THE ORIGINS OF MUSLIM slaves in Bahia can be traced to the interior of the Bight of Benin and the jihad of Sheikh Usman dan Fodio that established the Sokoto Caliphate. As is well known, the ethnic configuration of the Bahian population changed significantly in the last decades of the eighteenth century and continuing into the nineteenth, as Hausa, Nupe, and other Muslims became more common among the slaves, and most especially with the massive arrival of Yoruba-speaking slaves in the nineteenth century. The present study examines available biographical material in an attempt to shed additional light on the Muslim community and thereby establish more clearly the links between the patterns of resistance to slavery in Bahia, culminating in the Male uprising of 1835, with the jihad movement in the interior of the Bight of Benin.