In 1865 (1282h.), an Ottoman Navy ship called al-Burṣa set sail from Istanbul, en route to Basra. To reach their destination, the Ottoman crew planned to circumnavigate the horn of Africa (since the Suez Canal would not be inaugurated for another four years). However, as the ship reached the Southern Atlantic, it encountered a series of hurricanes that blew it westward until it finally found safe harbor in Rio de Janeiro, capital of the Empire of Brazil. Upon the Ottomans’ arrival in the Brazilian port, curious onlookers flocked to the ship to marvel at these unexpected guests.
Among the Ottoman crew was a man named ʿAbd al-Raḥmán al-Baghdādī, who served as the expedition’s imam. As he descended from the ship in his scholarly turban and robes, a Black man among the crowd of onlookers approached him. Much to al-Baghdadi’s surprise, the man greeted him in Arabic with an al-salāmu ʿalaykum, the typical greeting used among fellow Muslims. Al-Baghdadi, however, ignored the greeting. Surely, he thought, this Black man in European garb had learned the phrase in order to mock him. After all, this was the New World, which his geography books told him was inhabited by European-descended Christians and Indigenous tribes, but certainly no Muslims. It wasn’t until later that day, when he rose to perform the afternoon prayer and the man came to pray alongside him, that al-Baghdadi realized his error: the man was a Muslim, one of thousands in Brazil among the large West African community who were forcibly brought to the Americas in the transatlantic slave trade.
There are at least two reasons why this is a striking encounter. From al-Baghdadi’s point of view, finding a practicing Muslim in the Americas speaking Arabic was a complete surprise. But it is striking as well for reasons unique to the history of Brazil. The man who greeted al-Baghdadi in Arabic belonged to the community of West African Muslims known in Brazil as the Malê. Whether enslaved or free, the Malê were forced to hide their Muslim faith in Brazil to avoid persecution from the Catholic imperial authorities. Decades earlier, enslaved and free Black Muslims had led a series of revolts against the racist order of the Brazilian Empire. The largest and most violently suppressed revolt took place in the northern state of Bahia in 1835. Since then, simply being publicly perceived as a Muslim was enough to get someone beaten, imprisoned, or even killed.[1] We can thus infer that the Black Brazilian man who greeted al-Baghdadi in Arabic did so under threat of violent punishment, since the phrase would have identified him as a Muslim.
Persecuted and largely disconnected from Muslim networks beyond Brazil, the Malê were overjoyed by the arrival of a Muslim scholar from Islamic lands. At the request of the Malê, al-Baghdadi stayed in Brazil for three years, traveling between different Muslim communities in Rio de Janeiro, Pernambuco, and Bahia. During his time there, he covertly provided religious education in the pillars of Islam, Qur’anic recitation, and Arabic literacy. After three years traveling and teaching throughout Brazil, al-Baghdadi returned to Istanbul, with the financial assistance of Bahia’s Muslim community. Before departing, he promised the Muslims that he would return with official Ottoman support. Upon his return to Istanbul in 1869, he penned an account in Arabic about his Brazilian sojourn, which he called Musaliyyat al-gharīb bi kul amr ‘ajīb, or, “The Delight of the Foreigner in All Matters of Wonder.”
Written in the style of a classical Arabic riḥla, or travelogue, al-Baghdadi’s account was soon translated into Turkish and circulated widely to Ottoman readers. In recent years, this riḥla has seen renewed interest, and has appeared in several languages in the past couple of decades. A trilingual edition in Arabic, Portuguese, and Spanish was published in 2007 as the inaugural publication of the Biblioteca e Centro de Pesquisa América do Sul-Páises Árabes (the South America-Arab Countries Library and Research Center), BibliASPA for short. And a quadrilingual edition in Arabic, Turkish, Portuguese, and Spanish was published in 2017 by the Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs. These contemporary editions, with multiple translations bound together in a single volume, suggest a project of transregional collaboration between the Middle East and Latin America and, specifically, the bond of a Latin American Muslim diaspora with Muslim communities in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Indeed, through these editions, al-Baghdadi has been revived as a symbol of what we might call South-South solidarity, hailed for connecting an isolated Muslim community with the umma, or global community of Muslims.[2] Other scholars, by contrast, are less sanguine about what al-Baghdadi represents, characterizing his work as the ramblings of a bigoted Arabocentric Muslim traveler.[3] I argue, however, that both of these assessments are too quick to suppress one side or the other of al-Baghdadi’s contradictory relation to the Malê. They gloss over either al-Baghdadi’s advocacy on behalf of the Muslims of Brazil, or the undercurrent of anxiety over their black African origins and non-native Arabic speech. Rather than defining al-Baghdadi’s travelogue as an unequivocal emblem either of solidarity or bigotry, I read it as an articulation of an “ambivalent brotherhood:” on the one hand, al-Baghdadi expresses a sense of fraternity with the Malê as brothers of a shared faith; on the other hand, he casts them as his racial and linguistic others.
Ambivalent brotherhood
The dynamic of ambivalent brotherhood emerges in the initial encounter between al-Baghdadi and the Malê man who greets him, with which this essay opens. The Malê man extends a greeting in Arabic, al-Baghdadi’s native language and the sacred language of Islam. Yet, although al-Baghdadi understands the words, he views this Arabic phrase as out of place in the Black Brazilian man’s mouth. Only when they wash and pray in unison does al-Baghdadi come to understand, through this shared practice, that they are fellow Muslims. Once he realizes this, he is eager to help them, acquiring permission from the ship’s commander to stay behind in Brazil in order to teach this isolated Muslim diaspora. Nonetheless, even after he begins to see them as brothers of a shared faith, he continues to inscribe their difference along vernacular lines. In other words, their lack of a common mother tongue comes to represent, for al-Baghdadi, their ultimate difference. Throughout his narrative, he treats Arabic as misused and misplaced among the African-descended Muslims of Brazil.
The transatlantic encounter between al-Baghdadi and the Malê is informed by a universalizing ideal, in which all Muslims belong to a single community, regardless of their birthplace, genealogy, or mother tongue; yet their relation as fellow Muslims is also inflected by an asymmetry between the imam, an Arabophone religious scholar who was born and raised in Damascus and employed by the Ottoman Navy in Istanbul; and the non-Arabic-speaking Malê, who live as a persecuted racial and religious minority in a Catholic empire. Given this, there are at least three salient lenses through which the relation between al-Baghdadi and the Malê can be understood: first, in terms of a translingual encounter, in which they share Arabic as their scriptural language of worship, but not as their vernacular (or spoken) language of communication; second, as a transimperial encounter between minoritized Ottoman and Brazilian subjects (many of whom were born in the Sultanate of Sokoto in West Africa); and third, in terms of classical Islamic law, as a center-periphery encounter between an imam from the heart of Dar al-Islam, or Islamic lands, and Muslim diasporic subjects, who reside in non-Islamic lands, Dar al-Ḥarb, where they cannot freely practice their faith.[4]
For the purposes of this essay, I will focus primarily on the first dynamic—their ambivalent brotherhood as understood through language—though the transimperial context and center-peripheral relation figure into the issue of language as well. Their ambivalent brotherhood is exemplified through dynamics of language portrayed in the travelogue, in which Arabic functions as a medium of cohesion between al-Baghdadi and the Malê, while also becoming a site of friction onto which al-Baghdadi projects the Malê’s otherness. The dual function of Arabic in this transimperial encounter reveals cultural dynamics that exceed the binary constructions—East/West, domination/resistance, solidarity/antagonism—that often structure postcolonial analyses.
Arabic as a medium of cohesion and site of friction
As the language of Islamic scripture and worship, Arabic became a cohesive medium, a discursive glue for al-Baghdadi and the Malê, despite their lack of a common vernacular or an alternative common tongue. In one of the more striking scenes of his travelogue, Al-Baghdadi’s riḥla registers the role of Arabic as a cohesive force shared by the imam and his fellow Muslims in Brazil. He describes how, after several months in Brazil, he attended the Good Friday mass along with several other Muslims:
I went with a group of Muslims, all of us dressed in European dress. We entered the church and saw the emperor and the patriarch standing at the right side of the idol decorated with silver and gold. They worshipped the idol by kneeling before it, raising their hands in supplication. They adored the statue. When I saw them doing this I got goosebumps and whispered to my companions, “Say: God is unique,” and so forth, in their hearts, over and over.[5]
وذهب مع جملة من المسلمين كل منا عليه لباس الإفرنج فدخلنا الى الكنيسة فرأينا الامبراطور والبترك وقوفا
على يمين ذلك الصنم الذي هو بالفضة والذهب معمل ثم أشاروا له بالسجود على ركبهم باركين رافعين أيديهم
كالمسجيرين واظهروا هيئة العبودية لتلك الصورة الرسمية فلما راى هذا الداعى فعالهم اقشعر مني الجسد وقلت لرفقائى قولوا قل هو الله احد الخ وذلك سرا مرة بمرة
The verse he instructs them to recite is from a chapter of the Qur’an, sūrat al-ikhlāṣ, which declares: “God is unique, supreme, neither begetting nor begotten, and without peer.” This chapter, which expresses God’s unity and singularity, articulates one of the fundamental differences between Islam and Christianity. Recited in a church on the mass commemorating the crucifixion, their collective prayer stands as a pointed yet quiet rebellion against the dominant religion. The scene provides a rich illustration of what it meant to practice Islam in nineteenth century Brazil: forced to dissimulate, they dressed as Christians and participated in the public rituals of Catholicism. However, they maintained the tenets of their own faith, reinforced by a community of Muslims around them. In the church, Al-Baghdadi stands shoulder to shoulder with the Malê, enduring homesickness and possible persecution in order to remain with them. In their whispered rebellion, Arabic as their shared language of worship becomes a cohesive, sacred, and subversive medium.
Another chapter of the riḥla, however, reveals how Arabic also becomes a site of friction onto which al-Baghdadi projects the Malê’s difference. Throughout his travelogue, al-Baghdadi critiques the Muslims’ accented Arabic, deprecating them as non-native speakers, and rebukes their use of Arabic for talismans in ways that complicate Arabic’s role as a medium of solidarity between the Arab traveler and his non-Arab others. In other words, the very thing that unites them becomes a source of friction.
In a chapter about their Qur’anic knowledge, Al-Baghdadi writes with dismay about their accented speech in Arabic. Having grown accustomed to producing Portuguese sounds, their tongues are “heavy” (thaqīl), and they struggle to produce several of the Arabic letters. However, it is not only the Malê’s weak memorization and poor pronunciation that perturbs the imam. Despite the community’s minimal literacy, he writes that “they make a show of valuing the Eternal Speech, putting it in boxes for blessings (baraka) rather than for learning (taʿlīm).”[6] (يتغالون بأثمان الكلام القديم يضعوه في الصناديق بركةً ولا للتعليم)
It is a somewhat opaque statement upon first reading. His reference to “Eternal Speech” (al-kalām al-qaḍīm) refers, presumably, to the Qur’an, understood as the eternal and infallible word of God. In al-Baghdadi’s eyes, they misuse the Qur’an by placing it in “boxes for baraka instead of for learning.” Al-Baghdadi says no more on the matter, and does not clarify what these boxes are. He may be describing storage boxes, where the Malê conceal their Arabic texts from the prying eyes of suspicious authorities. However, given that he says they place them in boxes for baraka, he is likely referring to a talisman of sorts, in which the sacred script is placed in a small box or amulet in order to provide protection to its wearer.
Such protective talismans were commonly used by the Malê in Brazil, a practice they shared with the West African communities they were born into, as well as Muslims throughout the world.[7] Despite the importance of protective talismans among the Malê and many other Muslim communities worldwide, al-Baghdadi sees the Malê as having misconstrued the value of the Qur’an. As al-Baghdadi sees it, the Malê make a show of valuing it by treating it as a commodity to be bought and sold at high prices and enclosed in amulets. In this regard, al-Baghdadi’s reference to eternal speech seems pointed: in his view, they have taken language that is meant to be communicative and stripped it of its discursive value. With limited Arabic literacy, he implies, they cannot learn from its message. Instead, they have turned it into a material object of symbolic, and possibly even magical power.
Al-Baghdadi sees their talismanic uses or, in his eyes, their misuses of Qur’anic texts as a result of their isolation in Brazil and their alienation from Islam. For the Malê, however, these practices are not a matter of ignorance, nor the result of their alienation from Islamic realms. Rather, they are practices shared by millions of Muslims in West Africa and throughout the world, practices which they had kept alive and adapted to their new environment.[8] What this line ends up illustrating, then, is a rift over divergent understandings of what constitutes proper treatment of Islamic scripture. The language of the Qur’an, while a shared language that unites Muslims across vernacular difference, thus also becomes a source of friction in al-Baghdadi’s travelogue, and a site onto which he projects the Malê’s difference.
As al-Baghdadi’s criticism of the amulets illustrates, al-Baghdadi equates the Malê’s disconnection from Arabic with their divergence from Islam. Throughout the text, al-Baghdadi criticizes what he sees as aberrant religious practices and tries to discourage them, usually to little effect. He writes,
They are totally occupied with geomancy and natural magic. They know some Syriac words and tongue clacking. Each leader uses them to attract members to his group. […] I swear these are sciences without benefit. I told them this several times and showed them that it is illicit to deal with these lies. […] They showed their obedience, but I suspect that it was just to please me.[9]
لهم التفات تام لفني علم الرمل والسيميا ويحفظون بعض كلمات سريانية وشقشقات لسانية وكل رئيس بها جذب قلوب عشيرته ... ولعمري انها علوم ليس لها نفع أصلا وكم اخبرتهم بذلك وعرفتهم حرمة تعاطي الاوافك وبالغت في النهي عن ذلك فاظهروا تركها والظاهر لاجل ارضائي فقط وغير ممكن ازالت هذا النمط
From this line, we can imagine a polite, hospitable community who want to make their eccentric guest feel welcomed and respected, but who by no means follow all of his dicta. Rather, al-Baghdadi’s pupils select what they want to learn – in particular, how to pray properly and recite the Qur’an – while holding fast to the aspects of their own tradition that are meaningful to them, regardless of al-Baghdadi’s opinions.
Yet, his reference to their “Syriac words and tongue clacking” is telling. His reference to “Syriac words” probably refers, in reality, to Wolof, Hausa, or one of the other languages spoken by the Malê. Just as many languages have their go-to foreign language to denote incomprehensible speech (as the saying in English goes, “it’s all Greek to me”), Al-Baghdadi’s reference for incomprehensibility is Syriac, a minority language spoken in Syria and Iraq and the liturgical language of Syriac Christianity. He thus equates the Malê, in his assessment of their divergent practices, with a religious other. By equating the Malê’s vernacular languages with natural magic and geomancy, both of which al-Baghdadi considers incompatible with his own understanding of Islam, he casts the Malê’s vernacular languages as being outside of Islamic orthodoxy. It is once again along a linguistic faultline that al-Baghdadi inscribes the Malê’s difference.
Diasporic Muslims and Strategic Ambivalence: Reading al-Baghdadi in the riḥla tradition
Al-Baghdadi’s account of his years in Brazil is written in the tradition of the Arabic riḥla—a word meaning both “travel” and “travelogue” closely associated with the Islamic notion of al-riḥla fi ṭalab al-ʿilm (travel in search of knowledge). The Arabic tradition of riḥla was conceived as a devotional act (as al-Baghdadi puts it, he set off on his journey to “observe and contemplate the world in order to strengthen my certainty, through observation, in the greatness of the All Powerful”). However, the genre also came to be associated with the strange and the wonderous—al-gharāʾib and al-ʿajāʾib—which the traveling writer would record for the amazement of his readers back home.
In is travelogue’s title, Musalliyat al-gharīb bi kul amr ʿajīb, al-Baghdadi explicitly inserts himself within the Arabic literary tradition of riḥla (the terms gharīb andʿajīb in his title being the singular forms of gharāʾib and ʿajāʾib). By titling his work as he did, al-Baghdadi evokes the genre’s key terms, as well as one of its most famous practitioners, Ibn Battuta, the 14th-century traveler who recounted his travels through Asia and Africa in a book called Tuḥfat an-Nuzzār fi Gharāʾib al-Amsār wa ʿAjāʾib al-Asfār (A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders [gharā’ib] of Cities and the Marvels [al-ʿajā’ib] of Traveling). Ibn Battuta’s account includes such marvels as giants, giant snakes, and a giant footprint made by Adam, the first man to walk the earth. The established generic expectations that al-Baghdadi inherited were that a riḥla would include descriptions of people, places, and customs utterly strange and surprising to the traveler’s audience back home. To write a credible riḥla, we might conclude, one had to include incredible things. This understanding of the genre may explain al-Baghdadi’s inclusion of some of the more fanciful details, including a description of Indigenous Brazilians’ huge feet: when it rained, he writes, they would stand on their heads and use their wide feet as umbrellas (a trope he most likely borrowed from European literature, since similar claims appear in various French and Latin natural histories, including Pliney the Elder’s.)[10]
However, al-Baghdadi also distances himself from generic expectations by reversing the typical relation between the traveler and the strange and wondrous things. Whereas in Ibn Battuta’s formulation, the writer is the familiar observer who records the strange and wondrous people, places, and things he encounters, in al-Baghdadi’s title, he is the stranger: in the initial phrase, Musalliyat al-gharīb, “gharīb” refers not to the wonders observed, but to the stranger observing the world’s wonders. He thus plays with the terms of Ibn Battuta’s travelogue in order to highlight his own sense of alienation, even within the unexpected fraternity he found among the Malê.
Part of al-Baghdadi’s alienation, it seems, stems not simply from his displacement from his homeland and compatriots. More acutely, he expresses his discomfort with the unfamiliar—and in his mind, aberrant—iteration of his own faith that he finds in Brazil. Throughout the text, al-Baghdadi is ambivalent as to whether the Malê are true Muslims at all. He refers to them throughout the text as muslimūn, yet he also tells his commander that “from the beginning of Islam until today, no Muslims have entered these lands. We are the first to arrive and it is our duty to reform this group (ṭā’ifa).” [11] He thus implies that “this group” is not, somehow, properly Muslim. Further, his designation of the Malê as a ṭā’ifa, a word often used to describe a confessional sect, implies their distinction from a unified global community of Muslims.
There are various ways to interpret the source of this ambivalence: as a tension between divergent forms of religious interpretation and practice; as the result of racial prejudice; or as a perception of the Malê’s peripheral location vis-à-vis Islamic realms. (Al-Baghdadi himself attributes the Malê’s “unorthodox” practices to their diasporic condition in a Catholic Empire). Without dismissing these dynamics, I would like to suggest that al-Baghdadi’s ambivalence is, at least in part, strategic, and can be read within the aims of his riḥla. A recent article by Ali Kulez speculates about al-Baghdadi’s authorial motivations, suggesting that al-Baghdadi sought to exonerate himself from charges of treason for deserting his post with the Ottoman Navy in order to stay in Brazil.[12] While Kulez makes a convincing case for how this concern plays into the travelogue’s dynamics, I contend that the text is not entirely self-serving. Rather, the travelogue serves to support his petition for Ottoman sponsorship of his ongoing involvement with the Malê. After all, his travelogue records his promise to the Bahia Muslim community that he will return to them once he has secured aid from his sultan.
If al-Baghdadi did in fact petition the Ottoman government for sponsorship of his mission in Brazil, it appears he was unsuccessful. Besides his travelogue, few traces of the imam remain. However, a passing mention of one “Abdurrahmân Efendi” appears in an article about Syrian emigration to America in a 1907 issue of Revue du monde musulman, which reports that the imam returned to Constantinople to petition, without success, the Ottoman government to extend aid to the Muslims of South America. Shortly thereafter, the article reports, he returned on his own to Brazil, where he died, “without having had the satisfaction of being able to spread religious instruction there.”[13] The suggestion that al-Baghdadi did in fact return to Brazil deserves further research. However, though the historical evidence is sparse, the travelogue itself suggests its own potential for instrumentalization in garnering official Ottoman support for the Muslims of Brazil.
If we understand al-Baghdadi’s promise to the Malê to be sincere, the text itself seems written to function as a key piece of his petition. Al-Baghdadi makes his case, however, not in the form of a prescriptive political or religious treatise expressly directed at the Sublime Porte. Rather, he employs the descriptive mode of the riḥla. Though not an expressly argumentative genre, riḥla narratives are often concerned with the question of what it means to be a Muslim and to practice Islam. As Paulo Farah puts it, the genre constitutes a tradition of texts that “reflect the contours – complex, permeable, and in constant movement – of belonging and community within and beyond Dar al-Islam.”[14] Riḥla as a genre thus engages with debates between orthodoxy and innovation, and the boundaries of inclusion within a global Muslim community. Presented in a descriptive rather than prescriptive mode, the riḥla allowed al-Baghdadi a subtle form of argumentative power to petition for Ottoman aid of the Malê—an argument he was in no position to make, given his own precarity following his abandonment of his post as the Ottoman Navy’s official imam in order to stay with the Malê in Brazil.
Rather than staging his arguments as his own opinions directed towards Ottoman authorities, he uses his narrative to place key debates in the mouths of various interlocutors he met in his travels. Most significant, perhaps, is an early exchange he had with the Muslims who request that he stay and teach them. Along with their request, he reports that the men anticipated his objection by saying,
If you tell us to emigrate to Islamic lands to learn to pray and fast, we will reply that we are bound within certain conditions. If one of us migrates, he must leave all his worldly possessions to the state, and they will give him nothing in return.[15]
وان قلتم لنا هاجروا الى بلاد الإسلام وتعلموا الصلاة والصيام نقول ان علينا من الشروط من كل امر منوط ان من هاجر منا بنفسه يخرج من حطام الدنيا وما خوله لنفسه ويتركه للدولة خالصا ولا يكون في إعطائه حائصا
While in his account, it is the Malê who anticipate al-Baghdadi’s reply, his inclusion of it early in the text anticipates his readers’ response. The travelogue seems to insist that it is his and his compatriots’ duty to extend support across the Atlantic, rather than placing the onus on the Muslims to migrate from Dar al-Ḥarb (non-Islamic lands) to Dar al-Islam. Many religious scholars agreed that it was obligatory for Muslims under non-Muslim rule to migrate to Islamic lands, at least under certain conditions.[16] Given this, the text could be understood not only as a bid for Ottoman aid, but as a defense of the Malê remaining in the Catholic empire of Brazil. Al-Baghdadi is thus attuned to the Malê’s diasporic condition—distanced from, yet still connected to not only their ancestral homeland but Dar al-Islam: a “homeland” tied not to a specific territory of origin, but understood as any space in which one can freely practice one’s faith in the presence of coreligionists.[17]
Yet, while his travelogue defends the Malê’s right to remain in their diasporic home, he also emphasizes the alienation inherent in the diasporic condition, and the challenges of practicing one’s faith in an inhospitable environment. Describing the condition of Islam in Brazil, al-Baghdadi writes, “Given what I saw of […] the alienation/strangeness (ghurba) of this religion, I was pulled into a crisis of destiny and fate.”[18] The word ghurba, which shares a root with gharīb (strange, or a stranger), expresses the condition of a foreigner, and the state of being distant from one’s homeland. Al-Baghdadi uses the word ghurba here to describe not only the far-flung location of the Malê, but the condition of Islam itself in Brazil. His use of ghurba here denotes not only this Muslim community’s physical displacement from Dar al-Islam, but his perception of their alienation from Islamic practices, or perhaps even the morphing of Islam in Brazil such that the religion itself has become strange. The simultaneous naming of the Malê as Muslims and registering the “strangeness of [their] religion” enacts the ambivalent movement of al-Baghdadi’s text, at once incorporating the Malê into and excluding them from his own definition of the umma.
This ambivalent movement of inclusion and exclusion has been read by other scholars as evidence of al-Baghdadi’s racially inflected views of the West African Muslim diaspora. Without discounting the way that al-Baghdadi’s perceptions were shaped by biases against black Africans that circulated in his Ottoman milieu, we might also read such statements as a strategic portrayal aimed at his intended readers in the Ottoman court to justify the need for their support. Through a strategically ambivalent portrayal of the Malê, his account seeks a fine balance between casting the Malê as a pious, devout community deserving of Ottoman support, while also emphasizing their ignorance, thus justifying the need for the imam’s ongoing intervention. Granted, the fact that he saw the need for this ongoing intervention at all can be seen as a racially inflected “civilizing mission.”[19] Yet to reduce al-Baghdadi’s role in Brazil entirely to that would dismiss the agency of those within the Malê community who sought greater access to religious education and transregional ties to Muslim networks through this itinerant imam.
Tropes of egalitarianism and difference
Al-Baghdadi bookends his travelogue with an expression of unity in diversity, nested within poems extolling the virtues of the Ottoman Sultan Abdulaziz—another feature typical of the riḥla genre. In his opening and closing praise poems, he hails the Sultan’s empire as a locus of conviviality between al-‘arab and al-‘ajam, or Arabs and non-Arabs. Historically, these dialectic terms often connoted Arab superiority over their non-Arab counterparts. Here, however, al-Baghdadi employs them in the tradition of an Islamic universalism that recognizes parity between Arabs and their “Others” or, more broadly, parity across racial or ethnic difference. This Islamic ideal of community across difference was articulated in the Prophet Muhammad’s Farewell Sermon, in which he said: “Every Muslim is the brother of another Muslim [. . .]. An Arab has no superiority over a non-Arab (nor a non-Arab any superiority over an Arab), except in piety and devotion” (ليس لعربي فضل على عَجمي إلا بالتقوى).[20]
The term ʿajami, which I have glossed here as “non-Arab,” has been used by Arabs since pre-Islamic times to refer to non-Arabic-speaking foreigners, often pejoratively. It derives from the word ʿujma, meaning “confused and incomprehensible speech.” Parallel to the Greek word barbaros (whence the term “barbarian”) ʿajami denotes a slippage from linguistic difference to civilizational inferiority. However, since the advent of Islam, ʿajami has also been used to refer to ethnically non-Arab communities of believers, as it is used in the Prophet’s Farewell Sermon. Given this, the Arabic term ʿajami “speak[s] to the historical tension between religious belonging and vernacular difference in a pan-Islamic, Arabic (or arabophone) context,” as Annette Damayanti Lienau writes.[21]
The ʿarab/ʿajam dialectic provides a key to understanding al-Baghdadi’s position vis-à-vis both the Ottoman Sultan, to whom the travelogue is addressed, and the Malê, who comprise the travelogue’s central subjects. They illuminate, on the one hand, al-Baghdadi’s subordinate position in Istanbul as a supplicant to an ethnically non-Arab (Turkic-Circassian) ruler; and, on the other, his ambivalent solidarity with the non-Arab Malê community in both religious and linguistic terms. In al-Baghdadi’s Ottoman context, he belonged, as an Arab Ottoman subject, to an ethnolinguistic group that occupied a subordinate position relative to the ruling Turkic elite. In the ethnically stratified Ottoman Empire, then, to evoke hadith traditions of egalitarianism between al-ʿarab and al-ʿajam was to seek to raise the Arab author’s position to be on equal footing with his non-Arab (ʿajam) superiors. It is from this position of subordination that al-Baghdadi presents himself as a supplicant for interethnic parity from his Ottoman superiors, evoking “an imagined diverse and inclusive Ottoman state.”[22]
While, on the one hand, ʿajam can refer to the Empire’s Turkic elite, the designation can also encompass the non-Arabophone West African Malê.[23] If we read al-Baghdadi’s travelogue as a document intended to garner Ottoman support for the Malê, his employment of the ʿarab/ʿajam trope in his opening and closing panagyrics can thus be read as a bid to incorporate the Malê into a multilingual and multiethnic Ottoman-centric Muslim community. Yet, while al-Baghdadi advocates on behalf of the Malê as fellow Muslims, he casts them as unruly subjects whose racial difference and non-native Arabic speech justify a perceived need for religious reform.
Reading al-Baghdadi’s encounter with the Malê through anʿarab/ʿajam dialectic illuminates the contradictory dynamic of identification and difference at play in the travelogue. When Western hegemony is taken as the only axis of power or lens of analysis, as is often the case in postcolonial studies, it is easy to place al-Baghdadi as fellow victims of and rebels against a hegemonic white, Christian West. However, as Lienau argues, the ʿarab/ʿajam dialectic offers a corrective to the typical postcolonial studies lens. It provides “an alternative to the often binary (colonial/postcolonial) constructions used in nationally isolated studies, to reveal a cultural dynamic not fully explained by a single imperial or colonial legacy.”[24] It allows for a consideration not only of colonial dynamics, but also of how vernacular communities developed “within and against other lineages, including, in Africa, Arabic as a scriptural, religious medium.”[25] The ʿarab/ʿajam framework can be productively extended to encounters like al-Baghdadi’s with the Malê that take place within a Euro-American imperial context, but are structured by other imperial, linguistic, ethnic, and religious dynamics, complexes and legacies that fall outside of that primary context. The term ʿajami speaks to al-Baghdadi’s treatment of the Malê as linguistic and racial others. Yet, crucially, it also implies the proximity of a shared faith: an ʿajami identity arising not only from non-Arabness, but precisely out of intimate contact with and appropriation of the Arabic language as a sacred medium. (Indeed, “ajami” has come to refer to the many languages which, through contact with Islam, adopted the Arabic script, including Spanish [aljamiado], Persian, Yoruba, several Slavic languages, Malay, Swahili, Hebrew, Wolof, and Turkish.)
In al-Baghdadi’s travelogue, the ʿarab/ʿajam dialectic appears as a trope of interethnic parity through its depiction of Islam as a unifying force, and its depiction of Arabic as a principle medium of faith shared by Arabs and non-Arabs alike. Yet, alongside this universalizing impulse, the text also constantly reinscribes difference along an ʿarab/ʿajam fault line. It insists on the accented ʿajami otherness of the Malê through descriptions of their unwieldy and improper treatment of Arabic, their “Syriac words and tongue clacking,” and by casting their spiritual practices as incomprehensible, gharīb, and beyond the bounds of Islam. While this ambivalence may be, in part, strategic, serving to justify the need for further Ottoman support of an isolated Muslim community, it also belies an authorial anxiety between identification and difference, between a horizontal brotherhood and a hierarchical, imperialistic bid for control over a “barbarous” other. This, in short, is the dynamic I have termed “ambivalent brotherhood.”
The Afterlife of al-Baghdadi’s riḥla
While Al-Baghdadi’s mission to gain Ottoman sponsorship for the Malê was ultimately unsuccessful, his travelogue shifted Ottoman perceptions about the “New World.” Like his precursors Ibn Battuta, Ibn Fadlan, and other earlier practitioners of the riḥla tradition, al-Baghdadi’s travels contributed to new understandings of his own community’s conceptions of “the extension and nature of the umma.”[26] Some four decades earlier, the Egyptian intellectual Rifāʿa al-Tahtāwi’s Parisian travelogue described the Americas as bilād al-kufār, a land of unbelievers, writing that “most of America is Christian, except for the nomads, among whom there are still idolators. Islam does not exist there.”[27] Al-Baghdadi’s travelogue became the first evidence for Ottomans and Arabs that the Muslim umma extended to the New World.
Al-Baghdadi’s travelogue grabbed the public imagination, and reshaped Ottoman understandings of the contours of the umma, extending it into Brazil. Al-Baghdadi’s travels had almost immediate impact on the Ottoman geography curriculum, with Ahmad Midhat’s 1871 geography textbook including mention of the existence of Muslims in Brazil.[28] While al-Baghdadi was unsuccessful in gaining direct sponsorship for his educational mission, the Ottoman government went on to establish two consuls in Brazil in the following decades. While the more direct reason for this burgeoning diplomatic presence was the growing Ottoman migrant community in Brazil in the final decades of the 19th century, the consuls also took an interest in the African Muslim community and counted them in their census.[29]
Within two decades of al-Baghdadi’s return to Istanbul, two Turkish translations were published. The first appeared almost immediately after the Arabic manuscript was completed, in 1871.[30] The second appeared in 1889 in Bahçesaray, Crimea, in a newspaper edited by Ismail Gasprinski, called Tercüman [Translator].[31] That an account of Afro-Brazilian Muslims was read, in translation, by Muslims in Crimea speaks to the role of Arabic as a medium of intra-Muslim connection across vast distances—a hinge articulating between two diasporic Muslim communities without a common vernacular. Al-Baghdadi’s riḥla, in both its content and its circulation, reveals Arabic as a global language that functions simultaneously as a force of cohesion and a fault line.