Omar ibn Said ﵀

Carried away from Futa Toro, set ashore at Charleston, imprisoned in North Carolina, and in 1831 he wrote his life story in Arabic, on a field in the southern United States. It is all we possess.

Life

He was born around 1770 in Futa Toro, the region along the Senegal River that today belongs to Senegal. He came from a Fulani family prosperous enough to let him study for twenty-five years, and in his own 1831 manuscript he names his teachers. He learned Arabic, memorized the Qur’an, studied Maliki fiqh, tafsir, tawhid. He was, in other words, what in his own world was a tâlib: a student on his way to becoming a malam himself.

Around 1807, when he was thirty-seven, a war fell upon his region. He was taken captive, carried to the coast, put on a ship. He describes that voyage in his own words: a month and a half at sea, and ashore in a “great house that in the Christian land is called Charleston”, the port through which hundreds of thousands of West African Muslims entered American slavery. He was sold to a man he calls “Johnson” and who, by his account, mistreated him. He fled, walking north two hundred kilometers, perhaps more, and in Fayetteville, North Carolina (~35.05°N, -78.88°W), he was caught and thrown into a prison cell.

There happened what would shape his life. While he sat in the cell, he began to write on the walls with charcoal, in Arabic, a language unknown to his guards and a visible sign that this man was not what they thought he was. The news spread locally. He was bought by James Owen in Bladen County, North Carolina, a planter and member of a prominent family (his brother John Owen later became governor of the state). There Omar spent the rest of his life, almost sixty years, until his death in 1864, a year before the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in the United States.

He did not see Emancipation.

Faith and culture

In 1831, after more than twenty years on the Owen plantation, he wrote an autobiography of about fifteen manuscript pages in Arabic. This is the only surviving Arabic slave narrative from the antebellum US South. It exists. A man who had been carried away from Futa Toro wrote on American soil, in a language his masters could not read, the story of his life, a story that opens with the basmala and continues with Qur’anic verses.

The outside of the manuscript looks like a Christian conversion. He writes about Jesus, about the Bible, about Christian prayer. But modern researchers, among them Ala Alryyes (Yale), Sylviane Diouf and Ghada Osman, have shown that the text is ambiguous. The opening is not a Christian prayer but surat al-Mulk (Qur’an 67), a chapter that Muslims have traditionally read over the dead, and other passages quote surat al-Nasr and al-Fatiha. He appears, in Diouf’s words, to be employing a takiyya strategy: outwardly a conversion, inwardly a continuation of his faith. He speaks of his twenty-five years of study in Futa Toro with unmistakable pride, a pride no convert would show about his “pagan past”.

He wrote in total about fourteen Arabic manuscripts during his enslavement, most of them consisting of Qur’an citations alternating with personal lines. One Biblical Lord’s Prayer he calligraphed in Arabic, and yet the handwriting experts read in it the rhythm of a qasida. His faith was his secret country.

Legacy

His 1831 autobiography has, since 2019, been the property of the Library of Congress in Washington DC, where it is digitally available. The official English translation by Alryyes (A Muslim American Slave, 2011) finally made it accessible to a broad public.

Omar ibn Said ﵀ is the closest personal thread between West Africa and the Black diaspora in the Atlantic world. Most of the Muslim Africans carried away during the Middle Passage left no written trace, and their faith vanished within one or two generations under the pressure of the plantation and the forced mission. Omar’s manuscript is a voice that speaks through that silence. He was no exception, since researchers count the Muslims among the Africans enslaved in North America in the thousands, if not tens of thousands, mostly from Senegambia, Futa Toro, Futa Jallon, Bornu. But he is the written witness we have, and together with Bilali Muhammad ﵀ on Sapelo Island he marks the first American branching of the West African Islamic world.

His life raises a question we may not gloss over. A scholarly man of fifty-five years, formed in one of the most refined Islamic learning traditions of West Africa, spent his last fifty-four years as the property of an American planter, in a region where he could never perform a jumua prayer with others, never visit a madrasa, never make Hajj. He held on nonetheless, quietly rather than triumphantly, inwardly, in his own Arabic. That is the dignity line that runs through his manuscript, and we honor that line by speaking his name.

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Uncertainties:

The birth year “around 1770” rests on his own statement in the manuscript, which points to a date between 1770 and 1773. The date of his capture, “around 1807”, is generally accepted on the basis of his own account that he escaped to Fayetteville three years after arrival and became Owen’s property in 1810. The name “Johnson” for the first owner is likewise his own statement, and it has not been definitively confirmed in US archives. The takiyya interpretation of the Christian passages has been scholarly consensus since Alryyes and Diouf, yet it remains interpretive. The number of surviving Arabic manuscripts in his hand is usually put at “fourteen”, although some estimates are slightly lower.

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, 67, 69, 75, 79, 84–87, 103, 109, 170, 174–175, 184–185, 189–190, 221.
  • pp. 51, 59, 61, 63, 67, 69, 75, 79: the Life of 1831 itself: the opening with the Bismillah and Surat al-Mulk; the apology to Sheikh Hunter; the birthplace Fut Tur, the teachers and the twenty-five years of study, the big army that walked him to the sea; a month and a half at sea to Charleston and Johnson, a small, weak, evil man; Jim and John Owen, governor of North Carolina; thirty-seven years old at his departure; the Fatiha before the Lord’s Prayer; Jim Owen who does not beat him.
  • pp. xi, 3–7, 23: Alryyes’s introduction: born around 1770 to a wealthy father, captured in 1807 at the age of thirty-seven, sold in Charleston; the escape of 1810 to Fayetteville, the Cumberland County jail and the sale to James Owen of Bladen County, with whom he remained until his death in 1864; the twenty-three quarto pages of which eight are blank, the only surviving Arabic slave narrative in the United States; the discovery in a trunk in 1995; Surat al-Mulk as a deliberate choice and Surat al-Nasr of 1857 as the final known text.
  • pp. 84–87, 184–185, 189–190, 221: Jameson (1925) on the fifteen quarto pages; Plumer on the coals from the ashes and the Arabic on the cell wall, the Ramadan fast and the baptism; General Owen who saw him write in the jail; the essay by Ghada Osman and Camille F. Forbes on the fourteen surviving manuscripts that all open with an invocation of Allah ﷻ and His Prophet ﷺ, the age of about fifty-nine in 1831 and the ambiguity of and now against but now; Alryyes as a professor at Yale.
  • pp. 103, 109, 170, 174–175: the Muslims in North America in the thousands, possibly tens of thousands; the army of Bundu, Kaarta and Khasso that invaded Futa Toro in 1806–1807; the essay by Sylviane A. Diouf on the almamate under which he lived almost his whole life, the defeat of Abdul Kader in April 1807, Saint-Louis and the ships to Charleston.
• Allan D. Austin, African Muslims in Antebellum America: Transatlantic Stories and Spiritual Struggles, Routledge, New York/London 1997, pp. 129, 133–136, 144, 152–153: the only surviving Arabic autobiography of an American slave, thought lost after 1925 and recovered late in 1995; a dark Tukulor Fula, not an Arab; the capture around 1807, thirty days on the run, around forty on his arrival with the Owens and the fifty-three years that followed; the Lord’s Prayer he often wrote and the Surat al-Nasr of 1857 passed off 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. 50, 68, 70, 83, 94, 112, 191, 204, 207–208.
  • pp. 50, 68, 70, 83, 94, 112: the death of Abdel Kader Kane in 1807 that probably led to his capture; the landing in Charleston; the hundreds of thousands of Muslims in the Americas; the pseudo-conversion of around 1819 against the Bismillah of 1831; the strictly kept Ramadan; Moro or Moreau as a corruption of Umaru.
  • pp. 191, 204, 207–208: captured while praying, the petitions in charcoal on the cell wall and the purchase by General Owen; about fifty-nine in 1831; Surat al-Mulk as a veiled indictment, since it is Allah ﷻ and not the owner who holds the power; writing in slavery as a compromise.
• Surat al-Mulk 67:1–2 and Surat al-Nasr 110:1–3, the chapters with which he opens his Life and fills his final known manuscript of 1857.
• Surat al-Fatiha 1:2, Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds, the verse with which he closes his texts.