[Editor's Note: regarding the perception that the majority of
African slaves who arrived in the Americas were Moslems.
mep]
It is wrong, because most slaves came from the forest and savanna
regions beyond the then Gold Coast (which did export a lot of slaves
from inland Islmaic regions). Michael Gomez of Spelman Colleged has
just published a long article on that minority of N. American slaves
who were Muslims (they often got priviled treatment and promotion to
supervisory positions). He is on e-mail (mgomez@auc.edu) and can
tell you more about this (I suspect that an even smaller % of slaves
in the Caribbean and Brazil were Muslim than in the 13 colonies).