A Muslim American Slave

by Said, Omar Ibn; Alryyes, Ala

• ISBN13: 9780299249540
• ISBN10: 0299249549
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-07-20
• Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Pr

Summary

Born to a wealthy family in West Africa around 1770, Omar Ibn Said was abducted and sold into slavery in the United States, where he came to the attention of a prominent North Carolina family after filling "the walls of his room with piteous petitions to be released, all written in the Arabic language," as one local newspaper reported. Ibn Said soon became a local celebrity, and in 1831 he was asked to write his life story, producing the only known surviving American slave narrative written in Arabic. InA Muslim American Slave: The Arabic Life of Omar Ibn Saidscholar and translator Ala Alryyes offers both a definitive translation and an authoritative edition of this singularly important work, lending new insights into the early history of Islam in America and exploring the multiple, shifting interpretations of Ibn Saidrs"s narrative by the nineteenth-century missionaries, ethnographers, and intellectuals who championed it. This edition presents the English translation on pages facing facsimile pages of Ibn Saidrs"s Arabic narrative, augmented by Alryyesrs"s comprehensive introduction, contextual essays and historical commentary by leading literary critics and scholars of Islam and the African diaspora, photographs, maps, and other writings by Omar Ibn Said. The result is an invaluable addition to our understanding of writings by enslaved Americans and a timely reminder that "Islam" and "America" are not mutually exclusive terms.

Author Biography

Ala Alryyes is associate professor of comparative literature and English at Yale. He is author of Original Subjects: The Child, the Novel, and the Nation. He lives in Brooklyn.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. vii
Acknowledgments	p. ix
Chronology	p. xi
Introduction: ôArabic Work,ö Islam, and American Literature	p. 3
The Life
The Life of Omar Ibn Said, Written by Himself	p. 47
Autobiography of Omar Ibn Said, Slave in North Carolina, 1831	p. 81
Contextual Essays
Muslims in Early America	p. 95
Contemporary Contexts for Omar's Life and Life	p. 133
The United States and Barbary Coast Slavery	p. 152
ôGod Does Not Allow Kings to Enslave Their Peopleö: Islamic Reformists and the Transatlantic Slave Trade	p. 162
Representing the West in the Arabic Language: The Slave Narrative of Omar Ibn Said	p. 182
Omar's Earliest Known Manuscript (1819)	p. 195
Letter from Reverend Isaac Bird, of Hartford, Connecticut, to Theodore Dwight, of Brooklyn, New York (April 1, 1862)	p. 203
ôUncle Moreau,ö from North Carolina University Magazine (September 1854)	p. 207
Ralph Gurley's ôSecretary's Report,ö from African Repository and Colonial Journal (July 1837)	p. 213
Contributors	p. 221
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Excerpts

“Then there came to our country a big army. It killed many people. It took me, and walked me to the big Sea, and sold me into hands of a Christian man.”—Omar Ibn Said