All history as reconstruction of the past is of course myth

By ALBERTO DA COSTA E SILVA

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On 22 September 1869, the Count de Gobineau, then Minister of France in Brazil, wrote in a political report to the Quai d’Orsai1 that the French booksellers Fauchon and Dupont used to sell every year in their shop in Rio de Janeiro almost 100 copies of the Koran. Although very expensive (36 to 50 French francs), the book was bought almost exclusively by slaves and ex-slaves, who had to make great sacrifices in order to acquire it. Some of them bought the book in instalments, and it took them one year to pay for it. As the Korans were written in Arabic, Fauchon and Dupont also imported Arabic grammars with explanations translated into French, as these slaves and ex-slaves wanted to learn the language in order to read and understand the holy book.

Almost certainly, Gobineau was a good customer of the French bookshop. He would have been a very special customer not only because he was the official representative of France, but also because he was already a very well-known novelist and the author of a polemical book, the famous (or infamous) Essai sur l’Inegalité des Races Humaines. He probably got most of the latest books printed in France through this shop, and the booksellers had enough confidence in him to talk to him about selling books (especially prohibited books) to slaves. Gobineau received the information from the horse’s mouth and had no reason whatsoever to inflate the number of copies of the Koran that were sold in Rio de Janeiro: 100 copies and all of them in Arabic – two indications that, first, the number of Muslim Africans or descendants of Africans in the capital of the Empire of Brazil was at that time
much greater than the appearances would show, and, second, that they were in some aspects very strict Muslims, as they would not have the holy book written in any other language except that in which God dictated His words to Muhammad.

Perhaps many of the buyers of copies of the Koran were not able to read at all, but wanted to possess the Koran as the repository of God’s word, as an object of prestige, as a source of supernatural power or as a material symbol of faith. According to two keen observers (Nina Rodrigues at the end of the nineteenth century in Salvador, Bahia, and João do Rio in the first years of the twentieth century in Rio de Janeiro), the religious books on a table were the very first things to attract the attention of anybody who visited a Muslim house. The great majority of the mussulmis, mussurumis or malês (as the Muslims were known by the people of the Orishas, by the Umbanda adherents and by the Catholics) could read the Koran or wanted to be able to read it. The grammar books imported by Fauchon and Dupont were bought by those who wanted to learn Arabic in order to have direct access to the suras of the Koran, and especially by the young people who were learning the doctrines and rites of the faith.

João do Rio was a very good reporter but had no respect or liking for the religious practices of the Africans and their descendants in Rio de Janeiro (and as a matter of fact, no respect or liking for any other religion; he was ironical and critical of all of them). This fact gives his writings on Islam in Rio de Janeiro a special touch of truthfulness. We cannot doubt his words when he says that the young people had to study hard in order to become a cleric, or alufá, and that there were people in town able to teach and to examine students on knowledge of the Koran. One of his informants said to him that, after the exams, the approved candidate would be taken in triumph on horseback, followed by the faithful, along the streets of a distant suburb.

João do Rio confirms in relation to the Muslims in Rio what Nina Rodrigues had written about the Muslims in Bahia: that they were almost a closed community. But Nina Rodrigues was wrong when he reacted with incredulity to what the imam of Salvador and several Muslims said to him: that in Rio the mussulmi were also well organized, had a mosque and could even publicly perform some festivities and ceremonies. Later on, he got supplementary information that the mosque to which the blacks had access was maintained by the Arab community. It was this supplementary information (on the public mosque maintained by Arab immigrants) that was wrong. Until the end of the nineteenth century, the number of immigrants from the Ottoman Empire received by Brazil was insignificant: only 3023 from 1846 to 1889, and almost all of them Syrian and Lebanese
Christians escaping from Turkish political and religious persecutions.

Roger Bastide was also incredulous about the existence of a mosque maintained by Africans in Rio de Janeiro and of another in São Paulo. Certainly, there was no public building dedicated to Islam. The machacalis (possibly from the Hausa word masallachi) were probably the houses of the imam or of some alufás. In Rio, the main machacali at the beginning of the twentieth century was in the imam’s house at Barão de São Félix Street. It could not be any other way, as the laws of the Empire of Brazil (especially the Penal Code of 1830) prohibited the rites of any religion except Catholicism in any ‘building which had any exterior form of temple’. It was only in 1870, in response to the request of German immigrants, that Protestant cults were accepted as legal by the State. Until that date, there were no public Protestant churches in Brazil, and no open and public synagogues, although their cults could be tolerated inside closed doors. (For instance, although British subjects were permitted to practice their religion, the only Anglican church in Rio de Janeiro, at Barbonos Street, nowadays Evaristo da Veiga Street, had no sign outside and could not be distinguished from a family house.) So, what the informants of Nina Rodrigues alluded to as being a mosque was probably the imam’s house, where the faithful met on Fridays to pray together. But it was unquestionably a machacali, i.e., a
house of prayer, a genuine mosque in the sense of a space dedicated to religious fervour, similar to the one that existed in Salvador in the days of Nina Rodrigues: the house of the lemano Luis, at 3 Alegria Street.

Gobineau is clear: as the practice of Islam would not be accepted in the Empire of Brazil, the Muslims tried to conceal their real faith, and pretended to be Christians. We can understand that, when asked about their coreligionists, they would answer, in order to avoid persecution, that they were very few, an insignificant minority, no more than six, or seven, or ten. Even after the abolition of slavery and the proclamation of the Republic, they continued to insist that they were small in number, and also continued to be secretive about their faith. And they had a past full of reasons for this attitude.

Research in the police archives of Rio de Janeiro, São Luís, Recife, Salvador and other Brazilian towns will probably give very interesting information about the kind of persecution that people suspected of being Muslim suffered during the Empire. It will also reveal the complete ignorance of the police about Islam. They found the Muslims difficult and irritating to deal with. For them the Muslims were an unsubmissive and dangerous faction, always prone to antagonize the authorities and responsible for many rebellions. Sometimes these repressive actions against the Muslim Africans and Creoles had repercussions in the press, but this happened very rarely, for this kind of action against slaves or ex-slaves was a matter of routine that did not make news. But even in the newspapers of the nineteenth century we can find good examples of how the Muslims were mistrusted and persecuted.

contested his beliefs, he reacted strongly. The correspondent added thatOn 21 September 1853, for instance, the Rio daily Correio Mercantil published an article by its correspondent in Pernambuco, in which he tells the following story. At the beginning of the month, the police had discovered that a group of Africans, under the lead of a Yoruba alufá, a certain Rufino, called in his land Abuncare, was forming a community, ‘a new religious sect’. Several of them were arrested, including Abuncare, with whom was found ‘a book which he said’ – writes incredulously the newspaperman – ‘was the Koran’, and ‘many sheets of paper written in Hebraic’(sic). The police told him that Abuncare, a freedman, was a Muslim, and a very zealous one, and in such a way that when someone Abuncare deserved prison, for he did not work, and ‘exploited’ his coreligionists, who were ‘obliged’ to support him financially. And the newspaperman concludes: because of this adept of Muhammad, Recife spent several days in alarm, for many people believed that a slave rebellion was being prepared by the Muslims. The next week, the press correspondent from Pernambuco informed readers that Abuncare had regained his liberty, as the judicial authorities did not find anything in the religious activities of the alufá that could mean any danger for the public order. The newspaperman expressed indignation, suggesting that Abuncare should be sent back to Africa in order to avoid contamination of other freedmen and slaves by his deleterious religious ideas.

Roger Bastide, like Arthur Ramos before him, had doubts about the Islam of these so-called mussulmis. For Bastide and Ramos, the mussulmis were not real Muslims, but only followers of a kind of Islam mingled with pagan practices, that is, adherents of a form of syncretism, which they had brought from Africa. It is interesting to notice that these authors, who always had a benevolent regard for popular Catholicism in all its forms, were so severe in their judgement of what would be a real or strict Muslim. And it is even more interesting to note that what they present as proof of syncretism are practices regulated or accepted by Islam, such as the making of gri-gris, small leather bags containing verses from the Koran, the salat al-istisqa’ or prayer for rain, the prediction of the future, the belief in jinns, and the writing on wood tablets, or atô (possibly from allo in Hausa), with verses of the Koran that were washed, and the water used for the washing of the tablets was drunk by the faithful.

João do Rio was neither an anthropologist nor a sociologist, and was not obsessed, as so many scholars in Brazil (and in Cuba) with the question of acculturation, counter-acculturation, and syncretism. He wrote about what he saw and what he was told. His Muslims tried, as did those of Manuel Querino and Nina Rodrigues, to fulfil their religious duties with devotion and strictness in a hostile milieu. It is true that after the abolition of slavery and the proclamation of the Republic, the persecution of Muslims ceased, at least in Rio de Janeiro. The police in Rio treated them with more consideration than the Umbanda and Candomblé devotees, whose loud drumming and chants sometimes provoked negative reactions and protests from the neighbours.

In Rio, according to João do Rio, the African Muslims had an imam or lemano (who lived then in the Barão de São Félix Street), cadis or alikali (another Hausa word, alkali), substitute judges (sagabamo) and officials (assivajiu) who directed the collective prayers and ceremonies. They practised circumcision (kola), fasted during Ramadan, and had more than one wife. They were very strict in performing the daily prayers (kissium)
and ritual ablutions, sometimes clothed in abadás, the white tunic, with a red cap (filá) on the head, and at night almost always had the rosary (tessubá) in their hands. He did not say that they killed rams at the Id al- Fitri, but they probably did, as Nina Rodrigues and Manuel Querino noticed in Bahia. And discreetly they did some missionary work, for, as Nina Rodrigues informs us, in Salvador the lemano’s wife was born in Brazil and converted to Islam in Rio de Janeiro, where she lived for some time.

In his report, Gobineau wrote that all these Muslim Africans were Minas, a denomination that in Rio de Janeiro and other parts of Southern Brazil meant anyone who was not a Bantu or anyone who had been embarked on the Coast from Senegal to Cameroon. He also mentioned that many of the manumitted and free Muslim Africans went back to Africa from Salvador, but others chose to go to Rio de Janeiro. Forty years later,
João do Rio confirmed Gobineau’s information: many of the Muslims in Rio de Janeiro came from Bahia. It is possible that they wanted not only to stay away from their old masters but also to escape personal constraints, distrust, and persecution after the 1835 revolt. When they arrived in Rio they found many Minas brought to the town by slave ships directly from the African coast. And they were also joined by those sold by their masters in Bahia and the north-east to Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo during the coffee boom in the southern provinces. This interregional trade began around 1830, increased after 1850 and attained its highest numbers in the 1870s. As a consequence of this forced migration, an area predominantly Bantu, the Province of Rio de Janeiro, saw within a period of five decades a great increase in so-called Minas: not only Yoruba, but also Fon, Hausa, Ga, Gun, Ewe, Bariba, Bornu, Nupe, Gurunsi, Manding, Wolof, Felupe, Fante, and Ashante. Some of them were Muslims.

It seems that even before Abolition, but especially after the end of slavery, these ex-slaves who had arrived in Rio de Janeiro from the northern provinces as bondsmen or as freedmen began to form communities according to their place of origin, not in Africa, but in Brazil. The people from Bahia, the Bahians, mainly Yoruba (or Nago), but also Fon, Hausa, Nupe, Bariba and Bornu, began to get together in the same neighbourhood, around or near the house of a man or woman of special prestige – one of the first arrived who was already socially or economically successful, or an ayalorisha, babalorisha or other religious leader. At the turn of the century, a great number of families from Bahia (and from other northern provinces who were culturally absorbed by the Bahians) lived in an area of Rio de Janeiro called Pequena África (Little Africa), around a very well-known square, Praça 11. In this Little Africa, the Muslims concentrated in a few streets: São Diogo, Barão de São Félix, Hospício, Núncio and América.

Despite the fact that they tried to live in the same streets, the most important thing in these quarters of Rio at that time was not to belong to the people of the Orishas, to be a Muslim, a Catholic, a Yoruba or a Mbundu, but to have come from Salvador, Bahia, to belong to what we may define as a Bahian Diaspora. As a matter of fact, it was around this new identity that a new web of solidarity was woven. It was through Salvador that the
community imported, from Lagos or Ouidah, kola nuts, cowries, palm oil, soap and the blue and white cloth woven in a narrow loom, the pano da Costa so prized in Brazil. What happened in Rio de Janeiro was quite similar to what happened to the Africans who returned to Africa and formed in Accra, Anecho, Ouidah, Porto-Novo, or Lagos the Brazilian quarters and developed a new kind of group identity, that of ‘Brazilians’.

The African Muslims had never been so numerous in Rio as in Salvador, where, according to Nina Rodrigues, one in every three of the old Africans, before the 1835 insurrection, was a Muslim. But at the time of Gobineau, they were in sufficient numbers to buy almost 100 copies of the Koran each year and to make the holy book the bestselling import of Fauchon and Dupont’s bookshop. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, however,
there was no longer a market for new Korans in Rio de Janeiro. When João do Rio wrote his newspaper articles on the religions in the capital of the new Republic, the number of Muslims had considerably diminished. Perhaps part of the information he compiled was already a thing of the past; a recent past, but of the past. He was a contemporary of some Muslims who became legendary figures in the popular history of Rio de Janeiro – such as
Assumano Mina do Brasil, famous both as an alufá and for being a very handsome man, who lived in a two-storey building at 191, Praça 11 – but their numbers had dwindled. The old Muslim community had begun to disappear. Many of their members were sent back to the African coast by the Brazilian authorities; others returned to Africa by their own initiative, not willing to continue to be governed by infidels, or discontented with the restrictions their public cults suffered in Brazil, or unhappy with the mistrust, mixed with a kind of fear and respect, with which they were seen by the other Brazilian blacks. The majority died, some of them in old age, and not before having the disillusion of seeing their sons and grandsons little by little abandoning Islam and discreetly mingling with other religious groups, as had happened in Salvador, where some old Muslims complained to Nina Rodrigues that their descendants were exchanging Islam for the Orisha cults and Catholicism. During World War I, with the end of direct shipping connections between Salvador and Recife, on the western side of the Atlantic, and Lagos, on the eastern, the black Muslims in Brazil entirely lost their contacts with their co-religionists in Africa. Those who stayed in Brazil became more and more isolated, and began to resent this isolation, and the fact that, in order to be accepted by the other blacks, they had to adopt some of the customs of the infidels.

In Rio as in Bahia and other parts of Brazil, the mussulmis despised the religion of the Orishas and their believers, and the Orisha people mocked the religious practices of the Muslims. Although the Muslims as individuals were generally respected by the whole community as serious and virtuous people, they were also feared for their secretiveness. Nevertheless, in Rio they were part of the same diaspora, lived amidst ‘Bahians’ of other religious denominations, and selected their wives and husbands among them. Almost since the beginning, the Muslims mingled and fraternized with the ‘Bahians’ of other religions, and went to their parties, including their dancing parties, although never drinking alcoholic beverages or eating feijoada, the most popular dish in Rio, which consists of beans and pork. Their sons and daughters had to choose between being part of a mistrusted minority or joining the common values of the group where they lived. Some people brought up as Muslims ended by converting to the religion of the Orishas, to Umbanda, to Catholicism, to Evangelicalism or to Spiritism. The case of Mrs. Carmen Teixeira da Conceição was a good example of this. She was born in Salvador, Bahia, in 1877, went to Rio de Janeiro in 1893, and frequented the Muslim cults. At a certain time of her adult age, she became a Christian. But although she died as a devout Catholic (a very devout one indeed, for she was member of five religious associations, and for over 50 years used to attend two Masses every Sunday), in one of her last interviews her eyes filled with tears when she remembered the old Muslim people of Rio de Janeiro.