A Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar Ibn Said Read online

  A Muslim American Slave

  Ambrotype of Omar ibn Said (North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

  A Muslim American Slave

  The Life of Omar Ibn Said

  j

  Translated from the Arabic,

  edited,

  and with an introduction by

  A  A 

  j

  T h e U n i v e r s i t y o f W i s c o n s i n P r e s s

  Publication of this volume has been made possible, in part, through support from the F W. H F of Yale University.

  The University of Wisconsin Press

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  Copyright © 2011

  The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any format or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Said, Omar ibn, 1770?–1863 or 4.

  A Muslim American slave : the life of Omar ibn Said / translated from the Arabic, edited, and with an introduction by Ala Alryyes.

  p.

  : ill, facsim., maps; cm.—(Wisconsin studies in autobiography) English translations on pages facing facsim. pages of Arabic text.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-299-24954-0 (pbk.: alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-0-299-24953-3 (e-book)

  1. Said, Omar ibn, 1770?–1863 or 4.

  2. Slave narratives—North Carolina.

  3. Slaves’ writings, American.

  4. Slaves—North Carolina—Biography.

  5. African American Muslims—North Carolina—History—Sources.

  6. Slavery—United States—History—Sources.

  I. Alryyes, Ala A., 1963–

  II. Title.

  III. Series: Wisconsin studies in autobiography.

  E444.S25 2011

  306.3´62092—dc22

  [B]

  2010044625

  “Autobiography of Omar Ibn Said, Slave in North Carolina, 1831,” translated by Isaac Bird, first appeared in American Historical Review 30, no. 4 (July 1925): 787–95. Copyright © 1925 by the American Historical Review. Used by permission of the University of Chicago Press.

  “Muslims in Early America,” by Michael A. Gomez, first appeared in Journal of Southern History 60, no. 4 (November 1994): 671–710. Copyright © 1994 by the Southern Historical Association. Used by permission of the Editor.

  “Representing the West in the Arabic Language: The Slave Narrative of Omar Ibn Said,” by Ghada Osman and Camille F. Forbes, first appeared in the Journal of Islamic Studies 15, no. 3 (September 2004): 331–43. Used by permission of Oxford University Press.

  Appendix 1 is used by permission of Charles E. Merrill Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Franklin Trask Library, Andover Newton Theological School. John Hunwick’s translation first appeared in “‘I Wish to Be Seen in Our Land Called Afrika’: ‘Umar b. Sayyid’s Appeal to Be Released from Slavery (1819),” Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies 5 (2003): 62–77. Used by permission of Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies.

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  vii

  Acknowledgments

  ix

  Chronology

  xi

  Introduction: “Arabic Work,” Islam, and American Literature

  3

  A  A 

  T h e Li f e

  The Life of Omar Ibn Said, Written by Himself

  47

  Translated by A  A  

  Autobiography of Omar Ibn Said, Slave in North Carolina, 1831

  81

  Translated by I  B ,

  with an introduction and notes by J . F  J 

  C o n t e x t u a l E s s a y s

  Muslims in Early America

  95

  M  A. G

  Contemporary Contexts for Omar’s Life and Life

  133

  A   D. A

  The United States and Barbary Coast Slavery

  152

  R  J. A

  “God Does Not Allow Kings to Enslave Their People”:

  Islamic Reformists and the Transatlantic Slave Trade

  162

  S  A. D

  Representing the West in the Arabic Language:

  The Slave Narrative of Omar Ibn Said

  182

  G  O and C F. F

  Appendix 1. Omar’s Earliest Known Manuscript (1819)

  195

  Translated by J  H 

  v

  C o n t e n t s

  Appendix 2. Letter from Reverend Isaac Bird, of Hartford, Connecticut, to Theodore Dwight, of Brooklyn, New York (April 1, 1862)

  203

  Appendix 3. “Uncle Moreau,” from North Carolina University Magazine (September 1854)

  207

  Appendix 4. Ralph Gurley’s “Secretary’s Report,” from African Repository and Colonial Journal (July 1837)

  213

  Contributors

  221

  vi

  Illustrations

  Ambrotype of Omar ibn Said

  frontispiece

  Map of Western Africa

  5

  Detail from page of Omar’s Life

  7

  Daguerreotype of Isaac Bird

  10

  Isaac Bird’s certification by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions

  11

  Omar’s latest known extant writing: a copy of Surat al-Nasr 24

  African supply zones for the transatlantic slave trade 99

  vii

  Acknowledgments

  I am indebted to many people for their help with this book. My project had its seed in a conference on Omar ibn Said held at Houghton Library, Harvard University, under the auspices of the Longfellow Institute, which supports the study of non-English writings in what is now the United States. I am deeply grateful to Werner Sollors and Marc Shell, who organized that conference, for their in-valuable interest and encouragement during the beginning stages of this project.

  Early parts of the book were published with the support of the Longfellow Institute.

  I warmly thank Yota Batsaki for her help in that process. I am very grateful to Derrick Beard, the owner of the manuscript, for generously providing full access to it and for allowing it to be reproduced here. Special thanks are due to the contributors of this volume.

  For their insights and comments, I thank Anthony K. Appiah, Srinivas Aravamudan, Ian Baucom, Natalie Zemon Davis, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Muhsin al-Musawi, Gregory Nagy, Allen F. Roberts, and Jan Ziolkowski. I am also grateful to Jonathan Curiel, John Hunwick, Sulayman Nyang, Muhammed al-Ahari, and the late Thomas C. Parramore.

  My book ben
efited from questions and comments at invited talks and conferences. I particularly thank the Instituto de Filosofía de Ciências Sociais, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Wellesley College; the organizers of the Textual Culture Conference, the University of Stirling, Scotland; and participants in the “Non-English Literatures of the United States” seminar at the American Comparative Literature Association conference in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, especially Alicia Borinsky, Dan Duffy, Peter Fenves, Melinda Gray, Gönül Pultar, Steven Rowan, and Ted Widmer.

  A Morse fellowship at Yale University provided financial assistance and time off, which helped in the development of the project. I am grateful to the members of the Yale’s Working Group in Cross-Lingual Poetics and the Yale Arabic Colloquium for helpful comments, and thank Wai Chee Dimock and Beatrice Gruendler, respectively, for invitations to speak to these two colloquia. For valuable discussions and suggestions, I also thank my colleagues Rolena Adorno, Nigel ix

  A c k n ow l e d g m e n t s

  Alderman, Hazel Carby, Vilashini Cooppan, Benjamin Foster, Moira Fradinger, Dimitri Gutas, Chris Hill, Michael Holquist, Edward Kamens, John MacKay, Christopher L. Miller, Haun Saussy, Robert Stepto, Lamin Sanneh, Joseph Roach, and the late Richard Maxwell.

  My research assistant, Ross Powell, helped greatly with this project; I thank him for his enthusiasm and energy. My book would not have seen the light without the dedicated help of various librarians. Special thanks to Diana Yount, Archives and Special Collections, Franklin Trask Library, Andover Newton Theological School; Keith Longiotti, North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Abraham Parrish, Map Department, Yale University Library; and Diane E. Kaplan and Steve Ross, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.

  I am very grateful to the anonymous readers who reviewed my manuscript for the University of Wisconsin Press, as well as to William Broadway, Nicole Kvale, Katie Malchow, Adam Mehring, Nicole Rodriguez, and Raphael Kadushin at the Press. I heartily thank Amy Johnson, who copyedited the manuscript with meticulousness and intelligence. I am also deeply grateful to William L. Andrews for his enthusiasm, counsel, and example.

  Above all, I thank Aya and Amy for their love and support.

  I dedicate this book to the memory of my friend William Nathan Alexander.

  x

  Chronology

  1770

  Omar is born.

  1807

  Omar captured in Bure at age 37.

  1819

  Two-page manuscript sent to Francis Scott Key, accompanied by letter by a John Louis Taylor of Raleigh, North Carolina. A melding of Hadith and Qur’anic excerpts. Taylor requests an Arabic Bible for Moreau.

  1823–35

  Isaac Bird (1793–1876) in Syria.

  1825

  Christian Advocate article, “Prince Moro.”

  1828–30

  Jim Owen governor of North Carolina.

  1828

  Omar’s Lord Prayer, opens “thus you pray you.”

  1831

  Omar’s Life.

  1835

  Lahmen Kebby liberated.

  1836

  Omar’s manuscript mailed to Kebby; Kebby passes it to Theodore Dwight (1838), founder of the American Ethnological Society.

  1837

  Ralph Gurley, secretary of the American Colonization Society (ACS), reports Kebby is about to embark for Liberia at New York, in a letter from Augusta, Georgia. Gurley meets Omar and mentions Jonas King. Gurley reports in the African Repository.

  1844

  William B. Hodgson’s Notes on Northern Africa, the Sahara, and Soudan.

  1847

  Wilmington Chronicle article refers to seventy-five years old

  “Monroe.”

  1848

  Alexander Cotheal’s translation (first translation).

  1857

  Surat al-Nasr

  1854–9

  Rev. Mathew B. Grier expresses doubt regarding Omar’s conversion.

  1857

  Dred Scott decision.

  1862

  Isaac Bird’s letter to Dwight regarding manuscripts (second translation).

  1863

  Dwight informs Rev. Daniel Bliss, president of the Syria Protestant College, of Omar’s Arabic; Bliss offers to send Bibles printed in xi

  C h ro n o l og y

  Beirut to Liberia. They send Bibles with Arabic message in the fly-leaf requesting information from tribes.

  1863

  Death of Omar ibn Said. He is buried in plantation’s graveyard of General Owen.

  1864

  Dwight’s essay on Kebby in Methodist Review.

  xii

  A Muslim American Slave

  In t r o d u c t i o n

  “Arabic Work,” Islam, and American Literature

  A  A 

  In 1831, Omar ibn Said, then a slave in the United States, was asked to write

  “his Life.”1 Omar composed his narrative in North Carolina, having escaped from Charleston, South Carolina, where he was sold in 1807 after his transportation from Africa. His Life, which he wrote in formal Arabic in a West African (Maghribi) script, is a unique text.2 Several North American slaves wrote in Arabic.3 Some of these writings even became famous in their writers’ lifetimes.

  Nor were these Arabic texts limited to the United States. Muslim slaves came to other regions of the Americas, leaving Arabic writings in Panama, Colombia, Trinidad, Mexico, and especially Brazil, where Muslim slaves led the great revolt of 1835 in Bahia, in which “the bodies of the fallen rebels . . . [carried] Muslim amulets with prayers and passages from the Koran.”4 Omar’s manuscript is of singular importance, however, not only because it is the only extant autobiography written by a slave in Arabic in the United States, but also because it thus raises the question of how the Life compares to the numerous narratives written by escaped slaves. In this introductory essay, I investigate these connections both by analyzing Omar’s text and by exploring the influence of the network of contemporary

  “editors” and translators who worked on Omar’s text. Omar’s Life straddles two genres: the familiar slave narrative and the largely unfamiliar genre of Arabic writings collected and circulated by Omar’s editors.

  Omar ibn Said was born to a wealthy father around 1770 in a West African region then called Futa Toro, between the Senegal and Gambia rivers. After early Qur’anic schooling during which he learnt Arabic, Omar became a teacher. He was enslaved in 1807, possibly in the course of a military campaign, and transported to Charleston.5 According to Thomas Parramore, “after working for two years as a 3

  I n t ro d u c t i o n

  slave in Charleston and on a South Carolina rice plantation, he escaped in 1810

  and made his way to Fayetteville, N.C., near which he was recaptured” and jailed.

  Omar became the property of General James Owen of Bladen County, and later moved with the Owen family during the Civil War to “Owen Hill, a Cape Fear farm formerly the home of General Owen’s brother, Governor John Owen,” where Omar died in 1864.6 Omar came to the attention of the Owens after filling “the walls of his room [jail cell] with piteous petitions to be released, all written in the Arabic language.”7 Omar’s facility with Arabic made him a local celebrity. A contemporary account notes that he “wrote in a masterly hand, writing from right to left, in what was to [local observers] an unknown language.”8 Another article describes him as “an Arabic scholar” and stresses his devoted reading of his Arabic Bible. Allan Austin observes a similar strategic hybridity: “Omar was regularly willing and able to reassure all visiting Christians that he was a true convert, as he often wrote in Arabic what he called ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ and the Twenty-Third Psalm.”9

  The Life was neither Omar’s first nor his only Arabic text. In addition to this 1831 manuscript, a number of his other Arabic inscriptions survive. In a particularly moving example, intimating his desire to go home, Omar writes in 1819, “I want to
be seen in a place called Africa in a place called Kaba in Bewir.”10 It is this knowledge of Arabic that set Omar apart then and continues to matter prominently in our reappraisals of him.

  The Life is not our only source for the life of Omar ibn Said. There are, as the discussion above shows, many other references to him—Omar lived for about thirty-five years after he wrote his autobiographical narrative—ranging from newspaper stories to accounts of personal interviews, published nineteenth-century scholarly articles, and family archives. Many who met him noted his distinguished bearing. “Meroh’s fingers are very well tapered. His whole person and gait bear marks of considerable refinement,” wrote a visiting pastor.11

  This volume, it is worth stating at the outset, is a critical study of the text and contexts of Omar’s Life and not a biography of the man. Omar’s literacy enabled his own words to figure centrally in what we know about a former slave. Most slaves, after all, left no written records. But Omar’s narrative is also an important instance of what Werner Sollors has called “the long multilingual history in all genres of American literature.”12 Omar’s knowledge of Arabic plays a part in American literary and cultural history. As this essay shows, the Life is a document no less fundamental to the reconstruction of a singular life than to the understanding of an important, and largely unstudied, episode in the annals of American slave thought.

  Like the meaning of all texts, Omar’s autobiography’s meaning—its place in literary history—varies with time, context, and readers. This book includes and 4

  A l r y ye s / “ A r a b i c Wo r k ,” I s l a m , a n d A m e r i c a n L i t e r a t u r e Western Africa, 1929 (Map Collection, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University) considers the work of three sets of interpreters. Omar’s Arabic literacy made his story important for a number of nineteenth-century missionaries, ethnographers, and intellectuals, a group that will prove central to our understanding of his Life.

  This first set of readers is explored in this essay, while my translation and the

  “Contextual Essays” belong to our own period and reflect our literary and cultural interests. An earlier translation of Omar’s Life, published in 1925 in the American Historical Review, reveals different concerns but more importantly, perhaps, a different cultural viewpoint. One distinction between the two translations is worth stressing. Despite the earlier translation’s editor’s learning and knowledge of the context of Omar’s autobiography evidenced in his introductory text, it is clear that the editor does not see the “literate Mohammedans” he introduces in the company of Omar as part and parcel of America’s antebellum literature.