Harvard to Return Skull of Alleged Malê Rebel to Brazil - 09/11/2026 - Culture - Folha de S.Paulo

After four years of negotiations, Harvard University (U.S.) will return to Brazil a skull belonging to an individual from the time of the Malê Revolt, an uprising of enslaved Muslims in Salvador in 1835.

The request came from the Islamic Cultural Center of Bahia in November 2022, with support from the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA).

Researchers consider a connection to the revolt plausible, but the individual's ethnic origin has not been definitively established. "We still do not know whether these are the remains of a Malê who fought in Bahia in the 19th century," says UFBA historian Wlamyra Albuquerque, who sees the restitution as raising a debate about the objectification of Black bodies.

The skull was sent to the United States in 1836 and discovered in 2022 in an internal Harvard report on the university's involvement in colonialism and slavery.

The Islamic community advocates burial in Bahia: "In the Islamic religion, the body must be buried," says Sheikh Abdullah Hamid Al-Bakr Ahmed.