This paper builds on the scholarship on enslaved African Muslims by Jeffrey Einboden (2020), Munawar Ali Karim (2019), Sylviane Diouf (2013), Ala Alryyes (2011), and Michael Gomez (2005), to examine the interplay of representation, racism, and religion in the US. During the 19th century, enslaved African Muslims were elevated by Orientalists and ethnologists above enslaved Africans of different religions and language groups, further distancing African Muslim slaves from the canonical enslaved figure. This exoticist elevation of African Muslims led to their forced participation in public spectacles, where they offered performances of Christian piety. I argue that these performances must be understood in light of the practice of strategic dissimulation (taqiyya), under which many African Muslims appeared as assimilated Christians to avoid persecution or to obtain funds from Christian groups to return to Africa as missionaries. My paper seeks to recover the embedded traces of enslaved African Muslims’ cultural and religious identities which are typically effaced within the romanticized accounts of these figures and in translations of their works. Drawing on theories of Orientalism by Edward Said, counterhegemonic signification by Richard Turner, and James Scott’s “infrapolitics of resistance,” I analyze the lives and writings of enslaved African Muslims such as Omar ibn Said and Abd al-Rahman Sori illustrating how their categorization as “exceptional” Arabs/Moors led to their involuntary display as public spectacles. First, I examine The Life of Omar Ibn Said and Said himself, to illustrate how Said, despite being a slave, was allowed to participate in the public realm through performances of Christian piety. I claim that the ambivalence surrounding his faith within his narrative allows Said to create what Milette Shamir calls a “prosthetic narrative voice,” which aids him in maintaining his public persona of a converted Muslim, while ambivalently relaying private information about his Islamic beliefs without placing himself at risk. Second, I analyze the life of Abd al-Rahman Sori and his wife, Isabella, as they toured the Northeast to raise money to free their children. I examine how the advertisements, newspapers, and events in which Sori was displayed in, constructed an idealized image of Sori as a Muslim prince who also had the ability to write in Arabic. This public persona, I argue, aided Sori in his attempts to free his children and later gain passage back to Africa with the help of the American Colonization Society who believed he would preach the Gospel upon his return.