SÃO PAULO (RNS) — The skull is among thousands of human remains the university has said it will return to their original Native American communities or descendants.
The Brazilian flag. (Photo by Rafaela Biazi/Unsplash/Creative Commons)
Eduardo Campos Lima
March 26, 2025
SÃO PAULO (RNS) — After more than two years of struggle, the Muslim community of Salvador, Bahia State, still waits for Harvard University to give back the skull of an enslaved African man who allegedly took part in a major uprising in 19th-century Brazil.
In 2022, historian João José Reis learned of two Brazilian skulls being kept in Harvard museums. One belonged to an unidentified person in Rio de Janeiro, the other supposedly to a leader of the Malê Revolt, an 1835 rebellion of enslaved Yoruba Muslims, or Malês as they were known at the time, in Salvador. Reis, who authored a study on the uprising, along with colleagues in Brazil and the U.S. have since been campaigning for the repatriation of the second skull.
Two of the university’s museums — Peabody and Warren — have faced pressure for several years to return almost 7,000 human remains to their original Native American communities or descendants. The discovery of the Brazilian skulls brought the struggle to the South American region.
Reis and his colleague Hannah Bellini, a scholar who has studied Muslims in Salvador, formed a working group with the local Islamic community to facilitate the return of the skull.
“Islam establishes that the human body must be respected in life and after death,” Nigerian-born Sheikh Abdul Ahmad, who heads the Islamic Cultural Center of Bahia (known by the Portuguese acronym CCIB) in Salvador, told RNS.
Ahmad, who first arrived in Brazil in 1992 — and decided to remain in the country after discovering more about the Malês’ history — explained that the human body and its parts cannot be put on display.
“The Quran says that from earth we came, to the earth we shall go back, and from earth we will resurrect,” he added.
A deceased person must have an adequate mortuary treatment, in which the body is washed and perfumed with nonalcoholic fragrances. Then, a special prayer is directed by the community leader, asking God to forgive the person’s sins. No coffins are used, only white tissues must cover the body, and nothing can be put over the tomb.
“We will deal with that skull that same way. Of course we won’t wash it, but we’ll conduct the entire rite, especially the prayer, and we’ll bury it in the soil,” Ahmad explained.
As soon as a Muslim knows that the body of a fellow member of the Islamic community has not been properly buried, it becomes his or her religious obligation to do everything possible to promote the necessary honors for the deceased.
“We’ve been waiting for that and we’re hopeful the skull will be sent back to us. Our community has to do its part,” the sheikh affirmed.
Ahmad is especially eager to perform the prayers and ask for God’s forgiveness.
“No matter if it was 190 years ago, God still can accept our requests and forgive the deceased. And then he will be like a sinless child,” he said.
The Harvard Medical School campus in Boston. (Photo by Nathan Forget/Flickr/CC BY 2.0)
Harvard told RNS in an email that it is not opposed to the repatriation of the remains.
“We are working in collaboration with Brazilian authorities towards that shared goal,” a spokesperson said, pointing to a 2022 report by the Steering Committee on Human Remains in University Museum Collections and quoting its commitment to “employ provenance research and appropriate consultation with communities or lineal descendants, to implement interment, reinterment, return to descendant communities, or repatriation of remains.”
There’s not much available information about the skull, which was obtained before 1847 by a U.S. citizen living in Brazil. It had first been donated to the Boston Society for Medical Improvement before being acquired by Harvard’s Warren Anatomical Museum as part of a collection in 1889. Its accompanying note alleges it belonged to a Malê who fought during the uprising, although a DNA test still has to be conducted to confirm its origin.
The Malês, a name derived from the Yorubá word for Muslim, imale, were well-respected among enslaved Africans in Salvador. They primarily came from a region known as Yorubaland, which corresponds today to parts of Nigeria, Benin and Togo. They tended to be more educated than other groups of enslaved people — and than whites, in general. Many knew how to read and write (especially in Arabic) and were often assigned to more prestigious work.
At that time, there were about 4,000 African Muslims in Salvador and a total of 22,000 Africans, most of them enslaved people, in a city with an overall population of 65,000. Though the Brazilian Empire had declared Catholicism the established religion, Muslims were able to discreetly practice their religion, with some limitations.
For many Brazilian descendants of enslaved Africans, the Malê rebellion is a celebrated moment of heroism.
The Muslim Africans had been planning the rebellion for Jan. 25, at the beginning of Ramadan, but someone alerted the governor the day before and he deployed policemen to several points of the city. The Malês had to improvise and about 600 of them grabbed mostly knives and spears, with only a handful of firearms. Ultimately, the rebellion was quickly quashed, and backlash was swift. Four of the leaders were publicly executed, while others were either flogged or deported to Africa.
After the uprising, Islam was fiercely persecuted and mostly vanished from Salvador, until its resurgence with Arab immigrants in the 20th century.
Reis expressed frustration that, more than two years since the Harvard report was issued, the skull remains at the university.
“I never thought things would happen like that. They first argued that the process would involve an ethics committee that was deciding over that and other cases. We have never been informed of such decisions,” said Reis. “Then a delegate of the Brazilian Foreign Ministry took part in the last meeting between us and Harvard, in November 2024. We were told that now the university had finally met a valid interlocutor, the Brazilian government.”
While the dialogue has been apparently more fluid since then, there’s no news on when the skull is being repatriated. That CCIB, made up of about 700 Muslims, was disregarded as a “valid interlocutor” was also a bit shocking for the people involved in the process.
“Historical reparation should be something happening on the community level. That’s very important for that community, whose right to perform funeral rites has been denied in the past,” said Bellini.
“That community wants to make visible the connection between Bahia and Islamic Africa again,” Bellini said, adding they may decide to build a memorial after burying the skull.
The first feature film about the uprising is being released this year in Brazil. Directed by Antônio Pitanga, an 85-year-old legend of Brazilian cinema and television, “Malês” combines fictional and historical characters. Reis worked as a consultant for the film and, along with Pitanga, participated in a few exhibitions of it in U.S. universities.
“I’m very excited about the great reception the movie had in some African countries,” Pitanga told RNS from Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, where he was taking part in a festival. “I hope it will incentivize more and more Brazilians and also international spectators to study about the Malês, which is a fundamental part of our history,” he concluded.
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