A Free Mind, An Unfree Man
In 1831 Omar Ibn Said, an educated native of West Africa, wrote the only American slave narrative in Arabic.
By CHARLES S. DAMERON
The American South could hardly have been more on edge about its "peculiar institution" in the fall of 1831. In August, Nat Turner, a slave who had learned to read and was fired with a sense of divine mission, led several dozen slaves and free blacks from house to house in Virginia's Southampton County, liberating slaves and killing whites along the way. William Styron, who told the story in his novel "The Confessions of Nat Turner," called this "the only effective, sustained revolt in the annals of American Negro slavery." Reprisals across the South were severe. Militias and lynching parties set out to quash phantom slave rebellions, and state legislatures enacted laws forbidding blacks—free or enslaved—from being taught to read or write.
Amid these unpromising circumstances, members of the American Colonization Society—a group that encouraged owners to free their slaves and organized former slaves to colonize what is today Liberia—asked North Carolina slave Omar Ibn Said to write his autobiography. A literate man of West African extraction who had converted from Islam to Christianity, Ibn Said (ca. 1770–1863) created what today is the only extant example of an American slave narrative written in Arabic. His brief work, under the title "A Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar Ibn Said," is now published in a new translation by Yale professor Ala Alryyes, who supplements it with scholarly commentary.
Ibn Said's "Life" is not a customary slave narrative and does not follow the prototypical themes—the search for literacy and freedom—made famous by the autobiographies of escaped slaves, including Frederick Douglass. Then again, the manuscript, unlike most slave narratives, was not published to inspire the Northern abolitionist movement. The intended audience was Southern slave owners. Members of the colonization movement hoped to influence planters to free their slaves by showcasing the intellectual talents of men like Ibn Said. (Even if a work in Arabic would find only a tiny audience in America in the 1830s, news of its existence traveled far.) Accordingly, Ibn Said's tone is deferential: He pays tribute repeatedly to the benevolence of his owner and his owner's family and thanks them for introducing him to the Bible.
A Muslim American Slave
Edited by Ala Alryyes
Wisconsin, 222 pages, $19.95Not that he pretends that all was well from the moment of his enslavement. During tribal warfare in his homeland, Ibn Said says, he was captured and marched to the African coast, where he was sold "into the hand of a Christian man who bought me and walked me to the big Ship in the big Sea." A voyage of a month and a half, Ibn Said writes, brought the ship to "a place called Charleston. And in a Christian language, they sold me. A weak, small, evil man called Johnson, an infidel who did not fear Allah at all, bought me." In his compact narrative, Ibn Said sketches how he escaped from Johnson, was jailed for 16 days and eventually came into the possession of Gen. James Owen, the brother of North Carolina's governor, John Owen. "They are good men," Ibn Said writes, "for whatever they eat, I eat; and whatever they wear they give me to wear."
Ibn Said's tale, with its sunny portrait of ownership by a kind master, might be viewed skeptically by a modern reader. Yet the very fact that Ibn Said was writing in Arabic, Mr. Alryyes suggests in his commentary, permitted the author to insert subtly subversive elements beneath the nose of his benefactors. Ibn Said made extensive reference to his Muslim heritage, even as he reached for points of commonality between Christianity and Islam to express his faith.
Certain meanings and implications would have only been clear to Muslims. For instance, Ibn Said begins his text with a full recitation of the Quran's 67th sura, or chapter, titled al-Mulk ("Dominion"), which discusses God's absolute ownership of the universe. For a Muslim slave, Sura al-Mulk would probably have had an incendiary meaning: It tacitly rebukes slave owners by stressing mankind's common subservience to God and promising damnation for those who "persist in arrogance." With the inclusion of the sura, Mr. Alryyes notes, "Omar seems to refute the right of his owners over him."
Ibn Said's sly hand with Scripture is suggested in other places as well. Mr. Alryyes argues that Ibn Said had little trouble thinking of himself as both Christian and Muslim. In a compelling example of this harmonizing of faiths, Ibn Said writes out, side by side, two classics from each religion's liturgy: the first brief chapter of the Quran (Sura al-Fatiha, commonly used as a prayer) and the Lord's Prayer. Placed next to each other, they show striking similarities.
One reason that this new translation and commentary are needed, Mr. Alryyes suggests, is that earlier commentators on the work, even in the 20th century, failed to adequately understand Ibn Said's use of holy texts. In 1925 J. Franklin Jameson, founder of the American Historical Association, wrote the introduction to a translation but seemed oblivious to the significance of Ibn Said's inclusion of Quranic verse. "The earlier pages of the manuscript," Jameson wrote, "are occupied with quotations from the Quran which Omar remembered, and these might be omitted as not autobiographical."
In "A Muslim American Slave," Mr. Alryyes's excellent commentary is accompanied by other scholarly essays that examine Ibn Said's story. Among the best are Sylviane Diouf's study of Islam's rise in Ibn Said's West African homeland and Michael Gomez's history of the antebellum influx of Muslim slaves to the United States. The reader gleans a sense not only of Omar Ibn Said but also of the historical forces that shaped him.
Ibn Said's unusual cultural voyage would continue after he wrote his autobiography. The Arabic-writing slave became something of a celebrity in North Carolina, known widely as "Uncle Moro." Notwithstanding the American Colonization Society's interest in him, Ibn Said never returned to Africa. He was still enslaved when he died in 1863, just a year shy of the liberation that would have come with Gen. Sherman's march.
Mr. Dameron is a Robert L. Bartley Fellow at the Journal.
