The Enslaved Who Fasted in Secret

Ramadan Is American: Part I

Photo: Library of Congress

In 2009, archaeologists excavating Fort Shirley—a British colonial trading post on the Pennsylvania frontier — uncovered a small copper alloy medallion in a refuse pit. Stamped into its surface in Arabic: La ilaha illa Allah. There is no god but God.

The charm likely belonged to an enslaved African held by the Irish trader George Croghan. Fort Shirley was a place of trade, militarization, Indigenous displacement, and human captivity.

It was not a mosque yet Islam was there — long before minarets rose in American cities, before Eid became a line item on corporate calendars. Islam had already crossed the Atlantic. It did not arrive with immigration. It arrived in chains and according to some historians even before that through African explorers.

Fasting Under Brutal Conditions

By the time British ships began transporting large numbers of enslaved Africans to North America through the transatlantic slave trade, Islam had been rooted in West Africa for hundreds of ye…