Slavery and Abolition
ISSN: 0144-039X (Print) 1743-9523 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fsla20
Buying and Selling Korans in Nineteenth-Century
Rio de Janeiro
Alberto da Costa e Silva
To cite this article: Alberto da Costa e Silva (2001) Buying and Selling Korans in Nineteenth-
Century Rio de Janeiro, Slavery and Abolition, 22:1, 72-82, DOI: 10.1080/714005185
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Published online: 08 Sep 2010.
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Buying and Selling Korans in
Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro
A L B E RTO D A C O STA E SI LVA
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
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84 RETHINKING THE AFRICAN DIASPORA
table were the very first things to attract the attention of anybody who
visited a Muslim house.2 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 1889,3 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.4
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
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BUYING AND SELLING KORANS IN RIO DE JANEIRO 85
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.)5 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.6
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 co-
religionists, 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.
On 21 September 1853, for instance, the Rio daily Correio Mercantil
published an article by its correspondent in Pernambuco,7 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
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86 RETHINKING THE AFRICAN DIASPORA
contested his beliefs, he reacted strongly. The correspondent added that
Abuncare deserved prison, for he did not work, and ‘exploited’ his co-
religionists, 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.8
Roger Bastide, like Arthur Ramos9 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.10
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
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BUYING AND SELLING KORANS IN RIO DE JANEIRO 87
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.11 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.12
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.13
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88 RETHINKING THE AFRICAN DIASPORA
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.14 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.15 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,
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BUYING AND SELLING KORANS IN RIO DE JANEIRO 89
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.16
NOTES
1. Jean-François de Raymond (ed.), Arthur de Gobineau et le Brésil: Correspondance
diplomatique du Ministre de France à Rio de Janeiro, 1869–1870 (Grenoble: Presses
Universitaires de Grenoble, 1990), pp.143, 148.
2. Nina Rodrigues, Os Africanos no Brasil (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1932),
p.96; João do Rio, As Religiões no Rio (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Aguilar, [1902], 1976), p.23.
3. J. Fernando Carneiro, Imigração e Colonização no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Faculdade
Nacional de Filosofia da Universidade do Brasil, 1950), p.60.
4. Roger Bastide, As Religiões Africanas no Brasil, 1 (translation of Les Religions Africaines
au Brésil, São Paulo: Pioneira/Editora da Universidade de São Paulo, 1971), p.205.
5. Adolfo Morales de los Rios Filho, O Rio de Janeiro Imperial (Rio de Janeiro: A Noite,
1946), p.442.
6. Rodrigues, p.95.
7. Manolo Florentino called my attention to this matter published by Correio Mercantil.
8. Correio Mercantil, Rio de Janeiro (28 Oct. 1853).
9. Arthur Ramos, O Negro Brasileiro (Recife: Fundação Joaquim Nabuco/Massangana, [1934],
1988), pp.66, 72; As Culturas Negras do Novo Mundo (São Paulo: Companhia Editora
Nacional, [1936], 1946), pp.314, 329; Introdução à Anthropologia Brasileira, 1 (Rio de
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90 RETHINKING THE AFRICAN DIASPORA
Janeiro: Casa do Estudante do Brasil, 1943), pp.410, 432.
10. According to D. Carmen Teixeira da Conceição, who was 105 years old when she talked to
João Baptista M. Vargens and Nei Lopes, Islamismo e Negritude (Rio de Janeiro: Setor de
Estudos Árabes da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, 1982),
p.76.
11. Manuel Querino, Costumes Africanos no Brasil (Recife: Fundação Joaquim
Nabuco/Massangana, [1916], 1988), p.71.
12. Evaldo Cabral de Melo, O Norte Agrário e o Império (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1984),
pp.28, 39.
13. Roberto Moura, Tia Ciata e a Pequena África no Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro: Prefeitura
da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro, 1995), p.133.
14. Rodrigues, p.94.
15. Rodrigues, p.96.
16. Vargens and Lopes, pp.75, 76.
