Three former Jamaican Fundamentalist Christians tell their stories about how they entered Islam and how it has changed their lives. The Enslaved Muslims from West Africa Recent scholarship on the Atlantic slave trade has revealed that the total number of Enslaved Africans brought to the Americas is likely to be more than twenty million. Slyviane A. Diouf, writing on the Muslim slaves in the Americas, conclusively asserts: "Therefore, if counted as a whole, on a religious basis rather on an ethnic one the Muslims were probably more numerous in the Americas than any other group among the arriving Africans". In Jamaica from 1655 to 1807, Philip Curtin in his work on slave census, proposes 423,900 Africans from Muslim dominated areas, representing 56.8 percent of the arrivals. Islam had cut across ethnic lines, social classes and state boundaries in West Africa— Senegal, Gambia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Mali, Benin, Ghana, and Nigeria, Libya Egypt (incorporating Madinka, Fula, Susu, Ashanti, Hausa and other nations) from as early as the tenth and eleventh centuries, i.e. long before the slave trade. Islam in these kingdoms was first diffused by the migration of Muslim merchants, teachers, and agricultural settlers. The Muslims sometimes formed peaceful minorities in non-Muslim societies such as the Ashanti Empire. In cases such as Kano, Katsina, Takrur and Bornu the local chiefs accepted Islam as early as the tenth and eleventh centuries.

• published: 22 Feb 2011
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