Abstract
The introduction of Islam into West Africa is typically associated with Arab and North African Muslim traders and scholars who plied the trans-Saharan trade routes that eventually linked North and West Africa into an expansive economic unit (Trimingham 1959, 1962; Levtzion 1994). This is certainly the case for the introduction of Islam into the northern reaches of modern-day Ghana by the fifteenth century (Silverman and Owusu-Ansah 1989, 326).¹ Farther south, however, the Tabon—formerly enslaved Afro-Brazilian Muslims who left Brazil and settled in a number of West African entrepots in the 1830s—are credited with first introducing Islam to Accra,