Said El Mansour Cherkaoui · May 25, 2015
Fabulous History of our Brother Omar Ibn Said Called Moro in America
The Autobiography of Omar ibn Said, the only known American slave narrative written in Arabic
Omar Ibn Said (ca. 1770-1864)
Omar ibn Said (1770–1864) was a writer and Islamic scholar, born and educated in what is now Senegal, who was enslaved and transported to the United States. There, while enslaved for the remainder of his life, he wrote a series of works of history and theology, including a subsequently famous autobiography.
Omar ibn Said was born in present-day Senegal in Futa Tooro, a region along the Middle Senegal River in West Africa, to a wealthy family. He was an Islamic scholar and a Fula who spent 25 years of his life studying with prominent Muslim scholars, learning subjects ranging from arithmetic to theology in Africa.
In 1807, he was captured during a military conflict, enslaved and taken across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States. He escaped from a cruel master in Charleston, South Carolina, and journeyed to Fayetteville, North Carolina. There he was recaptured and later sold to James Owen.
Said lived into his mid-nineties and was still a slave at the time of his death in 1864. He was buried in Bladen County, North Carolina. Omar ibn Said was also known as Uncle Moreau and Prince Omeroh.
Handwritten chapter from the Qur’an, “Surat al-Nasr,” Omar Ibn Said, ca. 1820s, courtesy of Documenting the American South, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Although Omar converted to Christianity on December 3, 1820, many modern scholars believe he continued to be a practicing Muslim, based on dedications to Muhammad written in his Bible, and a card dated 1857 on which he wrote Surat An-Nasr, a short sura which refers to the conversion of non-Muslims to Islam ‘in multitudes.’ The back of this card contains another person’s handwriting in English misidentifying the sura as the Lord’s Prayer and attesting to Omar’s status as a good Christian.
Additionally, while others writing on Omar’s behalf identified him as a Christian, his own autobiography and other writings offer more of an ambiguous position. In the autobiography, he still offers praise to Muhammad when describing his life in his own country; his references to “Jesus the Messiah” in fact parallel Quranic descriptions of Jesus (who is called المسيح ‘the Messiah’ a total of 11 times in the Quran), and descriptions of Jesus as ‘our lord/master’ (سيدنا) employ the typical Islamic honorific for prophets and is not to be confused with Lord (ربّ); and description of Jesus as ‘bringing grace and truth’ (a reference to John 1:14) is equally appropriate to the conception of Jesus in Islam.
Given Omar’s circumstances of enslavement “among the Christians” and the possibilities of lobbying for his freedom that only came with confessing Christianity, his conversion can be argued to have been made under duress.
In 1991, a masjid in Fayetteville, North Carolina renamed itself Masjid Omar Ibn Said in his honor. Omar ibn Said is widely known for fourteen manuscripts that he wrote in Arabic. Out of all of his Arabic manuscripts, he is best known for his autobiographical essay written in 1831. It describes some of the events of his life and includes reflections on his steadfast adherence to Islam and his openness towards other ‘God fearing’ people. On the surface the document may appear to be tolerant towards slavery, however Said begins it with Surat Al-Mulk, a chapter from the Qur’an, which states that only God has sovereignty over human beings.
Most of Said’s other work consisted of Islamic manuscripts in Arabic, including a handwritten copy of some short chapters (surat) from the Qur’an that are now part of the North Carolina Collection in the Wilson Library at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His Bible, a translation into Arabic published by a missionary society, which has notations in Arabic by Omar, is part of the rare books collection at Davidson College.[6]
Transcribing from memory, ibn Said made some mistakes in his work, notably at the start of Surat An-Nasr. Said was also the author of a letter dated 1819 and addressed to James Owen’s brother, Major John Owen, written in Arabic and containing numerous Quranic references (including from the above-mentioned Surat Al-Mulk), which also includes several geometric symbols and shapes which point to its possible esoteric intentions. This letter, currently housed in Andover Theological Seminary, is reprinted in Allen Austin’s African Muslims in Antebellum America: A Sourcebook.
Further coverage of Omar’s writings within the context of Slave Narratives and Muslim Slave Narratives can be found in Five Classic Muslim Slave Narratives by Muhammed Al-Ahari. The presentation of Africa, Islam and slavery in the American slave Narratives of Muslim slaves in the Americas is a topic that is often overlooked in discussing the genre of slave narratives and the birth of African American Literature. In fact the first biography was that of a former Maryland slave, Job Ben Solomon, published in 1730 in Britain.
By reexamining these often overlooked narratives we can get insight into African Islam, the turmoil of integration into a foreign culture, life in Africa, and life as a slave in the Americas. The primary sources include: the narrative of Job ben Solomon, the two autobiographical pieces of Muhammad Said of Bornu, the Arabic autobiography of ‘Umar ibn Said, the Jamaican narrative of Abu Bakr Said, a discussion of coverage on Bilali Muhammad’s excerpts from the Risalah of Abi Zaid, Theodore Dwight’s articles on the teaching methods of the Serachule teacher slave Lamen Kebe, and a letter describing Salih Bilali.
Literary analysis of Said’s autobiography suggests that he wrote it for two audiences, the white literates who sought to exploit his conversion to Christianity and Muslim readers who would recognize Qur’anic literary devices and subtext and understand his position as a fellow Muslim living under persecution. In a letter written to Sheikh Hunter regarding the autobiography, he apologized for forgetting the “talk” of his homeland and ended the letter saying: “O my brothers, do not blame me,” with the knowledge that Hunter would require Arabic-speaking translators to read the message. Scholar Basima Kamel Shaheen argues that Said’s spiritual ambiguity may have been purposefully cultivated to impress upon a wide readership the injustices of slavery.[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omar_ibn_Said
In 1864, after more than fifty years in the United States and as the Civil War was coming to a close, Said died. Only a year after his death, slavery would be legally abolished in the United States. Unlike Suleiman Diallo and Rahman, Said was never granted freedom. Before and after his death, however, many people took note of Said, including religious leaders, abolitionists, and academics. Each group examined Said’s life through their own white ideological lens. Members of the American Colonization Society, for example, told of Said’s conversion to Christianity and spoke of him as a supporter of their cause to send enslaved Africans back to Africa. However, it is not clear to what degree Said really did support their organization. For himself, Said decided a return to West Africa was not suitable, citing his uncertainty that his family and his people were still intact. An academic, Theodore Dwight, the first secretary of the American Ethnological Society (an early scholarly institution focusing on the discipline of anthropology) knew of Said and other enslaved African Muslims. Dwight’s writing on enslaved Muslims provides evidence of surprise among white Americans at the degree to which West African Muslims were educated. Dwight’s writing also sheds light on Muslims’ commitment to the Islamic schooling they received in West Africa once America. In a January 1864 article in The Methodist Quarterly, Dwight penned:
It affords an idea of the degree of education among the Moslem blacks, when we see a man like this able to read and write a language so different from his own native tongue. Where is the youth, or even the adult, among the mass of our people who is able to do the same in Latin or Greek?
Said’s status and education in West Africa, as well as his tenacious resistance to his violent treatment in South Carolina, provided him with a skill set wherein he was able to garner positive attention from at least some white Americans. Both accounts of Said and his autobiography tell of white American’s positive reaction to his literacy and spiritual devotion, the latter with assumptions made to suit their own conception of the man. While the reaction of white people was fortunate for him, literacy among enslaved people was not legal in certain states, including South Carolina, the state from which he escaped enslavement. Said’s experiences also shed light on the complexity of some enslaved people’s relationship to multiple religions, in his case Islam and Christianity. Just as traditional West African religions were syncretizing among enslaved people on the islands of Georgia and South Carolina, it probable that some enslaved Muslim combined their practices with Christian ones. Alternatively, Muslims like Said may have understood that their internal religious beliefs were risky to proclaim, and their experiences and circumstances led them to grasp the social value of participating in Christian practices while more quietly holding on to their Islamic beliefs.
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