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Abdul Razik, Moustafa Hasan  

Emad Abdul-Latif

university professor and Imam, was born in 1885 in Abu Gerg village in Minya, Upper Egypt, to a wealthy and prestigious family. His father, Hassan Abdul Razik Pasha, was a prominent politician, and his mother, Khadooja Abdul Salam Al Shureiy, descended from a famous family in Upper Egypt. He studied at Al-Azhar under Sheikh Muhammad Abdou, who deeply influenced his ideologies. After obtaining his Alamyya certificate in 1908, he traveled to France to complete his studies at the Sorbonne University and then the University of Lyon. Upon receiving his doctorate, he settled in Lyon to teach the Arabic language and Islamic Law. World War I put an end to his stay in France. By the end of 1914 he returned to Egypt, where he worked as an employee at Al-Azhar and then a judge in the Islamic courts. Upon his appointment in 1927 as an associate professor at ...

Article

Adams, John Hurst  

Mary T. Henry

bishop, civil rights leader, and educator, was born in Columbia, South Carolina, to Rev. Eugene Avery Adams and Charity Nash Adams. He and his three siblings, Avery, Charity, and Lucy Rose, were raised in a spiritual and intellectually stimulating home. His father, an African Methodist Episcopal (AME) minister and social activist, in the 1920s organized the first African American bank in Columbia and the first modern statewide civil rights organization in South Carolina. None of these activities went unnoticed by young John and they helped to define his later focus and commitments. Adams was educated in the segregated Columbia school system and graduated from Booker T. Washington High School. His undergraduate work was completed at Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he earned an AB degree in History in 1947 After studying at Boston University School of Theology he received a bachelor of ...

Article

Ahmad, Baba al-Massufi al-Tinbukti  

Christopher Wise

religious teacher and expert in Islamic law in Timbuktu, was born 26 October 1556 in the village of Araouane, a few days north of Timbuktu by camel caravan. His full name was Abu al-Abbas Ahmad Baba ibn Ahmad ibn Ahmad ibn ʿUmar ibn Muhammad Aqit al-Sinhaji, al-Tinbukti. His father was Ahmad (1522–1583), his grandfather al hajj Ahmad (1458–1535), and his great grandfather Umar, the son of Muhammad Aqit, the celebrated patriarch of the Masufa Tuareg clan of Aqit (one of the most powerful families of Timbuktu).

Ahmad Baba was raised in Timbuktu, where he studied the hadith and Islamic law with his father and other Aqit family members. His most influential teacher was the famous scholar and historical figure Mahmud Bagayogo, author of numerous qurʾanic commentaries, whose acts of courage are recorded in al hajj Mahmud Kati’s Tarikh al fattash Prior to the Moroccan invasion ...

Article

Anyentyuwe  

Jeremy Rich

Gabonese intellectual and catechist (one who instructs potential Christians before their admission to the Church), was born in the Glass neighborhood of Libreville, the capital of Gabon, a territory acquired by France in 1885. Sonie Harrington, her father, was a prominent trader who belonged to the coastal Omyènè-speaking Mpongwe ethnic group, which had occupied the Gabon Estuary region for centuries. Her mother, who also belonged to a Mpongwe clan, died when Anyentyuwe was very young. Since Harrington traveled to central Gabon on a regular basis to represent different European trading firms, he placed his young daughters Ayentyuwe and Azize with the American-run Protestant mission school of Baraka. This school had been founded in the 1840s to educate Mpongwe girls and boys.

Anyentyuwe represented to many American Presbyterian missionaries a rare hope Most female graduates of mission schools entered into romantic and sexual relationships with visiting European and West ...

Article

Belhadj, Ali  

Jeremy Rich

was born in Tunis, Tunisia. Details about his family are difficult to obtain. Some claimed his father was Mauritanian, while others suggest he was born in Algeria or Mauritania. Documents regarding his family indicate that his mother died in August 1966 and that his father had already passed away. He was raised by his maternal grandfather at Diar Es Semch. He received an advanced Islamic education, and by the late 1970s had become an Arabic language teacher. The decision of president Houari Boumedienne to promote Arabic as a means of establishing a national identity created a new demand for Arabic instructors. Belhadj became an adept of the Salafi school of Sunni Islam, which developed from the late nineteenth century onward and called for a return to the original teachings of Islam that supposedly had been corrupted by heretical innovations. Belhadj viewed the Iranian Revolution of 1979 as a success ...

Article

Bowen, John Wesley Edward  

Ralph E. Luker

Methodist educator and theologian, was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, the son of Edward Bowen and Rose Simon. John's father was a carpenter from Maryland who was enslaved when he moved to New Orleans. After purchasing his own freedom, Edward Bowen bought that of his wife and son in 1858 and served in the Union army during the Civil War. After the war, young J. W. E. Bowen studied at the Union Normal School in New Orleans and at New Orleans University, which was founded by the Methodist Episcopal Church for the education of freedmen. Bowen received a bachelor's degree with the university's first graduating class in 1878. Eight years later, New Orleans University awarded him a master's degree. From 1878 to 1882 Bowen taught mathematics and ancient languages at Central Tennessee College in Nashville.

In 1882 Bowen began theological studies at Boston University While he was ...

Article

Bowen, John Wesley Edward  

Richard Bardolph

John Wesley Edward Bowen was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on December 3, 1855, the son of Edward and Rose (Simon) Bowen. Edward, a carpenter, had moved from Maryland to New Orleans, where he was ensnared in slavery and held in bondage until he purchased his own freedom. Subsequently he purchased freedom for his wife and his son John, then three years old. Edward Bowen later served in the Union Army during the Civil War (1861–1865).

The newly freed parents who were intelligent industrious and ambitious themselves quickly recognized their son s similar gifts and directed him in early childhood to the best education that their means and circumstances allowed They enrolled him in New Orleans University established for blacks by the Methodist Episcopal Church and there he attained his basic education from the first grade up through college years He received his bachelor s ...

Article

Brawley, Edward McKnight  

Sandy Dwayne Martin

Edward McKnight Brawley was born in Charleston, South Carolina, the son of free African American parents, Ann L. (maiden name unknown) and James M. Brawley. Brawley's parents took a keen interest in the education and professional development of their son, providing him private schooling in Charleston, sending him at the age of ten to Philadelphia to attend grammar school and the Institute for Colored Youth, and having him apprenticed to a shoemaker in Charleston from 1866 to 1869. He enrolled as the first theological student at Howard University for a few months in 1870; he transferred to Bucknell University in Pennsylvania in January 1871. The first African American student at Bucknell, Brawley completed his education with the encouragement and financial support of a white couple named Griffith and his own work teaching vocal music and preaching during school vacations The white Baptist church in ...

Article

Brawley, Edward McKnight  

Sandy Dwayne Martin

Baptist minister, educator, and editor, was born in Charleston, South Carolina, the son of free African American parents, Ann L. (maiden name unknown) and James M. Brawley. Brawley's parents took a keen interest in the education and professional development of their son, providing him private schooling in Charleston, sending him at the age of ten to Philadelphia to attend grammar school and the Institute for Colored Youth, and apprenticing him to a shoemaker in Charleston from 1866 to 1869. He enrolled as the first theological student at Howard University for a few months in 1870 but then transferred to Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, in January 1871 The first African American student at Bucknell Brawley completed his education with the encouragement and financial support of a white couple named Griffith and with his own work teaching vocal music and preaching during school vacations The white Baptist church ...

Article

Cook, John Francis  

Willard B. Gatewood

educator and clergyman, was born a slave in the District of Columbia. His mother was Laurena Browning Cook, but his father's identity is unknown. His mother's sister, Alethia Browning Tanner, was clearly a dominant influence in his early life. Although she was a slave, her owner allowed her to hire out her own time, and by operating a profitable vegetable market in Washington, D.C., she acquired the money to purchase her own freedom as well as that of her sister and about twenty-one other relatives and acquaintances, including her nephew. Freed at the age of sixteen, Cook apprenticed himself to a shoemaker in order to earn the money to repay his aunt.

He completed his apprenticeship in 1831 but abandoned shoemaking because of an injured shoulder. He secured a job as a messenger in the office of the United States Land Commissioner where a white employee, John Wilson ...

Article

Cook, John Francis, Sr.  

Willard B. Gatewood

John Francis Cook was born a slave in the District of Columbia. His mother was Laurena Browning Cook, but his father's identity is unknown. His mother's sister, Alethia Browning Tanner, was clearly a dominant influence in his early life. Although she was a slave, her owner allowed her to hire out her own time, and by operating a profitable vegetable market in Washington, D.C., she acquired the money to purchase her own freedom as well as that of her sister and about twenty-one other relatives and acquaintances, including her nephew. Freed at the age of sixteen, Cook apprenticed himself to a shoemaker in order to earn the money to repay his aunt.

He completed his apprenticeship in 1831 but abandoned shoemaking because of an injured shoulder He secured a job as a messenger in the office of the United States Land Commissioner where a white ...

Article

Gomes, Peter John  

Stephen Butler Murray

Plummer Professor of Christian Morals and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church at Harvard University, was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He was the only child of Peter Lobo Gomes, a cranberry bog laborer who had immigrated from the Cape Verde Islands, and Orissa Josephine Gomes (née White), a member of a prominent family in the black aristocracy of Boston, a graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music, and the first black woman to work in the Massachusetts State House, where she was a principal Clerk. Peter J. Gomes was raised in the predominantly white town of Plymouth Massachusetts where he was the only black student in his class An exceptional student and the president of his class Gomes devoted himself to the First Baptist Church of Plymouth where his mother played the organ and directed the choir and where Gomes preached his first sermon at the age of ...

Article

Kazadi, Mathieu  

Jeremy Rich

was born in a small town several hundred kilometers east of the small regional center of Djoko Punda in the Kasai province of colonized Belgian Congo what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo His family belonged to a Luba speaking clan and he was his parents eighth child Kazadi s parents died when he was very young A group of American Mennonite Protestant missionaries had established a church in Djoko Punda shortly before Kazadi s birth Following his parents deaths the missionaries decided to help the young boy and allowed him to enroll at their new school after he had moved to live with his brother who already had found work as a domestic servant with the mission Kazadi considered leaving the mission as Catholic missionaries tried to encourage Congolese to abandon the Mennonites during World War I He recalled even leaving the mission grounds and boarding a ...

Article

Kebe, Lamine  

Allan D. Austin

Muslim teacher who is variously known as Kibbe, Lamen Abd al-Amin, and Paul. Beyond two short notices in the African [Colonization Society's] Repository (1835) and a mention in a list of Liberian colonists, all that is known about Kebe was recorded by Theodore Dwight Jr., African Colonizationist and a founder and secretary of the American Ethnological Society.

Lamine Kebe was born into a prominent family of the influential Kaba, or Kebe, of the Jakhanke clan of the Soninke or Serahule people. These were the founders of ancient Ghana, according to some accounts, and, more conclusively, twelfth-century converts to Islam from an area near the bend of the Niger River in present-day Mali. A short history of his people by Kebe accurately but sketchily describes the migration of a pragmatic, dedicated Qāadirīya brotherhood of teachers of Islam toward Kebe's Futa Jallon (home of Bilali ...

Article

Levington, William  

Richard J. Boles

minister, teacher, missionary, and abolitionist, was born free in New York City during the spring of 1793. His parents and the circumstances of his childhood are unknown. Around 1800 Levington relocated to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he spent most of his adolescence and worked in the bookstore of Sheldon Potter. There he became a friend and protégé of Sheldon's brother, Alonzo Potter, who eventually became the Episcopal bishop of Pennsylvania and who helped secure Levington's entry into the Protestant Episcopal ministry. In 1819 Levington moved to Albany, New York, under Potter's mentorship. Potter became a professor at Union College and he unofficially instructed Levington part-time there until he returned to Philadelphia in 1822 In Albany Levington was employed as a teacher in a school for African American children and he attended St Peter s Church It was likely through his teaching position that ...

Article

Marino, Eugene Antonio  

Vincent F. A. Golphin

clergyman, and the first African American Roman Catholic archbishop in the United States, was born in Biloxi, Mississippi, the sixth of eight children of Jesus Maria Marino, a baker, and Lottie Irene Bradford a maid After an elementary and high school education in parish schools the future prelate studied for the priesthood as a member of a religious community established to minister to blacks and Native Americans He graduated from St Joseph s Seminary College in Washington D C and later earned a master s degree at Fordham University Marino grew up as a religious minority within a racial minority oppressed by segregation in the Deep South The family was devoutly Catholic in a region of the country that was overwhelmingly Protestant and historically as hostile toward the Church of Rome as it was toward people of African descent Biloxi s Catholic parish for blacks Our Mother ...

Article

Neau, Elias  

Graham Russell Hodges

Born in France to Huguenot parents, Neau fled to the West Indies along with other French Protestants in 1679 to avoid persecution. There he married and then traveled to North America in the early 1680s. Captured by a French privateer in 1692 while he was on a business trip to London, Neau became a galley slave and later was held in the prison at Marseilles.

While in prison, he wrote a series of letters to correspondents in North America, including Cotton Mather, about his sufferings. Released in 1698 after the end of King Williams's War, Neau migrated to New York City. Although he soon owned slaves and became a minor slave trader, Neau published in 1699 a classic text on the meaning of Jesus s sufferings Only through pain and imprisonment Neau argued could Christians receive the gift of true religious comprehension qualities that any enslaved African American ...

Article

Olinga, Enoch  

Anthony A. Lee

Enoch Olinga was born into a family of Christian (Anglican) converts among the Teso people in Uganda. His father was a catechist and missionary for the church, and he was educated in missionary schools. During World War II, he joined the British Army Education Corps and served in the East African King’s Rifles Corps in South Asia: Burma, East Pakistan, Ceylon, and India. When he returned to Uganda in 1946, he was employed by the colonial Department of Public Relations and Welfare as a translator, eventually moving to Kampala. He produced two books in his own language, Ateso.

In 1951, fired from his job because of heavy drinking, Olinga began to study the Baha’i faith, recently introduced into Uganda by Ali and Violette Nakhjavani, a Baha’i couple from Iran. In February 1952 Olinga converted to the Baha i religion Almost immediately he returned to his home village ...

Article

Prieto, Juan Nepomuceno  

Henry B. Lovejoy

free black of the Lucumí nation, second sergeant of Havana’s Battalion of Loyal Blacks, and leader of the famous Mutual Aid Society of the Lucumí Nation of Santa Bárbara, remembered among modern-day practitioners of Cuban Santería as Ṣàngó tẹ̀ dún, was born around 1773 into a Yoruba-speaking family in the Bight of Benin hinterland.

During the expansion of the kingdom of Oyo, which had been consolidating its control of the internal slave trade to the coast at Porto Novo, Prieto was enslaved when Oyo raised a powerful coalition, including Dahomey, to destroy the port of Badagry in September 1784. The Dahomey army then marched the boy down the beach to Ouidah where he was sold to British slave ship captain Joseph Frayer, who forced Prieto along with 650 others on board the Golden Age This ship was owned and operated by some of Britain s most notorious ...

Article

Protten, Christian  

Jon F. Sensbach

Protestant missionary of mixed African and European parentage, was born in or near the Danish slave-trading fort of Christiansborg (present-day Accra, Ghana) on the Gold Coast. Little is known about his father, a Danish soldier stationed at the fort. His Ga mother was the daughter of Ofori, the king of Anecho, or Little Popo, a Ga kingdom some one hundred miles east on the Bight of Benin. Protten’s early upbringing reflected his bicultural heritage. Even as he grew up speaking Ga and Fante, two important languages widely used in commercial transactions along the coast, he attended a school for mixed-race children at Christiansborg taught by Danish Lutheran minister Elias Svane, learning Danish and receiving instruction in Christianity. Such multilingualism was not uncommon for Gold Coast residents, both African and European. In 1727 Svane left Christiansborg for Denmark taking eleven year old Protten and another mixed race student Frederick Pedersen ...