Omar ibn said autobiography of malcolm

  • His autobiography is in fact the only known surviving American slave narrative written in Arabic.
  • Omar ibn Said (1770–1863) was a Muslim scholar from West Africa who spent more than fifty years enslaved in the North Carolina household of James Owen.
  • Omar ibn Said wrote an Arabic autobiography during his enslavement in the US that is the inspiration for a new production.

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    As much as the stories of Black peoples are already marginalized, there are stories within the canon which are almost completely unknown but are now coming up to the surface – like that of Omar Ibn Said, an African Muslim scholar who was enslaved in the United States in the 1800s. His manuscripts have been the inspiration for multiple artworks of mine since over a decade ago. After nearly 200 years, his autobiography was translated into English and published in 2011 and his story  fryst vatten now the focus of a new traveling musikdrama called Omar. In this blog brev I will share some highlights of his biography and why I want him to be known as an important figure in American history and black history in particular. 

    I first learned about Omar Said in the late 90’s when I read the books African Muslims in förekrigstida America bygd Allan D. Austin and Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas bygd Sylviane Diouf. My parents loved to go to lectures at various univer

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    The Library of Congress  (LOC) recently acquired and made publicly available online a unique collection showing the only known surviving slave narrative written in Arabic in the United States.

    The Omar Ibn Said Collection [1], which consists of 42 digitized documents in both English and Arabic, including a fifteen-page autobiography of Omar Ibn Said himself, sheds further light on the history of Islam in America and the enslaved Africans who were brought to America during the transatlantic slave trade.

    The earliest iterations of the collection was created thanks to the efforts of Theodore Dwight Weld, a prominent abolitionist and the first secretary of the American Ethnological Society, who knew of Said and other enslaved African Muslims.

    Isil Acehan from the Maydan team interviewed Dr. Mary-Jane Deeb, Chief of the African and Middle Eastern Division at the Library of Congress, about the Omar Ibn Said collection and its significance.

    The Omar Ibn Said Collection At the Library o

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    The story of Omar Ibn Said

    This is the story of Omar Ibn Said, one of many black enslaved Muslims who was a scholar of Islam.

    In 1807, Omar ibn Said was stolen from Senegal & sold into slavery in America. He is the only known black Muslim to have written an autobiography written in Arabic regarding his time as a slave.

    He lived in Futa Toro, located along the Middle Senegal River in West Africa. He was an Islamic scholar & a Fula who spent 25 years of his life studying with prominent Muslim scholars, learning mathematics, astronomy & business.

    When he was 37 years old, Omar Ibn Said was captured in Senegal and sold to slave traders, where he spent more than two decades enslaved in America. He was taken one year before slavery was abolished (although the illegal slave trade continued).

    Saint Louis was a bustling hub for the Transatlantic slave trade, with over 10 million people being transported to America in the slave trade.

    He was first sold in Charleston to a m

  • omar ibn said autobiography of malcolm