This article explores the relationship between slave emancipation and the spread of Islam in early colonial French Buguni (southern Mali). It examines the reconstitution of village communities in the wake of violence and enslavement during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and documents the ways in which widespread mobility and trans-local social processes fostered the emergence of new forms of religious identification and practice. It demonstrates that many of the region's first Muslims were returning slaves whose conversion was a cultural consequence of slavery. Oral accounts of village histories of Islam are used in reconstructing a history that has left few traces in the archival record.