Ahmaud Arbery Was A Descendent of Bilali Muhammad of Sapelo Island, Georgia

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Bilali Mohammed was an enslaved West African on a plantation on Sapelo Island, Georgia. According to his descendant, Cornelia Bailey, in her history, God, Dr. Buzzard and The Bolito Man, Bilali was from the area of present-day Sierra Leone. He was a master cultivator of rice, a skill prized by Georgia planters.

William Brown Hodgson was among scholars who met Bilali.[3] Bilali was born in Timbo, Guinea sometime between 1760 and 1779 to a well-educated African Muslim family.[4] He was enslaved as a teenager, taken to the Bahamas and sold to Dr. Bell, where he was worked as a slave for ten years at his Middle Caicos plantation. Bell was a Loyalist colonial refugee from the American Revolutionary War who had been resettled by the Crown at Middle Caicos. He sold Bilali in 1802 to a trader who took the man to Georgia.

Bilali Mohammed was purchased by Thomas Spalding and assigned as his head driver at his plantation on Sapelo Island. Bilali could speak Arabic and had knowledge of the Qur'an. "Due to his literacy and leadership qualities, he would be appointed the manager of his master's plantation, overseeing approximately five hundred slaves".[5] In the War of 1812, Bilali and his fellow Muslims on Sapelo Island helped to defend the United States from a British attack. Upon Bilali's death in 1857, it was discovered that he had written a thirteen-page Arabic manuscript. At first, this was thought to have been his diary, but closer inspection revealed that the manuscript was a transcription of a Muslim legal treatise and part of West Africa's Muslim curriculum.

The first partial translation of the document was undertaken in 1939 by Joseph Greenberg and published in the Journal of Negro History. Since the turn of the 21st century, it has been analyzed by Ronald Judy,[6] Joseph Progler,[7] Allan D. Austin[8] and Muhammed al-Ahari.

 

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Among the new details: the family histories of both Arbery’s killers, which include ancestors who enslaved people and fought for the Confederacy. They also uncovered Arbery’s link to one of the most well-known enslaved people in Georgia, Bilali Mohammed on Sapelo Island. Mohammed was the highly educated author of a manuscript on Islamic belief and rules discovered after his death in 1857.

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The episode is titled "Roots."

SEPTEMBER 16, 2020
Roots | Ahmaud Arbery 4

 

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In 1803, Bilali Belali (Ben Ali) Muhammad and his family arrived in Georgia on Sapelo Island. Bilali Muhammad was a Fula from Timbo Futa-Jallon in present day Guinea-Conakry. By 1806, he became the plantation manager for Thomas Spalding, a prominent Georgian master. Bilali “Ben Ali” was the leader of one of America’s earliest known Muslim communities. While enslaved, Bilali was the community leader and Imam of at least 80 men on Sapelo Island. During the War of 1812, he told his slave master that he had 80 men of the true faith to help defend the land against the British. Bilali was known for regularly wearing his fez, a long coat, praying five times a day facing the east, fasting during the month of Ramadan, and celebrating the two holidays when they came. Bilali was buried with his Qur’an and prayer rug. In 1829 Bilali wrote a thirteen-page book in Arabic called the “Ben Ali Diary,” about some of the laws of Islam and Islamic living. The book is currently housed at the University of Georgia in Athens. Bilali and his wife Phoebe had twelve sons and seven daughters. One of his sons is reported to be the “Aaron” of the author Joel Chandler Harris’ works, Uncle Remus and Br’er Rabbit stories. Bilali daughters’ names were Margaret, Hester, Charlotte, Fatima, Yoruba, Medina, and Bint. All of Bilali daughters but Bint could speak English, French, Fula, Gullah, and Arabic. Bilali was well educated in Islamic law.

1800's

 

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I wonder if Ahmaud knew he truly descended from royalty.

I wonder if his family knew they are descended from Bilali Muhammad before this nightmare happened.

It is such a wonderful legacy to be born into.

If he didn't -- it just makes me so sad.

I pray more of us truly do our family tree -- or start the research process. Our ancestors were everything -- and we should be VERY proud of them!

R.I.P. to this intelligent, talented, handsome young man. Ms. Wanda and Mr. Arbery will continue to stay in my thoughts and prayers.

 

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http://sapelonerr.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/Land-Owership-Paper2.pdf

 

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Nobody belonged to the salt marshes of coastal Georgia more than Ahmaud Arbery. His family’s roots there run more than 200 years deep. A native of those same marshes writes about who Ahmaud was, how well he was loved, and what his community must reckon with in the wake of his murder.

Ahmaud Arbery Holds Us Accountable — THE BITTER SOUTHERNER

During the War of 1812, Ahmaud’s Geechee ancestors from Sapelo fought for the United States, even as we alienated all of the unalienable rights endowed upon them by their Creator and so extolled in our country’s founding documents. After the Civil War, Ahmaud’s ancestors bought their lands here as freedmen and paddled from the islands to the mainland in hand-hewn bateaus once every year to dutifully pay their taxes. Despite relentless attempts to steal their land, beat them down, and drive them out, Geechees like Ahmaud’s ancestors thrived and settled throughout the Golden Isles and the mainland, living in harmony with this delicate estuarine ecosystem — fishing, hunting, clamming, crabbing, oystering, and farming — for more than a century before the first industrialists showed up to poison our waters with chemical plants and long before the first snowbirds arrived to convert our community into a sun-soaked playground for the rich and the retired.

Ahmaud’s birthright to this particular place is strong. His people’s fight to maintain their ownership of this particular place is resolute. The dignity and kindness and richness of culture that they have imprinted on this place is indelible. And while that doesn’t give him any greater right to life and justice than any other human anywhere, it does highlight the depravity of any argument that white men had a right to confront him with guns and end his life simply because he was a black man who stood his ground in their neighborhood, because he didn’t explain and supplicate himself to them.

But nobody belonged to this particular place more than Ahmaud Arbery. ​