantation in Natchez, Mississippi, where he worked for approximately forty years. He was eventually recognized by acquaintances who knew his origin. He wrote a letter in Arabic that reached US officials; a copy was transmitted to Morocco. The Moroccan Sultan — Moulay Abd al-Rahman ibn Hisham, who had reigned since 1822 — responded to the communication, expressing concern for the welfare of a Muslim enslaved in the United States. That diplomatic signal reached Secretary of State Henry Clay and President John Quincy Adams. Ibrahima was freed and returned to Africa in 1828, dying in Liberia in 1829. (Source: Terry Alford, Prince Among Slaves, Oxford University Press, 1977; US State Department correspondence, National Archives.)
The evidentiary significance is this: Moulay Abd al-Rahman exercised diplomatic concern over an enslaved Muslim in Mississippi in 1826–1828 — and then, eight years later, ratified the 1836 Treaty that formally articulated that function in Article 21. It is the same Sultan, the same relationship, the same understanding. The Sultan's 1826 conduct establishes what "Muslimin" in Article 21 meant from the EOM's own perspective: the Sultan of Morocco considered Muslims enslaved in the United States to be within his diplomatic concern. The United States received that communication, acted on it, freed the man — and eight years later ratified a treaty with the same Sultan naming "Muslimin" as the protected class. The 1826 diplomatic exchange is the living definition of the 1836 treaty term.
In the trial records — preserved in the Arquivo Público do Estado da Bahia and documented in João José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) — the authorities found Arabic-written documents on the bodies and in the possessions of the rebels: Quranic verses, Islamic prayers, amulets containing text in Arabic script. The colonial court prosecuted enslaved people for possessing Arabic documents. The Arabic documents are now primary source evidence of what the colonial classification system called "negro" and "pardo" — and what they actually were.
The evidentiary significance for the treaty research framework is a timing argument: the Arabic "Muslimin" of Article 21 of the 1836 Treaty named a living, documented, Arabic-literate class in the Americas in the calendar year before the treaty was ratified. The colonial censuses called them by racial adjectives. The colonial courts, in prosecuting them, created primary source records of who they actually were. The same two-record structure visible throughout the treaty class argument — external classification on the administrative record, documented original identity in the adversary's own proceedings — appears in Brazil in 1835 as it appears in Virginia in 1667 and in the Inquisition records of the 16th and 17th centuries. One mechanism, operating simultaneously across all of the colonial systems of the Americas, targeting the same "Muslimin" class the treaty's Arabic controlling text named.
Note on evidentiary scope: Omar ibn Said was not an EOM subject — his own autobiography names his homeland as Futa Toro. He is documented here because his case shows the same erasure mechanism applied to the treaty class: a specific national identity (Toucouleur/Fula) buried under the generic "Negro" classification. Same mechanism, different nation. His writings are not evidence of the legal authority here, or of treaty class membership. The legal authority is 8 Stat. 484.
The survival of Islamic names in active use in 1932 is not nostalgia. It is evidence of what the colonial suppression system could not reach: the private transmission of identity through family oral tradition. The plantation naming system erased the Arabic names from the legal record. The families preserved them at home. The legal record said one thing. The family name said another. Lorenzo Dow Turner found the family name still in use, 150 years after the suppression was supposed to have been complete.
The Federal Writers' Project Slave Narratives (1936–1938), collected across the former Confederate states and held at the Library of Congress, document a parallel persistence: informants describing grandparents and great-grandparents who faced east to pray — toward the direction of Mecca, the qibla — and who performed prostrations. Diouf documents specific accounts from WPA interviews in which individuals with no remaining identification as Muslim described behaviors that are precisely the Islamic prayer form: the direction, the prostration, the timing. The practice had outlived its name. The qibla orientation documented in 1930s WPA interviews traces directly to the same Maliki-Sufi tradition of the Empire of Morocco's subjects — the same orientation encoded in the Arabic "Muslimin" of the 1836 Treaty's Article 21.
The chain from the manuscript to the practice to the interview spans approximately two centuries: Bilali Mohammed's manuscript c. 1820 → his Sapelo Island community → the saraka practice maintained by his community's descendants → the WPA interviews of the 1930s documenting qibla awareness among people whose grandparents had been enslaved. The colonial suppression architecture, which operated on the legal record and the public sphere, could not reach the kitchen and the direction of prayer. What was preserved in private was the same identity the treaty's Arabic text named in public.
She organized the most effective resistance to the Arab-Islamic conquest of North Africa in the 7th century. After the defeat of Kusayla — the prior Amazigh commander — around 688 CE, she assumed command of the confederation, reorganized the Amazigh forces, and inflicted a major defeat on the Umayyad general Hassan ibn al-Numan, driving his army back for several years. She employed a scorched-earth strategy — destroying crops and settlements to deny the invaders a permanent foothold. She understood what they were: not a raid, but a permanent colonial occupation. She was finally defeated and killed around 703 CE when the Umayyad forces returned with reinforcements.
The Arab chroniclers called her al-Kāhina — "the prophetess." This designation is itself evidence. The invaders took the Agellidt — the sovereign — stripped her indigenous title, and replaced it with a supernatural label. Then European historians called her a "queen" — applying their own monarchical category. She has been called a prophetess and a queen by everyone except her own people, who called her by her title: Agellidt. She was not a prophetess. She was not a queen. She was a Jewish Agellidt. The supernatural label was designed to contain the political claim — to make her a mystic figure rather than a head of state. The same architectural move appears 1,000 years later when colonial administrators stripped the "Moroccan Subject" title from the treaty class and replaced it with "Negro," "Colored," and "African American." Take the political noun. Give them an adjective. The mechanism begins with her.
Al-Kahina is not in this record because she has a legal claim. She died 1,083 years before the 1836 Treaty was ratified. She is in this record because she is the earliest documented proof of who the treaty class actually was before the names began. Her people — Amazigh, Jewish, governing the western domain — became the people administered as Moroccan Subjects. The Arab conquest absorbed them. The Alaouite Sultanate governed them. The United States signed a treaty protecting them. The colonial apparatus renamed them across 13 steps. Al-Kahina is the face of the population before step one. She is not a witness. She is the identity itself.
He was a hero. He walked into the deepest phase of Jim Crow — before the NAACP had a legal strategy, before the UN existed, before international human rights law had a body — and told his community who they actually were. Not what the census said. Not what the classification imposed. Who they were. He did not have the treaty, the statute, or the ICJ case number. He had the insight. He paid for it. The FBI surveilled him from his earliest public assertions. Ali was arrested in 1929 under disputed circumstances and died shortly after release. The state came for him not because his community was violent — it was not — but because it was asserting a Nationality. The Nationality assertion was the threat.
The FBI file is the admission: the federal government identified, targeted, and neutralized a man whose central act was reconnecting the treaty class to its own name. FOIA releases confirm this. Noble Drew Ali is a front runner — he saw the destination clearly when the path had not yet been built. What he asserted in 1913 without a legal brief, the filing record of 2026 now documents with 107 instruments, 12 independent grounds, and three active international forums. The hero came first. The documentation followed.
He went to Africa. He went to Mecca and completed the Hajj — earning the title El-Hajj, a Moroccan-Arabic honorific carried by those who have made the pilgrimage, the same linguistic tradition that connects the "Muslimin" of Article 21 of the 1836 Treaty to the living Islamic identity of the treaty class. He returned from Mecca understanding that the struggle was not racial — it was national. Not Black against white. But a people claiming their national identity and their human rights against a colonial classification system. That understanding made him dangerous to the system in a way that civil rights advocacy did not: he was building an international record, connecting to the non-aligned world, framing the condition as a colonial one rather than a domestic one.
He was assassinated on February 21, 1965. He was 39 years old. El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz is a hero and a front runner. He carried the correct argument — international law, Nationality, human rights rather than civil rights — at the cost of his life. The international filings of 2026 stand on ground he walked first. His early demise did not stop the argument. It confirmed how dangerous the argument was to the people who have spent 228 years suppressing the Nationality.
Christianity was used by the colonial system to pacify, to organize submission, and to replace the memory of who you were before the names began.
After 1667, once the colonial system had severed religion from legal status and built the racial category to replace it, Christianity served a new colonial function. It was not the oppressor's tool in the simple sense of something forced on an unwilling population. It was more subtle than that. Christianity — specifically the version taught to enslaved and colonized populations — emphasized patience, submission, forgiveness, and the reward of the afterlife. These are not inherently colonial values. But in the colonial context, they were deployed to replace the memory of political sovereignty with the aspiration of spiritual salvation.
You were taught to look up. To wait. To pray. To endure. You were not taught to look at the Treaty of Peace and Friendship, ratified by the United States Senate in 1836 and confirmed by the International Court of Justice in 1952, which created specific legal obligations on the United States toward your ancestors and their descendants. You were taught about Moses leading his people out of Egypt. You were not taught about the Emperor of Morocco's first recognition of the United States in 1777 — the first nation in the world to do so — or about the treaty protections that recognition created.
The Black church in America is a genuine institution of community, solidarity, and cultural survival. The faith of many Moroccan subjects who became Christian was sincere. None of this negates the structural reality: the colonial system used the church — specifically the theological framework of submission to earthly authority and redemption through spiritual discipline — to manage the political consciousness of the treaty class. The same Gates who designed the GEB's vocational education framework cited Scripture — Romans 12:16, "condescend to men of low degree" — as the theological justification for designing the treaty class's education to produce docile rural labor rather than lawyers and statesmen.
Christianity became part of the invisible system. Not because faith is bad — faith is not bad. But because this particular version of this particular faith, applied to this particular population in this particular way, served the colonial function of managing consciousness. Of keeping you looking up when you needed to be looking at the document.
The Amazigh Islamic tradition was Sufi in character. The Sufi orders were not merely spiritual brotherhoods — they were the identity-preservation and knowledge-transmission networks of Al-Maghrib al-Aqsa. Which is precisely why they were targeted first.
The Sufi tariqa (order) system was the organizational infrastructure of Moroccan Islamic identity across the western domain. Each order maintained a chain of transmission — silsila — connecting every practitioner through an unbroken lineage back to the founding masters and ultimately to the Prophet. This chain of transmission was simultaneously spiritual and genealogical: it documented who you were, where your lineage ran, and which community's tradition you belonged to. In Al-Maghrib al-Aqsa, the two most influential orders were the Tijaniyya (founded 1781 in Ain Madhi by Ahmad al-Tijani) and the Qadiriyya (derived from Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani). Both were active in the western domain simultaneously with the 1836 Treaty.
The Sufi orders' role in the treaty class's story goes beyond religion. They were the mechanism by which the "Muslimin" identity — the Arabic word in the controlling text of Article 21 of the 1836 Treaty — was transmitted across generations in the face of colonial pressure to convert and conform. When a family maintained a Sufi practice in secret — keeping the dhikr (remembrance of God) in private, preserving the Arabic names, maintaining the spiritual lineage chain — they were simultaneously preserving the religious identity and the national identity that connected them to the treaty.
Lorenzo Dow Turner documented in 1932 that these Islamic Arabic names were still in active family use in the Georgia and South Carolina Sea Islands — 150 years after the plantation naming system was supposed to have erased them. Each name is a primary source of the Islamic identity the colonial system was designed to suppress.
Turner's 1949 publication "Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect" (University of Chicago Press) is a peer-reviewed academic study — the primary academic authority on African and Arabic linguistic survival in Gullah-Geechee communities. He documented over 6,000 words of African and Arabic origin surviving in active use. The Islamic Arabic personal names below are documented in his fieldwork as names that Gullah families were giving their children in the 1930s — not as historical curiosity but as living identity markers transmitted across generations through private family practice that the plantation naming system and the colonial legal record could not reach.
The survival of these names in active family use in 1932 — 100 years after the 1836 Treaty was ratified, 65 years after the 14th Amendment was applied, 70 years after emancipation — is not nostalgia or coincidence. It is the primary evidence that the colonial suppression architecture could not fully reach the private sphere of family oral tradition. The legal record said "Fanny." The family said "Fatima." Lorenzo Dow Turner found "Fatima" still in use. The Arabic controlling text of Article 21 says "Muslimin." The private family record preserved the Islamic identity the treaty was designed to protect.
The Archivo General de Indias in Seville contains the Inquisition trial records of Moriscos in the Americas. The colonial system prosecuted your ancestors for being who they were — and in prosecuting them, created the most detailed primary source record of their Islamic identity in existence.
The Archivo General de Indias — Seville, Spain
Established in 1785 to hold all colonial-era records from Spain's American territories, the Archivo General de Indias contains over 80 million pages of colonial administrative documentation, including the records of the Spanish Inquisition's operations in the Americas. The Inquisition prosecuted "crypto-Islam" — the maintenance of Islamic practice in secret — among the Morisco population that had carried baptized Islamic identity to the New World after Spain's forced conversions.
These records name the accused. They document the specific Islamic practices maintained: the Arabic language, the ritual prayer (salat), the prohibition on pork, the direction of prayer (toward Mecca), the maintenance of Islamic dietary law (halal), the recitation of the Shahada (Islamic declaration of faith). Each prosecution record is a primary source of Islamic identity surviving in the colonial Americas in the 15th through 18th centuries.
The prosecuted identities appear in these records under Spanish names — the external record. The internal record of what the Inquisition found documents the Islamic identity beneath the Spanish exterior. The two-record structure visible in the Casa Contratación's limpieza de sangre investigations (the knowing/suppressing split) appears again here: the colonial system knew who these people were. Its own persecution records confirm the knowledge.
Under this research framework, the Inquisition records at the Archivo General de Indias are compulsory retrieval targets in the active international proceedings. IACHR P-1365-26 and OHCHR h6a662eo both require primary source documentation of the treaty class's pre-colonial identity — the identity the colonial system suppressed. The Inquisition records are the colonial system's own documentation of that identity. The prosecuted Morisco's Arabic prayer, documented in a 1620 Inquisition trial transcript held in Seville, is primary source evidence in a 2026 petition before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
The 1667 Virginia Act did not just close a legal defense. It performed a complete identity substitution — replacing the national-religious identity marker that connected the treaty class to the 1836 Treaty with a spiritual framework designed to produce docility, patience, and political passivity.
Religion: Islam — Amazigh/Sufi tradition; "Muslimin" = the treaty's controlling identity term
Political identity: Subject of the Emperor of Al-Maghrib al-Aqsa — treaty-bearing, consular-protected, internationally recognized
Legal defense: Baptism defense (before 1667): Christian baptism = potential argument for freedom within colonial courts
Organizational network: Sufi tariqa — silsila chain documenting lineage and identity preservation across generations
Religion: Evangelical Christianity — specifically the version emphasizing submission, patience, and spiritual reward; explicitly excluding lawyers, statesmen, and political actors
Political identity: "Negro," "Colored," "African American" — racial adjectives with no sovereign relation and no treaty connection
Legal position: Constitutional civil rights — fighting for equal treatment inside the colonial framework that accepted reclassification as its premise
Organizational network: The Black church — community solidarity, but structured around spiritual practice rather than legal identity assertion
The conversion-map comparison is not a criticism of Christianity or of the Black church tradition. The faith of Moroccan subjects who became Christian was, in many cases, sincere. The community produced by the Black church — its solidarity, its cultural production, its political leadership through the civil rights era — is real and significant.
The point is structural: the identity substitution that the 1667 Virginia Act put in motion replaced every element of the original identity matrix that connected the treaty class to the 1836 Treaty with elements that made that treaty invisible. Arabic name → English name removes the lineage chain. Islamic identity → Christian practice removes the "Muslimin" treaty identifier. Sovereign subject → racial adjective removes the treaty standing. Constitutional rights → removes the international forum. Sufi order → Black church removes the identity-preservation transmission network. Each substitution was precise. Each served the same function: moving the treaty class from the noun that triggered treaty standing to the adjectives that could not.
Knowing your original faith is not a requirement to assert your treaty rights. But understanding what was suppressed — and why — is part of understanding the full scope of what was done.
You do not need to currently practice Islam to assert that you are a Moroccan subject under the 1836 Treaty. The Arabic controlling text of the 1836 Treaty uses "Muslimin" — Muslim subjects of the Emperor — and that word means exactly what it says. But treaty class status flows from descent and lineage, not from current religious practice. The colonial apparatus changed your religious identity by force, not by your choice. The twelve-step name chain was not voluntary. The Virginia Act of 1667, the Inquisition conversions, the missionary enforcement system — none of these were chosen. The legal principle is: you cannot lose the protection of a treaty by being forced to violate its conditions. A status suppressed without consent is not a status abandoned. The question is not what you currently practice. It is who your sovereign was.
But understanding that your original faith was Islam — and understanding how that faith was used as the first colonial handle against you, then converted into a pacification mechanism, then woven into the educational and organizational systems designed to manage your consciousness — is part of seeing the full system. You can see colonialism more clearly when you can see what it took from you in spiritual terms as well as legal terms.
The Inquisition records at the Archivo General de Indias contain the names of your ancestors — Moriscos in the Americas, prosecuted for being who they were even after conversion. Those records are compulsory retrieval targets in the active international cases. The colonial system's own persecution records are evidence of your identity. The system that tried hardest to erase you created the most detailed record of your existence.