Omar ibn Said ﵀: The Man Who Wrote Arabic on the Wall

Fayetteville, North Carolina, 1810. A prisoner of about forty picks up a piece of charcoal from the floor. He sets down the first letter. The jailer looks on and does not know what he is seeing.

The First Letter

The image that must come first is a cell in Fayetteville, North Carolina, in the summer of 1810: stone walls, one window high in the corner, the light falling in at a slant across the floor. On the floor sits a man of about forty, a man who later in his life will himself write that he looked older there than he was. He has run away from his first slaveholder in Charleston and walked two hundred kilometers through the backcountry, and now he sits there, exhausted, starved and caught.

He picks something up, a piece of charcoal, perhaps a splinter of burnt wood from a cold fire, and he stands, walks to the wall and sets down the first letter. It is Arabic.

The jailer, who comes by every hour to look in, sees the signs appear and takes them at first for scribbles; then it strikes him that the signs repeat themselves, that there is regularity in them, that this is no madness but a script. The news goes through Fayetteville, and people come to see a captured runaway African who writes in a language no one in North Carolina can read.

This is the beginning, not of his life, which had begun forty years earlier in Futa Toro, but of the only trace he has left us, and of the reason his name is still spoken two hundred years later.

Futa Toro, 1770

Around 1770 a boy is born in Futa Toro, a Fulani sultanate along the middle reaches of the Senegal River, in what today is northern Senegal and southern Mauritania. A few years after his birth the Torodbe revolution, under the leadership of Sulayman Bal and later Abdul Qadir Kan, will establish an Islamic reform state there, the Imamate of Futa Toro, Almaamate in the local Pulaar, and that is the climate in which the boy grows up.

His name is Omar ibn Said, son of Said, and his family belongs to the Torodbe, the literate, religious Fulani caste that holds political and intellectual power in Futa Toro. In his autobiography, written some sixty years later on a plantation in North Carolina, he names the names of his teachers, and these are no abstractions but men who, in a village along the Senegal River, taught him to read: his brother Muhammad, a teacher Sheikh Soleiman Kumba, and another, Jebril Abdal.

He studies for twenty-five years, and that number carries weight, since twenty-five years is more than enough to rise from talib to malam, from student to teacher. He memorizes the Qur’an, studies fiqh according to the Maliki madhhab, and reads tafsir, tawhid and nahw, grammar; during Ramadan he prays taraweeh in the mosque of the village, sometimes at the court of Almaamy Abdul Qadir.

This must stand before a single shackle is put around his wrist: Omar ibn Said ﵀ is no exotic exception but the product of a West African intellectual tradition that at that moment, in the late eighteenth century, is in bloom. The reform states of Futa Toro, Futa Jallon and later Sokoto bring forth a generation of scholars who dream in Arabic, who cite Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani ﵀ from memory, and who can lay the Risala alongside the Mukhtasar of Khalil and explain the difference.

He is a West African Muslim intellectual, and he has been that before he became anything else; he will remain that, beneath the skin, beneath the disguise, beneath the injustice, until the day he dies.

The Crossing

Around 1807 it breaks. The precise war that takes him captive can no longer be reconstructed with certainty, since Futa Toro in those years lies under pressure from neighboring peoples, from the slave raids of the coastal states and from internal conflicts; he himself writes, sparingly, that “a great army” came and carried him “to the sea”, and he says no more, so that silence must not be made into more than he himself wished to allow.

He is thirty-seven years old, he has a family, he has books, he has a place in his community, and all of that is torn through the fingers of his life in a few weeks as he is driven across the village boundary, to a gathering point, to a coastal fort, probably Saint-Louis or Gorée, the gates of that time. And then the crossing, the Middle Passage as the English-language sources call it: a month and a half at sea, by his own account, more than six weeks in the hold of a ship he had never built, on an ocean whose existence was unknown to him, to a continent whose name he could not pronounce.

That crossing must not be passed over, because that ship was a torture chamber: hundreds of people stacked together in holds that had been designed for goods, with sickness, hunger and typhus, with the dead thrown overboard, without light, without room to stand upright, and without prayer in community, for how could there be. Whether Omar ﵀ performed salah during that crossing, and whether he was able to pray at all, is not known; what is known is that he held on to it, somewhere deep down, because what he writes down years later is unmistakably the language of a man whose inner self never came loose from the Qur’an.

He arrives in Charleston, South Carolina, at the auction block, and he is sold; his first owner names him “Moreau”, which is probably a corruption of Umar, as a Southern tongue reshapes that sound. He becomes the property of a man whom in his manuscript he calls “Johnson”, and he writes sparingly, but precisely: Johnson was cruel, he beat, he did not give enough food, he was a small, evil man.

What Omar ﵀ steps off the ship with is nothing, literally without a single possession, except this: he can read and write in two languages, Arabic and Pulaar. That is his thread of continuity, and that is what no one can take from him. They can possess his body, they can reshape his name, they can impose a new alphabet on him, but the Arabic he learned by heart at fifteen sits deeper than ownership. That will become visible in three years, on a cell wall.

The Escape and the Cell of 1810

He flees, and the details are his own: he writes later that he escaped from Johnson and walked to the north. Charleston lies on the sea, North Carolina begins two hundred kilometers further on, and Fayetteville lies further still; he walks, presumably by night, through a landscape whose language he barely knows, asks, one supposes, with gestures for bread, and is probably fed by free black communities along the route, since no one else would let a fleeing, dark, unintelligible man pass unnoticed. He eventually arrives in Fayetteville.

There he is caught. Fayetteville lies at roughly 35.05° north latitude, 78.88° west longitude, a small town in the sandy interior of North Carolina with nothing special about it, except that at that moment one cell exists into which this man ends up. He sits there for weeks, he eats what he is given, he sleeps, and then he picks up, and here the article returns to the image with which it began, a piece of charcoal, and he writes signs on the wall that no one around him can read.

The news goes through the town, and Fayetteville has Arabic-speaking visitors: a few Levantine traders pass through, a Jewish translator, a missionary who knows Hebrew and thinks he can distill Arabic from it. They come one by one to look and they speak with him, and they cannot all follow him fully, since his Arabic is West African and his Arabic handwriting is the stylized Maghribi variant that Eastern Arabic speakers sometimes find difficult to read; but there is enough contact to confirm that this man reads and writes, that this man prays, that this man is not who they thought he was.

A planter from Bladen County, James Owen, hears the story and buys Omar ﵀. Owen is, and we must be careful with words here, an exception within the Southern planter class: well-to-do, of reformed disposition, seasoned with the intellectual refinement that some Southern elites assumed, and his brother John Owen later becomes governor of North Carolina. James is not cruel in the manner of Johnson but cruel in the manner of the system itself, since he regards Omar ﵀ as property and does not let him go, even though he gives him a room, a Bible in Arabic, and time to write. There, on Owen’s plantation in Bladen County (~34.62°N, -78.55°W), Omar ﵀ will spend the next fifty-four years of his life.

The “Conversion”

In 1819 James Owen publicly announces that Omar has converted to Christ, and the Southern press picks it up, so that Omar in the years that follow becomes a small local phenomenon: a “civilized” African who is Arabic and Christian at the same time, an exhibit in the pro-slavery rhetoric that “see, even they can see the Light”. He is shown around, and a visitor from the North comes to look at him and notes movingly how he prays with him.

Whoever reads carefully sees something else. In 1819 he is around forty-nine, he has recently come into possession of an Arabic Bible that Owen has given him, and he writes in those years various short Arabic texts, letters, fragments, reflections, which Owen collects and passes on to Northern abolitionists, to Eastern Orientalists and to curious Presbyterian clergymen, men who, largely without Arabic, assume that they are pious Christian texts. They are, when they are deciphered a century later by Arabists, largely Qur’an verses.

One manuscript, which begins with the question “what can I say about my life”, opens not with the Lord’s Prayer but with Surah al-Mulk, Chapter 67, a surah that within the Islamic tradition is traditionally read over the dead, and that is about the sovereignty of Allah ﷻ over all of creation.

A man who lives in slavery begins his life story with a surah about who is truly king, and he signs several letters with “Praise be to Allah ﷻ, Lord of the worlds”, which is al-Fatiha; that is not the language of a man who has broken with his past but the language of a man who still speaks the prior tongue.

Ala Alryyes, professor at Yale, has in his 2011 edition A Muslim American Slave patiently gone through the text with paleographic and philological tools, and his conclusion, confirmed by Sylviane Diouf in Servants of Allah (2013) and by Ghada Hashem Talhami earlier, is careful and precise: Omar ibn Said ﵀ outwardly performed an adapted identity in order to survive, while inwardly he remained what he had always been.

His interior will be left at that, because he kept it hidden himself, and that privacy, between him and Allah ﷻ, is his alone to own, so that no one may break in there and issue a verdict. What may be observed, with healthy restraint, is what he set down on paper: surahs, not psalms; al-Fatiha where the Creed would have stood; an opening that he consciously chose and that only someone who knew the Qur’an could have written.

His outward declaration was survival, and his inner practice, insofar as it can be inferred from his writing, was preservation. That is a difference every Muslim must be able to see.

Yusuf ﵇, the Qur’anic Mirror Image

Here is a place to be still for a moment, because there is something Omar ibn Said ﵀ returns to in his own texts, never explicitly or by name: the structure of his life is the structure of a story he had already known by heart as a child, Surah Yusuf, Chapter 12 of the Qur’an.

Yusuf ﵇, son of Ya’qub ﵇, grandson of Ishaq ﵇, great-grandson of Ibrahim ﵇, was carried away from his home by his own brothers, thrown into a pit, picked up by a passing caravan, brought to Egypt, and sold and enslaved there; and there, as a slave, he rose, through his literacy, through his integrity, through his piety, until he became administrator of grain storehouses and saved a people from famine, and on no single day did he forget who he was and where he came from and to Whom he belonged.

Omar ﵀ knew this story word for word; he had memorized the surah years earlier and knew the Arabic sound of every verse, and when he, captured by strangers, carried off across water, sold at a market, eventually administrator on someone else’s plantation, literate among illiterates, Muslim among Christians, held his life against that surah, he must have seen something, and it was a structure rather than a metaphor or a poetic parallel.

Yusuf ﵇ had been enslaved and remained learned, and Yusuf ﵇ had lived in Egypt among people who did not know his God without himself forgetting. Yusuf ﵇ had preserved a language his masters could not read, in his case the language of dreams, in the case of Omar ﵀ the Arabic letters on a Fayetteville cell wall. And Yusuf ﵇ had, when he finally received power, not used that power to punish his brothers but had forgiven them, and that is the moral peak of the surah.

What did Omar ﵀ do, then, with the people who owned him? He did not curse them in his texts; he even praised James Owen, who bought him and never freed him, in his autobiography as someone who treated him well. That may have sounded like Stockholm syndrome, but it may also have been something else, it may have been the surah, since a man who places his own story within a prophet’s story chooses, like the prophet, not to let hatred be his last word.

When Omar ibn Said ﵀ wrote on that cell wall in Fayetteville, he was not alone, since he stood in a Qur’anic narrative line, and he knew that, and whoever reads well knows it too. This is perhaps the most piercing fact of his life: history has imprisoned his body, trampled his language and reshaped his name, but within the Qur’an, on the page where Surah Yusuf still stands without alteration, he was never outside himself.

The Autobiography of 1831

In 1831, when he is around sixty-one, he sits down and writes it down: fifteen pages, in Arabic, with a reed pen or a goose quill, we do not know precisely, on paper that Owen has given him, in a room on the plantation. Outside other enslaved people work in the fields, and inside a man writes the only Arabic autobiography of an enslaved African that we possess from the antebellum United States. Nothing else like this survives, and that is a fact rather than an exaggeration.

The manuscript opens with Bismillah, then a complete Fatiha, then surah al-Mulk in its entirety, and only after that does the life story begin: he writes about Futa Toro, about his teachers, about his twenty-five years of study, about an earlier hajj, since he had already, before his capture, undertaken a pilgrimage to Mecca, which among West African Torodbe of his status was not unusual, about the war that took him, about the crossing, about Johnson, about the flight, about the cell, and about Owen.

He also writes about Christianity, vaguely, sometimes with what sounds like fitting agreement, sometimes with a sentence which, read aloud in Arabic, is precisely a surah echo where a Christian pious word should stand. We leave the precise exegesis of that to Alryyes and Diouf, and we take the manuscript for what it is: a complicated, double-voiced, carefully preserved document from a life cut by two worlds.

After his death the manuscript passes into the hands of a Northern abolitionist circle, is copied by nineteenth-century Orientalists and moves through different archives, until it is donated in 1995 to the Library of Congress in Washington DC; since 2019 it has been their full property and digitally available online, under call number mss85544, where anyone can call it up. There lie his fifteen pages, and there lies, in his own handwriting, his life.

The Death and the Archive

He dies in 1864, a bitter year, since the American Civil War is in full swing: Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 has formally declared the enslaved in the rebellious Southern states free, but enforcement does not yet reach Bladen County, and the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolishes slavery throughout the United States, will only be ratified in December 1865.

Omar ﵀ dies a few months before that date, ninety-four years old, and he has never been free; he dies without having seen his wife and children in Futa Toro again, without having prayed a jumu’ah with other Muslims, and without having heard Arabic spoken again by anyone who could speak it fluently. He is buried somewhere in Bladen County, and his gravestone is not preserved with certainty, since the place is, in keeping with the custom for one who dies in slavery, without a clear marker.

But his writing exists. In Washington, 38.89°N and 77.00°W, in a climate-controlled collection, lies a fifteen-page bundle that is one of the most precious documents of all African-American history, and for the Muslims among that diaspora a relic in the true sense of the word: a fabric seen through an eye that other eyes could not see through.

Why His Name Counts Today

Omar ibn Said ﵀ is not only an American story but an Atlantic story. The Torodbe families from which he came, the Fulani communities of Futa Toro and Futa Jallon, in the same period in which he was shipped to Charleston also saw people leave for the Dutch Caribbean, and the slave registers of Suriname contain Pulaar names, Karim, Bilali, Salih, Mamadu, some of which have been washed away over the course of two centuries while others have remained as a family name or first name.

It is not unlikely that Torodbe Fulani from the same Senegal-Futa region from which Omar ﵀ came stood among those shipped to Suriname, to Curaçao, to Aruba and to Trinidad: men who could read Arabic before they were put on the ship, whose faith, in one or two generations under plantation pressure, was washed away, but whose dhikr perhaps still, somewhere very deep, has carried over as a Gullah rhythm or a Winti pattern or a half-Christian family prayer.

We cannot be certain about that. We must not exaggerate, but we may say that the chance is far from small that something from the world of Omar ibn Said ﵀, a name, a facial form, a habit, a half-memory, has travelled down in those families. And even where that direct genealogical thread is invisible, his survival of faith, under conditions specifically designed to murder that faith, is a gift to every Muslim who came after him, since he held on not only for himself but for those who came after, and he has, in one cell in Fayetteville and in one fifteen-page bundle, proved that iman can travel through an ocean and come out alive on the other side. That is not romance but proof.

He Was One

He was one, but he was not the only one, because in the generation of Omar ﵀, and before and after him, hundreds of thousands of West African Muslims were transported across the Atlantic Ocean. Researchers like Sylviane Diouf and Michael Gomez estimate that fifteen to twenty percent of the enslaved in the Americas were Muslim, others estimate higher, and for the Caribbean the figures are harder, but not lower. Most of those people have left no manuscript behind. Most of their names have been swept out of the archives or were never put into them, and most of their faces are unknown. Omar ibn Said ﵀ is the voice that speaks through that silence; he is not the exception but a witness.

From him the story passes to the others: to Bilali Muhammad ﵀ on Sapelo Island, whose grandchildren in the 1930s could still recite the Fatiha; to Ayuba Suleiman Diallo ﵀, whose Arabic letter brought him from a Maryland cell to London; and to the Malê uprising in Bahia, where in January 1835, four years after Omar ﵀ wrote his autobiography, Hausa and Yoruba Muslims in Brazil rose up, prayed before they marched out, and prepared their plan on Arabic prayer tablets. The story passes to what was lost, and to what remains.

May Allah ﷻ be pleased with him, and may He ﷻ preserve his writing until the Day on which all names are spoken aloud.

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Sources

• Omar ibn Said ﵀, A Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar Ibn Said, ed. and trans. Ala Alryyes, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 2011, pp. xi, 3–7, 23, 51, 59, 61, 63, 65, 67, 69, 73, 75, 77, 79, 84–87, 103, 126, 168–170, 174–175, 184–185, 189–190, 221.
  • pp. 51, 59, 61: the Life of 1831 itself: the opening with the Bismillah and Surat al-Mulk; the apology to Sheikh Hunter that he has forgotten much of his own language and of Arabic; his birthplace Fut Tur (Futa Toro), his teachers Mohammad Said, his brother, Sheikh Suleiman Kimba and Sheikh Jebril Abdal, the twenty-five years of study and the big army that walked him to the sea.
  • pp. 63, 65, 67, 69: a month and a half at sea to Charleston; Johnson, a small, weak, evil man; the escape, the sixteen days and nights in jail, Bob Mumford and Jim Owen; the brothers Jim and John Owen, governor of North Carolina from 1828 to 1830; thirty-seven years old when he left his country and twenty-four years in the Christian country; the verse on Mecca and Medina that Alryyes reads as catechism rather than as report.
  • pp. 73, 75, 77, 79: Praise be to Allah, the Lord of Worlds; the Fatiha in full, followed by the Lord’s Prayer; the infidels who sold him unjustly; Jim Owen who does not beat him nor impose hard work.
  • pp. 3–7, 23: Alryyes’s introduction: born around 1770 to a wealthy father, the Maghribi script, the escape of 1810 to Fayetteville, the Cumberland County jail, the manuscript of twenty-three quarto pages with eight blank pages, the discovery in a trunk in Virginia in 1995 and the sale at auction to a private collector; Surat al-Mulk as a deliberate choice and Surat al-Nasr of 1857 as his last known writing.
  • pp. 84–87: Jameson’s edition (1925): some fifteen quarto pages; Plumer on the birth around 1770 on the banks of the Senegal and the names Meroh, Moreau and Moro; the coals from the ashes and the Arabic on the jail wall; the baptism by Snodgrass between 1819 and 1822; the Arabic Bible (Newcastle 1811) at Davidson College; General James Owen who visited the jail out of curiosity and bought him; his grave at Owen Hill.
  • pp. 168–170, 174–175: the essay by Sylviane A. Diouf: the Torodbe under Suleyman Bal, Abdul Kader Kane as first almamy after 1776 and the almamate under which Omar ﵀ lived almost his whole life; the defeat of Abdul Kader in April 1807, the confinement in Saint-Louis and the ships to Charleston, so that he was among the last captives to enter the United States legally.
  • pp. 184–185, 189–190: the essay by Ghada Osman and Camille F. Forbes: fourteen extant manuscripts, all opening with an invocation of Allah ﷻ and His Prophet ﷺ; about fifty-nine years old in 1831; the discovery of 1995 and the collector Derrick Beard; the Fatiha before the Lord’s Prayer and the ambiguity of and now against but now.
  • pp. xi, 103, 126, 221: the chronology (born 1770, captured 1807 at the age of thirty-seven, the manuscript of 1819); Michael A. Gomez, Journal of Southern History 60 (1994), reprinted here, who counts the Muslims in North America in thousands, possibly tens of thousands, and calls Austin’s ten to fifteen percent unsubstantiated; Alryyes as professor at Yale.
• Allan D. Austin, African Muslims in Antebellum America: Transatlantic Stories and Spiritual Struggles, Routledge, New York/London 1997, pp. 129–131, 133–137, 144, 152–153.
  • pp. 129–131: the only extant Arabic autobiography by an American slave; the Life thought lost after 1925 and found late in 1995; the Southern legend of the Arabian prince; the Arabic Bible as a gift from Christians; the baptism into the Presbyterian Church, recorded in 1821.
  • pp. 133–135: a dark Tukolor Fula, not an Arabian; the pilgrimage to Mecca as a debatable point; the capture around 1807, about thirty days on the run, taken out of a church in Fayetteville; around forty when he came to the Owens and the fifty-three years that followed; the English Quran that Owen found for him.
  • pp. 136–137, 144, 152–153: the Lord’s Prayer that he wrote often; the manuscript of 1819 closing with thirteen verses of Surat al-Mulk; Surat al-Nasr of 1857 passed on as the Lord’s Prayer; twenty-three pages with writing on fifteen; the praise of the Owens as words to keep in their good graces.
• Sylviane A. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas, 15th anniversary edition, New York University Press, New York 2013, pp. 69–70, 83, 90, 94, 112, 167, 191–192, 204, 207–208.
  • pp. 83, 94, 112, 167: the pseudoconversion: the conversion around 1819 against the Bismillah of 1831; the Ramadan he kept strictly the first year; Moro or Moreau as a corruption of Umaru; the English and the Arabic Quran.
  • pp. 191, 204, 207–208: captured while praying, the petitions in charcoal on the jail wall and the purchase by General Owen; about fifty-nine in 1831; Surat al-Mulk as a veiled indictment, for it is Allah ﷻ, not the owner, who has the power; writing in slavery as a compromise.
  • pp. 69–70: the question of the share of Muslims among the deported, on which Diouf declines to give a percentage and speaks of hundreds of thousands of Muslims in the Americas.
  • pp. 90, 192: Bilali Muhammad ﵀ of Sapelo, his wife Phoebe and his daughters as practising Muslims, remembered by his descendants in the 1930s; the Arabic letter of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo ﵀ to his father that bought his freedom.
• João José Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia, trans. Arthur Brakel, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 1993, pp. 73, 93, 118: the Bahia uprising, planned for dawn on Sunday 25 January 1835, the twenty-fifth of Ramadan 1250, with the amulets and Quranic texts on the fallen rebels.
• Surat al-Mulk 67:1, the verse with which Omar ibn Said ﵀ opens his Life.
• Surat al-Fatiha 1:2, Praise be to Allah, the Lord of the Worlds, the sentence with which he closes his texts.
• Surat Yusuf 12, the story of the prophet Yusuf ﵇ against which the article sets his life.