The Believers: A Dark History of Islam in Brazil

 

They came across the water, those first Muslims. Not on great ships with billowing sails like the Portuguese who would follow, but on vessels of desperation and faith. And just like most stories that begin with the sea, this one’s drenched in blood.

Folks in Bahia—that’s where our tale begins and nearly ends—they’ll tell you the Muslims have been there since the 1300s. Yeah, that’s right. Before Columbus ever dreamed of his voyage, before the Mayflower was even a sapling in some English forest. I read about it in Omri Elmaleh’s writings in Latin American History. He claims the Malian Emperor, Mansa Abubakari II, might’ve washed up on Brazil’s northeastern shores, bringing Allah with him across the Atlantic.

But that’s just the prologue, friend. The real story—the one that’ll keep you up at night—that didn’t start until the 1600s.

See, what they don’t teach you in school is that slavery wasn’t just about bodies. It was about souls too. And when those Portuguese slavers dragged ten to fifteen million Africans across the Middle Passage, they didn’t just steal their freedom. They tried to steal their God.

Between fifteen and twenty percent of those poor bastards were Muslims. Do the math—that’s millions of believers, torn from their homes, their mosques, their prayers. And Brazil? Brazil was the hungry maw that swallowed most of them whole. Five million enslaved souls, forty percent of all Africans taken. The numbers are enough to make you sick, aren’t they? But numbers don’t scream in the night or bleed under the lash.

They called the Muslims “Malê,” from the Yorubá word Imale. The Yorubá people came mostly from what we now call Nigeria. Then there were the Haussá, the Mandinka—all of them with their own traditions, their own ways of praying to Allah. All of them carried across the ocean like cargo, dumped into the nightmare of Brazilian slavery.

Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery—1888, if you can believe it. Almost three hundred years of hell on earth, where plantation owners would watch a man or woman work themselves to death and shrug, figuring they’d get maybe a year’s labor before buying a replacement.

“The slaves go to work at five in the morning and spend the entire day exposed to sunlight and rain, vulnerable to various fevers caused by excessive exposure to the sun,” wrote David Gomes Jardim back in 1847. Reading those words makes your skin crawl, doesn’t it? Makes you wonder what kind of monsters we really are.

But here’s the thing about faith—it’s like a cockroach. You can’t stamp it out. You can’t drown it. You can’t starve it. These Muslims, they kept their beliefs alive in secret. They built hidden madrasas, whispered their prayers when no one was listening. They fasted during Ramadan, taught their children the Qur’an by moonlight.

You ever try to hold onto something when the whole world is trying to rip it from your hands? That’s what these people did. They carried amulets with verses from the Qur’an stitched inside. They wore the abadá when they could get away with it. They rented rooms just to pray in private.

And in Bahia, something remarkable happened. They didn’t just survive—they built a community. Under the noses of their oppressors, they created a network of believers. The ganho system—that’s what the Portuguese called it—let slaves work in towns and give a cut to their masters. It was meant to squeeze more profit from human suffering, but it created cracks in the walls of bondage. Through those cracks, ideas and prayers and plans could flow.

By 1835, the pressure had built to a breaking point. In November of ‘34, the Malê celebrated Isra and Mi’raj openly. It was a mistake. The authorities shut them down hard, then desecrated their mosques days later. You see, Brazil’s Imperial Constitution made Catholicism the only religion allowed to worship in public. The Muslims were supposed to keep their Allah locked away, hidden like a dirty secret.

But here’s where it gets interesting, where the story turns dark as pitch. The Malê weren’t just praying anymore. They were planning.

Led by people like Ahuna, a Nagô slave in Salvador, they brought together different African groups—Yorubá, Haussá, Fulani, Aio Quija. They chose the end of Ramadan for their uprising, a time they called the Night of Decree. A holy night, a night when God might grant them victory.

“The decision to rebel on January 25, 1835, was likely made in November 1834,” wrote historian João José Reis. “It was a calm and calculated political decision, designed to control heightened emotions caused by the crisis.”

But the best-laid plans of mice and men—you know how that goes. Sabina da Cruz, a freed Nagô woman, betrayed them. So did another freed slave named Guilhermina. The authorities got wind of the rebellion and prepared.

Even so, when the night came, six hundred rebels took to the streets. Blood flowed. Men died. The rebels split up, moving through Salvador like shadows with purpose. They tried to free Pacífico Licutan—they called him Bilal—from prison. They tried to seize weapons from a military post.

They regrouped at Mercês Convent, then pushed toward Cabrioto, hoping to join forces with plantation slaves. But at Água de Meninos, the cavalry caught up with them. Seventy-three rebels died that night. Five hundred were captured.

The punishment was swift and terrible. Executions. Floggings. Deportations. Pacífico Licutan, poor bastard, was sentenced to 1,200 lashes. Fifty a day until the job was done. According to Margarita Rosario, that’s how he died—whipped to death for daring to believe in freedom.

After the rebellion, the authorities cracked down hard on anything that smelled like Islam. Arabic writing became contraband. African gatherings became suspect. The Malê community in Bahia withered under the boot of oppression.

But here’s the thing about faith—it’s like water. It finds the cracks. It seeps through. It waits. Islam didn’t disappear from Brazil. It went underground, it waited, and when Middle Eastern immigrants arrived years later, the old faith and the new immigrants found each other in the dark.

That’s how belief survives. Not in grand cathedrals or spectacular miracles, but in whispers and secrets and blood. In the courage of people who refuse to surrender their souls, even when their bodies are in chains.

And sometimes, when the night is quiet and the moon hangs low over Salvador, you might hear the echo of those ancient prayers, carried on the Atlantic wind. The same wind that brought them here, all those centuries ago. The same wind that will carry their story long after you and I are dust.

Because some things are stronger than chains. Some things can’t be killed.

Not even by men who think they’re gods.