Joao Jose Reis draws on hundreds of police and trial records in which Africans, despite obvious intimidation, spoke out about their cultural, social, economic, religious, and domestic lives in Salvador.

The Muslim slave uprising in Bahia in 1835, though unsuccessful in winning freedom for the rebels, had national repercussions, making it the most important urban slave rebellion in the Americas and the only one in which Islam played a major role. Joao Jose Reis draws on hundreds of police and trial records in which Africans, despite obvious intimidation, spoke out about their cultural, social, economic, religious, and domestic lives in Salvador.