Since the September 11, 2001 attacks, the ensuing US War on Terror, and emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, there has been an increased critical awareness regarding the presence and participation of Black Americans, particularly Muslims, in the formation of the US, beginning with 15th-century encounters between Europe and the Americas. However, this work, first begun by Allan Austin’s sourcebook African Muslims in Antebellum America (1984), remains incomplete due to inconsistent and incomplete translations of some of the primary source material. Moreover, personal narratives written by Muslim and Arabic-speaking Africans enslaved in the US and the Caribbean remain largely excluded from the critical tradition of African American and diasporic slave narratives. This paper will examine the lives and writings of enslaved African Muslims such as Omar ibn Said and Abd al-Rahman Sori to illustrate how they complicate hierarchies of enslavement and how this history still affects contemporary racial relations. Using a historical approach grounded in the early modern context of Mediterranean slavery, I argue that enslaved African Muslims and their writings illustrate how Islam became racialized in the broader shift from religious to racial slavery in the West. By the mid-19th century, these “exceptional” African Muslims were re-categorized as “Moors” or “Arabs” to de-Africanize them–a method of domination and form of racism rooted in culture and religion, rather than race and biology. In turn, African Muslims were placed above enslaved Africans of different religions and language groups in the social and racial hierarchy, further distancing African Muslim slaves from the canonical enslaved figure. The exoticist and inadvertent elevation of African Muslims due to their linguistic and religious identities led to their forced participation in public spectacles, where they maintained a continuous performance of piety for their visitors and the public at large. I argue that these performances of piety complicate and reflect discourses of dissimulation (taqiyya) under which many African Muslims publicly appeared as assimilated Christians to avoid persecution or in some cases, to obtain funds by Christian groups to return to Africa under the guise of becoming missionaries themselves. As the 9/11 generation enters college in the midst of Black Lives Matter protests and commemoration of the tricentennial of Africans in North America, my research both reveals the formative role of enslaved, Arabic-speaking Muslims in US history and culture, and aims to broaden the genre of the slave narrative to include their works.