Ottoman History Podcast - An Ottoman Imam in Brazil

Episode Date: April 11, 2024

with Ali Kulez hosted by Sam Dolbee | In 1866, a series of unexpected events led to an Ottoman imam by the name of Abd al-Rahman al-Baghdadi ending up in Rio de Janeiro. In this episode, Ali Kulez explains how he got there, and what happened when al-Baghdadi became close with enslaved and free Afro-Brazilian Muslims, and attempted to teach them his vision of Islamic orthodoxy. In addition to exploring themes of Islam and race in Brazil, Kulez also traces how the translation of al-Baghdadi's travel narrative can offer a window onto the history of South-South relations into the present. In closing, he discusses the challenge of evaluating past solidarities and differentiating them from those we might want to see.    « Click for More »

It's the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Sam Dolby. This episode begins with a dream. Al-Baghdadi has a dream when he was in Damascus. In the dream, he's in a church and he's before an image of Christ. And he tells this dream to his friends and they say that maybe he has done something wrong and they take it as a warning. But then in Brazil during the Easter celebrations, he

enters the cathedral in Rio de Janeiro with his Afro-Brazilian disciples and he sees the emperor kneel before the image of the Christ and he turns to his fellow Muslims and asks them to read privately Ikhlas, the Surah of Ikhlas.

And he says that this dream has come to realization in Brazil. The person who had that dream was Abdurrahman al-Baghdadi, an imam who was in Damascus before being exiled to Istanbul in connection with the massacres of 1860, before ending up in Brazil, attempting to teach his vision of Islamic orthodoxy to enslaved Afro-Brazilian Muslims in the late 1860s. The person telling us about this dream and the journey that it seemed to predict is Ali

Kules. My name is Ali Kules. I'm an assistant professor of Hispanic studies at Boston College. In this episode, we discuss Abdurrahman al-Baghdadi's journey. We ask what sources tell us about this journey, what their limitations are, and that eternal scholarly question of the tension between what we want to have happened and what might have actually happened.

Islam and race and Brazil and much more. Here's Ali. So we have limited information. Everything we know about him comes from, well, some of them comes from his autobiography. And he has a brief account there. And the rest comes from a maritime engineer who was with him in one of the steamships, the Corvettes. His name is Muhandis Faik. And what we know of him is that he was born in Baghdad, as the last name indicates.

But he grew up in Damascus. And he received education in Islamic law and theology, as well as Arabic and Persian letters. And after this point, it's a bit speculative, but Mohandas Faik tells us that he was involved in the Damascus incident, which is a way of referring to the massacre of Christians that happened. That was the final episode of the Mount Lebanon war. And he was, according to Faik, again, he was imprisoned there and then sent to the prison of the imperial arsenal and if that is true that suggests that he was going to be a galley slave basically so he's taken from damascus and and brought to istanbul yeah as punishment for some association with with the violence of 1860. Yeah, yeah, well, so that's the assumption. And there, he seems to have won the favor of the Captain of the time, the Grand Admiral Atesh Mehmet Pasha, who freed him and enlisted him in

the Navy as an imam. So that's as much as we know. Al-Baghdadi never talks about it in this much detail, but that's what Faik provides us with. And how does he end up in Rio de Janeiro? The Ottoman Empire wanted to strengthen its presence in the Basra area. So they decided to send two ships, two steamships, corvettes to that area. And he was on one of them, the Bursa. They were named Bursa and Izmir. But these ships really weren't equipped for the journey. And the Suez Canal hadn't been opened yet. Actually, it might have propelled the sublime port to send those two steamships. And near the island of Mallorca, they run into a storm.

They stay in Cadiz in Spain for six months for repairs. And when they resume near Cape Verde, there's another storm. And they are basically in the Atlantic lost for a few weeks. And in the end, they arrive at Rio de Janeiro purely by accident. They're in Rio de Janeiro for more repairs. And what kinds of interactions are occurring between this ship and all of the Ottoman subjects on it and local people? One interesting detail is that the first officer that came to the ship asked if the Turks ate men. So they assumed there might be cannibals, you know, that's what they had heard about them.

Once that worry is kind of like put down, they stroll through the city. that Al-Baghdadi has on, the religious vestment that he has on, attracts the attention of one of the Malays, the enslaved and freedmen that are Muslims, Afro-Muslims of Brazil. And he tries to communicate. He says, which is a strange combination of Portuguese with Arabic, saying, I'm Muslim. But Al-Baghdadi thinks that he's mocking him. strange combination of Portuguese with Arabic saying I'm Muslim but he

al-Badari thinks that he's mocking him so he asks questions in Arabic and Turkish and when the black man doesn't doesn't answer he just says he just thinks that he's he's mocking him and does not give it much importance but the next day a lot of people come to the docks and among them are the Malays as well and they they keep saying you Muslim they say salaam but no one thinks that they are they're Muslims and no one's on the on the ship speaks Portuguese so when the Ottomans begin the noon prayers and the and the Muslims join them that's when they understand that these men are Muslims,

and then they find a translator. So the Ottomans are performing the prayer on the ship, and these local people join in. Yeah, yeah. Even Don Pedro II, the emperor, comes and visits Mendes Faik as a very interesting account of him checking the engine department, and he's shocked that he even checks that. It becomes basically a fascination for the city and it's even depicted in one of the

cartoons that I found in a Rio de Janeiro newspaper. Maybe we'll be sure to include that cartoon on the website so people can look at at it but could you talk about what what that cartoon shows it was a it was a wonderful aha moment in the in the digital archive of brazilian newspapers uh basically uh it's by uh this illustrator called enrique flies who was a german immigrant to to brazil and he has this alter ego called Dr. Semanas. And he is dressed with a turban. And he is talking to a man called Senor Osmanlı in the cartoon. And they are sitting over hookahs.

And a black boy is about to serve them coffee. So Dr. Semana asks Senor Osmanlı, how do you find our country? And he says, well, it's a great country, but everyone wants to rule and no one wants to obey. And then he says, you know, you should bring a kadı to rule these people. And if you rule one, you'll rule the rest. The Afro-Brazilian boy affirms joyously, he has reason, he's saying the truth. That's what he says. So they used basically the ships on the dock to, I guess, satirize their old political situation.

I mean, one of the most interesting things about this article that you have in the Luso Brazilian Review is about the kind of unexpected connections that we might see beyond this cartoon, between the figures in the cartoon who are doing things maybe not expected from the cartoon. But maybe before we get into that, could you speak a little bit about a big topic, but a topic that I suspect our listeners will be less familiar with, and that's questions of race, but also Islam in Brazil at this time? Oh, definitely. Islam had a long history in Brazil. The majority of the enslaved people who were Muslims came at the beginning of the 19th century. And they were coming from the

Bait of Benin, and they were from West Africa, which at the time there was an Islamic expansion and African jihads in West Africa. So after they arrived, they've kept practicing their faith, and some of them knew how to write in Arabic, which in a country where even, you know, slaveholders are illiterate was a very interesting situation. And Islam had an important place in the slave rebellions of Brazil. The most significant of those rebellions is in 1835. It's the Malay Revolt of 1835. And it began on a Ramadan. And the core group that organized it were Muslims. And we still have the Arabic amulets that the fighters had on them when they were caught by the police. And some of them were executed, others imprisoned and punished otherwise, and some

sent back to, even deported back to Africa. The rebellions kind of disappear after 1835, after 1835, but the religion keeps on. And the persecution seems to be a little less when al-Badadi arrives, because many Brazilians of European descent would go to these religious figures, authorities, to ask about the future, for example. So it had these numerological, it combined, Islam there combined with these numerological practices that derived from Yoruba beliefs or from West Africa. It was an Islam that had Catholic and Yoruba elements. It was very syncretized. And Islam usually is not a religion that allows for syncretism a lot. So that was an interesting phenomenon. But it had a minor status, meaning

that it couldn't be practiced openly. And everyone who did so faced persecution. And Al-Baghdadi is made aware that he cannot wear his religious vestment, for example, outside in the city. For the Malays themselves, they did not see any problems combining these religions. Actually, even in West Africa, there are movements that sought to purify Islam of Yoruba elements. movements that sought to purify Islam of Yoruba elements. And al-Baghdadi tries to do the same, but officially they did not exist. They would not be recognized as a group. And along with other Afro-religious practices like Ajafon Vudum or Kandomle, it would be thought of as something potentially dangerous how does

al-baghdadi's relationship with this group proceed they first ask him to reside with their a place they have um in the outskirts of rio de janeiro uh for 13 days and there he sees that their islam is not is not what he is used to. Let's put it that way. He mentions, for example, that they are not doing the namaz, the prayer properly. And he tries to teach, but he's depending on this translator figure who is later revealed in this great reveal as a crypto Jew. That's one part of the travelogue that I'm not entirely comfortable with. I don't know how accurate it is. But he says that maybe he did not translate him well

because he did not see any progress in the religious practices of the Muslims he met there. Then they convinced him to stay. And we do not know if they offered him some financial monetary gain or whether he wanted to do this out of the religious obligation he felt towards them. And Mendes Faik says that he deserted. And he himself says that the commander allowed him to do so. Is this to say that the ships continue their journey to Basra

and Abdulrahman al-Baghdadi stays in Rio de Janeiro? Exactly. The ships continue their journey. They meet another Muslim imam in Cape Town and then they eventually arrive in 1866 to Basra. But al-Baghdadi will stay for three years. But al-Baghdadi will stay for three years. So he will stay the longest in Rio de Janeiro, and then he will move to Bahia, where there's a strong Muslim community in Bahia. The slave rebellion occurred in Salvador. That's north as Recife in the state of Pernambuco. And he shares his impressions of the Muslims he meets in each of these locations. What are his impressions? Is it a similar vein of, you know, they're not doing things the right way? It's usually like that. The Islam he encounters there is certainly not orthodox. As I said, it combines these Catholic and Yoruba elements.

But there are other things that disturb him. For example, Muslim men and women drink alcohol. The women do not cover themselves. They do not follow the inheritance laws of Islam. He tries to change each of these. But he says that they sometimes said yes or appeared like they were changing their practices to please me, but I'm sure that they would restart once I leave. He kind of realizes at one point the futility of his endeavor in Brazil. But this is what he does.

In Rio de Janeiro, he has these regular classes to children and to adult men. He teaches them Arabic. He even, according to his account, he prepares this really wonderful document that is in Arabic, but in Portuguese letters transcribed to the Latin alphabet. And so he has this pedagogical effort, basically. He brings them, he finds at the French bookstore some copies of the Quran, and he orders a great number of them at a great price for the believers. So he genuinely tries to bring them some sense of orthodoxy in the one he has in his mind. And as far as we can tell, it's unclear if this mission is connected to any state endeavor,

or is it clear that it's not connected to any state endeavor? It is clear that it's not connected. With the commander, he has this conversation. The commander says of the steamship that he's going to leave. If you leave, they are going to accuse me. And he says, but you have also our religion as this obligation towards those who do not know but are willing to practice the faith. So he is between this political obligation that he has to the Ottoman throne and the religious obligation. And he chooses the religious one it seems.

What interests me most about this journey is that it's basically is an instance of solidarity or commiseration maybe we can call it outside the diplomatic channels. It's basically the he establishes a contact with a group that is that would be i imagine very close to contact from from from outsiders because of his religious know-how and because he came from those lands and he was this he was the authentic muslim basically for them so he provides us insights to their practices and he's basically our only source uh Islam in 1860s in Brazil. I wondered if you could talk more about that and maybe speculate, because it seems like from what's happening, how he's seeing himself as the representative of orthodoxy, but then people aren't really doing what he's saying. So it seems like, you know, there's something else going on there and it's hard to figure out from the absence of sources, right? Yeah, absolutely. In the travelogue, he appears to be, one can read the travelogue very quickly as a document of his obstinacy or his strong adherence to orthodoxy.

But when you look at it with a bit more nuance, I think, and he says so, that he did not try to convert them to the Hanafi school, for example. He tried to find the common points between the four schools of jurisprudence to teach them. But as a Muslim, and as an imam, and as a religious scholar, he cannot accept Catholicism in Islam or Yoruba beliefs or fortune telling, because he knows that sihr is strictly forbidden. So he tries, but he also understands that he will not succeed, probably. Yeah, sihr being magic. Another place in the article where I found the analysis really interesting are questions of race.

How might al-Baqtadi be experiencing questions of race? To what extent is he talking about it in his own writing? That's certainly a very interesting question. It is something that interests me a lot as a researcher, because we know that Islam and the Ottoman Empire has a very particular history with blackness, which differs a lot from, let's say, what we see in the transatlantic slavery. But still, stereotypes circulated in the Ottoman Empire regarding the black people or the Zenji. very relevant to this travelogue, the stereotype of a kind of naive, yet rather well-intending black man, which is contrasted with the clever, kind of mischievous other. And in the travelogue, the Muslims that we see appear as these well-intending disciples who have lost their way, basically, and who are misled by poor mediators of Islam

because he will accuse the translator that he has on the Rio days with being a mistranslator, a man who is trying to secretly convert them to Judaism. And so you mentioned that you were a bit dubious about this this character of of the translator that appears uh could you say more about that yeah he's uh he's called ahmad and he's from morocco if he is uh if he is indeed jewish there's there was a jewish immigration from morocco earlier in the century um to to bra people ended, like eventually some of them moved to Rio de Janeiro, so that could be true.

But according to Al-Baghdadi, he is this figure who introduces kind of strange practices, practices that he does not recognize as Muslim, like splitting the phlegum to buckets during Ramadan. And al-Baghdadi portrays them as someone who took advantage of them. He says that even to convert them to Islam, he was making them pay. So he says that after his efforts and after his democratization of Islam, so to speak, many more were converted.

But the question of race, as you mentioned, is crucial to this encounter because the Muslims he meets tell him that they always thought Islam to be a black man's religion. So they perceive Islam on racial terms, maybe as an African religion. He kind of changes that perception. So on the one hand, I think that his views on blackness might have limited to a certain extent his report with the Malay. But then again, the changes that he wanted to instill were not, I honestly don't think they were possible at the time. And so he's working between 1866 and 1869 or so as kind of an itinerant preacher, holy man.

And then he leaves? Then he leaves. He says that he is struck with homesickness. Then he leaves. He says that he is struck with homesickness and the way he sees Islam hidden or persecuted troubles him a lot. He's a poet as well. The Trablock has a lot of poetry. And one of the most touching passages is him saying, I'm here alone without a breeze to alleviate the pain. I'm here where the bell struck, strike, and Satan laughs or something. So it's kind of a vilification of Christian Brazil, but at the same time, a touching moment of solitude in Brazil. And then here he narrates his journey back to Istanbul. He even does the Hajj, he visits Mecca,

which allows us to categorize this travelogue as Rikla, as Hajj literature almost. And he shares brief impressions of of the cities he stops at but um and that's where the travel begins basically and we do do we know what happens in the rest of his life we do not know um i haven't encountered i have only seen um a year of death and uh and nothing else there's a there's a divan. His divan is in Berlin at the public library, I think. And maybe there we would have more information about that, but I haven't encountered anything of him afterwards. And neither do we know what happens to mehendi's fight so there's a

there's certainly more to find out there there's something almost evanescent about about these encounters where these figures kind of disappear after we have this textual record i wondered if you could talk about you mentioned the dubiousness about some parts of of the travelogue and then also the fact that this is part of a genre, the Rehna genre, the journey travel literature, Hajj literature genre. How does that shape how you interpret this source and how much you feel like we can trust it? That's a great question.

I think reading a text like this is kind of walking on a jump rope. And you have to be strategic in your readings. Would he have any reason to bend the truth here or not? As far as you can tell, I think that's a question one has to ask oneself. For example, a figure like the Jewish translator justifies his trip, justifies his desertion in the eyes of the Ottoman Istanbul readers. So that's why I kind of like have questions about that figure. And, you know, the way he resembles certain stereotypes about the Jewish people reinforces that. But there are certain, I think, a certain awareness of form is important in that it allows you to decipher the text properly. He starts the text, for example,

with these elaborate formulaic praise of Sultan Abdulaziz, But there we also find a political affirmation of his of his subjugation to the Ottoman throne which is so key to him because this document is to serve as his proof of inculpability basically. Some awareness of form combined with the real life politics of the stakes at hand, I think is important. I wanted to ask about how you first encountered this source and learned about it and what that path was like. Sure. I first saw it in Turkish translation, in Latin alphabet. There's a press with certain religious affinities that published both Mehendis Faik's Travelogue and Al-Baghdadi's. And then I went to the German translation by Zohreh

from the manuscript, because as a literary scholar of Latin America, I don't read Arabic. So I had to kind of shift between sources to find out what was happening in that text. And what I found was the Turkish translation had omitted certain parts of the travelogue where he talks about the naked indigenous woman he sees, for example, in Rio de Janeiro, and passages filled with eroticism were left out. So I went to the German translation

to fill out some parts that I hadn't seen on the Turkish one. And then I found out that there was an English translation as well. So I basically triangulated between those to find out what was happening. But what was interesting as well is that this text became part of the efforts to incite economic collaboration between Brazil and Turkey. This Global South Forum called ASPA, which is the joint forum between Arab countries and Brazil and Latin American countries, came to being.

And it has a publishing end. And it has a publishing hand. And the first publication they did was a trilingual edition of this, of this trialogue in Spanish, Portuguese, and Arabic, but not English, because they are trying to end the triangulation of the, of the, of the, through the North, right, through Europe or United States. And there I had in my hands yet another kind of take on the text. And did you see discrepancies in the same way as you saw before or less relevant? The Turkish translation that we have in that trilingual translation is very limited. Again,

you know, certain parts have been simplified, either for better comprehension or probably with that in mind. But the Spanish and Portuguese, being that they are closed languages, they follow each other. And then there's a Brazilian investigator, Paulo Farah, who basically oversaw the publication. And he worked directly with the Arabic manuscript in Berlin. But I think he encountered another copy of it in Istanbul, actually. So you mentioned how this 2003 trilingual edition was part of this South-South economic relationship building effort. We can also see this text itself as an example of South-South relations in a way. How do you see those encounters

in the 1860s as offering something more complicated than, you know, these efforts to turn it into economic collaboration more recently? And the states try to use the vocabulary of the global south, because they do, and try to form cooperations. They imagine these relations as mutually beneficial, as a way of reaffirming their economic presence against certain centers of the West, let's say. And they do not foresee any conflicts happening in these relations. And al-Baghdadi's travelogue is a testament all to the contrary,

because we see the tension between orthodoxy and adaptation being a crucial issue. We see that someone like al-Baghdadi will have conflicting solidarities between his native soil and the subaltern group with which he interacts. And we see that there are intermediate figures like the translator who complicate this relationship. So I feel that with their economic and political vantage point, the states kind of tend to overlook willfully some of these conflicts, because a text like Al-Baghdadi's is practically against the Brazilian state because it is promoting Afro-Brazilian religious practices which were condemned by the state. So it isn't a beneficial agreement between the countries, right? It's counter-hegemonic. It's against the hegemony of one of the countries

involved at least. It seems like another group kind of inflecting this effort is the Syrian and Lebanese community of Brazil, who are referred to as Los Turcos, right? Coming from the Ottoman Empire. Many of them Christian, though. And so how does this early example of Muslim encounters in Brazil fit with that longer history, which I'm guessing is in part informing what Lula was doing in 2003. Yeah, I mean, it's there's this interesting, it's a coincidence, it's a happy coincidence that he's

from Damascus. And the most of the majority of the people who immigrated from the Ottoman Empire at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th were either Syrians or Lebanese. century and the beginning of the 20th were either Syrians or Lebanese. His account is very different, of course, from their experience in the country, because theirs have the advantages and the plights of an immigrant in a foreign country, in a Southern American country, but his stay is less than, it is not immigration by any chance. It is based on religion and of this religious solidarity with a very minority group. Whereas the serial Lebanese community

had ways of integrating themselves to the Brazilian society at large. And we still have monuments, for example, in major cities that kind of reaffirm their identity, but at the same time their allegiance to Brazil and what it represents. Al-Baghdadi is basically on a clandestine mission of fun. And he comes back. And the only other account of this narrative that I found

was in Ahmed Mithat's geography book. He included that in Brazil there are Muslims, so he must have read it. So there's research to be done, I think, in the Istanbul newspapers to see what kind of reverberations it had in the Istanbul press. You know, sometimes you read something, and you put it aside for several years, and then you realize, oh oh that's actually really strange and

unexpected um and sometimes you read something and you know immediately that okay this is this is an article or a book or whatever um does does that definitely definitely the second for me uh because like do you remember where you were when you were first reading it i was i was uh i was in uh i was in los angeles because i I was just doing a random Google search, Latin America, Middle East, to see what was coming up. And I saw it. And then I asked my dad to order

and scan these copies for me. And he did. And as a Latin Americanist from Turkey, this had anecdotal importance for me. And it is strange when we find ourselves in a research project where we are so, where our personal history so closely aligns with some of the aspects of the, of the, of the text. And I find it to be sometimes even a difficulty or obstacle

because you have to kind of separate yourself to form an argument objectively about what's going on and without romanticizing, for example, the solidarity you might feel as a researcher with certain groups and he might not be feeling towards them. In closing, Ali will read a passage about homesickness and Islam from the Portuguese translation of Abdurrahman al-Baghdadi's words, and then offer us an on-the-spot English translation. Every time I see Islam in the way I remember it, in terms of baptism, burial, and dispensation, quanto ao bautismo, ao enterro e à dissimulação, meus olhos verdes no torrente de lágrimas em profusão.

Eu lamento muito pelas terras do Islã e lembro-me de minha terra natal e da grande distância que a separa do Brasil. that separates it from Brazil. Now I find a breeze that relieves the heat in a city where there are no people who can comfort me, where I can feel the power and the desolation, where the bells are ringing and where the whispers of the devil are deep. All the time I see Islam persecuted the way I record it in my account of baptism and their hiding of Islam, a torrent of tears comes from my eyes. I lament for the lands of Islam and I remember my native lands and the great distance that separates us from Brazil. I cannot find a breeze that would alleviate the heat in a city where people who can help me don't exist, where the power is held by the undeserving and by where the bells strike and where Satan's whispers are profuse.

It's my favorite passage in the traveling. And it's also very hot in here, so... Satan's whispers. Satan's whispers are definitely heard Ali thank you so much Thank you so much Sam This was very great That's Ali Kuliz

His article is An Early Encounter in the Global South Abdurrahman al-Baghdadi's Journey to the Brazilian Empire in Luso-Brazilian Review from 2022. Of course, as always, for relevant readings and other podcasts, please visit our website at ottomanhistorypodcast.com. That's all for this episode. Until next time, take care. © transcript Emily Beynon