Nations & States
Omar ibn Said in the Carolinas
An enslaved Muslim scholar writes in Arabic, c. 1820s CE
1240s AH / c. 1820s CE
Educational historical reconstructionWhere
The Carolinas, in the American South
35.0500, -78.8800 · View on OpenStreetMap
Background
Among the many hundreds of thousands of Africans torn from their homes and carried across the Atlantic into slavery in the Americas were a great number of Muslims, for Islam was long established across much of West Africa, and among these captives were men and women of real learning, scholars who knew the Qur'an by heart and could read and write the Arabic of the religious sciences. The best-known of them in the United States is Omar ibn Said, a scholar of the Fula people from Futa Toro, in what is now Senegal, who had studied for many years and taught before he was seized, about 1807, and shipped to Charleston and sold into slavery in the Carolinas, where he lived out the rest of his long life in bondage. Omar is remembered above all because he was literate in Arabic and left writings in his own hand, including, about the year 1831, a short autobiography, the only known life-story of an enslaved person in America written in Arabic and from a Muslim background, a rare and precious document. His enslavers presented him as a convert to their Christianity, and he was associated outwardly with a church; yet his Arabic manuscripts return again and again to the opening chapter of the Qur'an, to the phrase In the name of God, and to the prayers and formulas of Islam, and his true inner faith has been much debated, with many holding that the religion of his learning and his heart remained that of his birth. Whatever the case, Omar ibn Said stands as a witness to the faith, the literacy and the learning that countless African Muslims carried with them into the cruelty of American slavery, and that the system of bondage could not wholly erase. This scene depicts the scholar at his writing in the Carolinas. In keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance, and his writing is not shown as a legible devotional text.
What you see
By candlelight at a plain table, an elderly man writes on a page in a flowing Arabic hand, his pen moving in the script of the Qur'an; the writing of a learned man, set down in a land where almost no one around him can read a word of it.
Beyond the window lie the fields and the night of a plantation in the American South in the early nineteenth century; the writer is a captive, an enslaved African far from his homeland.
This is Omar ibn Said, a Muslim scholar of West Africa, learned in the Qur'an and the religious sciences, who was seized and carried across the ocean into slavery in the Carolinas, and who in his bondage wrote, in Arabic, the story of his own life.
He was one of many thousands of African Muslims, some of them men of learning, who were enslaved and brought to the Americas; though pressed by his enslavers into the outward forms of their religion, his own Arabic writings return again and again to the words of the Qur'an and the prayers of Islam.
His short autobiography, written about 1831, is a rare and precious thing: the life-story of an enslaved American told in his own hand and his own learned tongue, a witness to the faith and the learning that the captives carried with them into bondage and did not wholly lose.
Omar ibn Said and his Arabic autobiography are historically documented. The scene depicts the scholar at his writing; no individual is shown by likeness, and the writing is not presented as a legible devotional text.
Further reading & cross-references
The autobiography and Arabic manuscripts of Omar ibn Said (c. 1831): The primary source. Used for his life, his learning, his writing and the Islamic content of his manuscripts. Confidence high.
Scholarship on Omar ibn Said and African Muslims enslaved in the Americas: Used for his origin, his enslavement, the debate over his faith and the wider history of enslaved African Muslims. Confidence high (the faith question is genuinely debated, noted as such).
Histories of Islam in West Africa and the transatlantic slave trade: Used for the established Islam of West Africa and the Muslims carried into American slavery. Confidence high.
The antebellum Carolinas (material/geographic context): The plantation South of the early nineteenth century constrains the depiction.
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