Omar ibn Said ﵀ — The Man Who Wrote Arabic On The Wall
Fayetteville, North Carolina, 1810. A prisoner in his sixties picks up a piece of charcoal from the floor. He sets down the first letter. The jailer looks on and does not know what he is seeing.
The First Letter
You must imagine one image. Not the ship, not the market, not the plantation — those come later. This image first.
A cell in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Summer of 1810. Stone walls, one window high in the corner, the light falls in at a slant. A man of about forty — later in his life he himself will write that he looked older there than he was — sits on the floor. He has run away from his first slaveholder in Charleston. He has walked two hundred kilometers through the backcountry. He is exhausted, starved, caught. Now he sits there.
And he picks something up. A piece of charcoal. Perhaps a splinter of burnt wood from a cold fire. He stands up. He walks to the wall. He sets down the first letter.
It is Arabic.
The jailer, who comes by every hour to look in, sees the signs appear. He thinks at first they are scribbles. Then it strikes him that the signs repeat themselves, that there is regularity in them, that this is no madness but a script. The news goes through Fayetteville. People come to see. A captured runaway African, who writes in a language no one in North Carolina can read.
This is the beginning. Not of his life — that had begun forty years earlier in Futa Toro. But the beginning of the only trace he has left us. The beginning of why we still speak his name two hundred years later.
Futa Toro, 1770
Let us go back.
Around 1770 a boy is born in Futa Toro. Futa Toro is a Fulani sultanate along the middle reaches of the Senegal River, in what today is northern Senegal and southern Mauritania. A few years after his birth the Torodbe revolution, under the leadership of Sulayman Bal and later Abdul Qadir Kan, will establish an Islamic reform state — Imamate of Futa Toro, Almaamate in the local Pulaar. That is the climate in which the boy grows up.
His name is Omar. Ibn Said. Son of Said. His family belongs to the Torodbe: the literate, religious Fulani caste that holds political and intellectual power in Futa Toro. In his autobiography, written sixty-five years later on a plantation in North Carolina, he names the names of his teachers. His brother Muhammad. A teacher Sheikh Soleiman Kumba. Another, Jebril Abdal. These are not abstractions. These are men who, in a village along the Senegal River, taught him to read.
He studies for twenty-five years. Let that number hang in the hall for a moment. Twenty-five years. More than enough to rise from talib to malam, from student to teacher. He memorizes the Qur’an. He studies fiqh according to the Maliki madhhab. He reads tafsir, tawhid, nahw — grammar. During Ramadan he prays taraweeh in the mosque of the village, sometimes at the court of Almaamy Abdul Qadir.
This is the first thing you must understand before a single shackle is put around his wrist. Omar ibn Said ﵀ is no exotic exception. He is the product of a West African intellectual tradition that at that moment — late eighteenth century — is in bloom. The reform states of Futa Toro, Futa Jallon, later Sokoto — they bring forth a generation of scholars who dream in Arabic, who cite Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani ﵀ from memory, who can lay the Risala alongside the Mukhtasar of Khalil and explain the difference.
He is a West African Muslim intellectual. He has been that before he became anything else. And he will remain that — beneath the skin, beneath the disguise, beneath the injustice — until the day he dies.
The Crossing
Around 1807 it breaks.
The precise war that takes him captive can no longer be reconstructed with certainty. Futa Toro in those years lies under pressure from neighboring peoples, from the slave raids of the coastal states, from internal conflicts. He himself writes, sparingly, that “a great army” came and carried him “to the sea”. He says no more. We must not make more of that silence than he himself wished to allow.
He is thirty-seven years old. He has a family. He has books. He has a place in his community. All of that is torn through the fingers of his life in a few weeks. He is driven across the village boundary, to a gathering point, to a coastal fort — probably Saint-Louis or Gorée, the gates of that time. And then the crossing. The Middle Passage, as the English-language sources call it. A month and a half at sea, by his own account. More than six weeks in the hold of a ship he had never built, on an ocean he did not know existed, to a continent whose name he could not pronounce.
Let us not pass over this.
That ship was a torture chamber. Hundreds of people stacked together in holds that had been designed for goods. Sickness. Hunger. Typhus. The dead overboard. No light. No room to stand upright. No prayer in community — how could there be. We do not know whether Omar ﵀ performed salah during that crossing. We do not know whether he was able to pray. We do know that he held on to it, somewhere deep down, for what he writes down years later is unmistakably the language of a man whose inner self never came loose from the Qur’an.
He arrives in Charleston, South Carolina. The auction block. He is sold — his first owner names him “Moreau”, which is probably a corruption of Umar, as a Southern tongue reshapes that sound. He becomes the property of a man whom in his manuscript he calls “Johnson”. He writes sparingly, but precisely: Johnson was cruel. He beat. He did not give enough food. He was a small, evil man.
What Omar ﵀ steps off the ship with is nothing — literally no possession — except this: he can read and write in two languages. Arabic and Pulaar. That is his thread of continuity. That is what no one can take from him. They can possess his body. They can reshape his name. They can impose a new alphabet on him. But the Arabic he learned by heart at fifteen sits deeper than ownership.
That will become visible in three years. On a cell wall.
The Escape And The Cell Of 1810
He flees.
The details are his own. He writes later that he escaped from Johnson and walked to the north. Charleston lies on the sea, North Carolina begins two hundred kilometers further on, Fayetteville further still. He walks, presumably by night, through a landscape whose language he barely knows. He asks, one supposes, with gestures for bread. He is probably fed by free black communities along the route — no one else would let a fleeing, dark, unintelligible man pass unnoticed. He eventually arrives in Fayetteville.
There he is caught. Fayetteville lies at roughly 35.05° north latitude, 78.88° west longitude. A small town in the sandy interior of North Carolina. Nothing special about it. Except that at that moment one cell exists into which this man ends up.
He sits there for weeks. He eats what he is given. He sleeps. And he picks up — and now we return to the image with which this article began — a piece of charcoal. And he writes.
He writes signs on the wall that no one around him can read.
The news goes through the town. Fayetteville has Arabic-speaking visitors — a few Levantine traders pass through, a Jewish translator, a missionary who knows Hebrew and thinks he can distill Arabic from it. They come one by one to look. They speak with him. They cannot all follow him fully — his Arabic is West African, his Arabic handwriting is the stylized Maghribi variant that Eastern Arabic speakers sometimes find difficult to read. But there is enough contact to confirm: this man reads and writes. This man prays. This man is not who they thought he was.
A planter from Bladen County, James Owen, hears the story. He buys Omar ﵀. Owen is — we must be careful with words here — an exception within the Southern planter class. He is well-to-do, of reformed disposition, seasoned with the intellectual refinement that some Southern elites assumed. His brother John Owen later becomes governor of North Carolina. James is not cruel in the manner of Johnson. He is cruel in the manner of the system itself: he regards Omar ﵀ as property. He does not let him go. But he gives him a room, a Bible in Arabic, and time to write.
There, on Owen’s plantation in Bladen County (~34.62°N, -78.55°W), Omar ﵀ will spend the next fifty-four years of his life.
The “Conversion”
In 1819 James Owen publicly announces: Omar has converted to Christ.
The Southern press picks it up. Omar in the years that follow becomes a small local phenomenon — a “civilized” African who is Arabic and Christian at the same time, an exhibit in the pro-slavery rhetoric that “see, even they can see the Light”. He is shown around. A visitor from the North comes to look at him and notes movingly how he prays with him.
But look closely.
In 1819 he is around forty-nine. He has recently come into possession of an Arabic Bible that Owen has given him. He writes in those years various short Arabic texts — letters, fragments, reflections — which Owen collects and passes on to Northern abolitionists, to Eastern Orientalists, to curious Presbyterian clergymen. Those men, largely without Arabic, assume that they are pious Christian texts.
They are, when they are deciphered a century later by Arabists, largely Qur’an verses.
One manuscript, which begins with the question “what can I say about my life”, does not open with the Lord’s Prayer. It opens with Surah al-Mulk. Chapter 67. A surah that within the Islamic tradition is traditionally read over the dead, and that is about the sovereignty of Allah ﷻ over all of creation. “Blessed is He in Whose hand is the Sovereignty, and He has power over all things.” A man who lives in slavery begins his life story with a surah about who is truly king.
He signs several letters with “Praise be to Allah ﷻ, Lord of the worlds”. That is al-Fatiha. That is not the language of a man who has broken with his past. That is the language of a man who still speaks the prior tongue.
Ala Alryyes, professor at Yale, has in his 2011 edition A Muslim American Slave patiently gone through the text with paleographic and philological tools. His conclusion, confirmed by Sylviane Diouf in Servants of Allah (2013) and by Ghada Hashem Talhami earlier, is careful and precise: Omar ibn Said ﵀ outwardly performed an adapted identity in order to survive. Inwardly he remained what he had always been.
We will say no more about his interior than that. He kept it hidden himself. That privacy — between him and Allah ﷻ — he is the sole owner of. We may not break in there and issue a verdict. We may, with healthy restraint, observe what he set down on paper: surahs, not psalms. Al-Fatiha, not the Creed. An opening that he consciously chose and that only someone who knew the Qur’an could have written.
His outward declaration was survival. His inner practice — insofar as we can infer it from his writing — was preservation.
That is a difference every Muslim in the hall must be able to see.
Yusuf ﵇ — The Qur’anic Mirror Image
Now we must be still for a moment.
For there is something Omar ibn Said ﵀ returns to in his own texts. Not explicitly, not by name. But the structure of his life is the structure of a story he had already known by heart as a child. Surah Yusuf. Chapter 12 of the Qur’an.
Yusuf ﵇ — son of Ya’qub ﵇, grandson of Ishaq ﵇, great-grandson of Ibrahim ﵇ — was carried away from his home by his own brothers. Thrown into a pit. Picked up by a passing caravan. Brought to Egypt. Sold there. Enslaved there. There, as a slave, he rose — through his literacy, through his integrity, through his piety. He became administrator of grain storehouses. He saved a people from famine. And he did not forget, not a single day, who he was and where he came from and to Whom he belonged.
Omar ﵀ knew this story. Word for word. He had memorized the surah years earlier. He knew the Arabic sound of every verse. And when he — captured by strangers, carried off across water, sold at a market, eventually administrator on someone else’s plantation, literate among illiterates, Muslim among Christians — held his life against that surah, he must have seen something.
Not a metaphor. Not a poetic parallel. A structure.
Yusuf ﵇ had been enslaved and remained learned. Yusuf ﵇ had lived in Egypt among people who did not know his God and had himself not forgotten. Yusuf ﵇ had preserved a language his masters could not read — in his case the language of dreams, in Omar ﵀'s case the Arabic letters on a Fayetteville cell wall.
And Yusuf ﵇ had, when he finally received power, not used that power to punish his brothers. He had forgiven them. That is the moral peak of the surah.
What did Omar ﵀ do with the people who owned him? He did not curse them in his texts. He even praised James Owen — who bought him and never freed him — in his autobiography as someone who treated him well. That may have sounded like Stockholm syndrome. It may also have been something else. It may have been the surah. A man who places his own story within a prophet’s story chooses, like the prophet, not to let hatred be his last word.
When Omar ibn Said ﵀ wrote on that cell wall in Fayetteville, he was not alone. He stood in a Qur’anic narrative line. He knew that. And we, if we read well, know it too.
This is perhaps the most piercing fact of this whole evening. History has imprisoned his body, trampled his language, reshaped his name. But within the Qur’an, on the page where Surah Yusuf still stands without alteration, he was never outside himself.
The Autobiography Of 1831
In 1831 — he is then around sixty-one — he sits down and writes it down.
Fifteen pages. In Arabic. With a reed pen or a goose quill, we do not know precisely. On paper that Owen has given him. In a room on the plantation. Outside other enslaved people work in the fields. Inside a man writes the only Arabic autobiography of an enslaved African that we possess from the antebellum United States.
We have nothing else like this. That is no exaggeration. That is a fact.
The manuscript opens with Bismillah. Then a complete Fatiha. Then surah al-Mulk in its entirety. Only after that does the life story begin. He writes about Futa Toro. About his teachers. About his twenty-five years of study. About an earlier hajj — he had already, before his capture, undertaken a pilgrimage to Mecca, which among West African Torodbe of his status was not unusual. About the war that took him. About the crossing. About Johnson. About the flight. About the cell. About Owen.
He also writes about Christianity. Vaguely. Sometimes with what sounds like fitting agreement. Sometimes with a sentence which, when you read it aloud in Arabic, is precisely a surah echo where a Christian pious word should stand. We leave the precise exegesis of that to Alryyes and Diouf. We take the manuscript for what it is: a complicated, double-voiced, carefully preserved document from a life cut by two worlds.
After his death the manuscript passes into the hands of a Northern abolitionist circle. It is copied by nineteenth-century Orientalists. It moves through different archives. It is donated in 1995 to the Library of Congress in Washington DC. Since 2019 it has been their full property and digitally available online — call number mss85544. Anyone in this hall can call it up tonight on their phone before going to bed.
There lie his fifteen pages. There lies, in his own handwriting, his life.
The Death And The Archive
He dies in 1864.
It is a bitter year. The American Civil War is in full swing. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 has formally declared the enslaved in the rebellious Southern states free, but enforcement does not yet reach Bladen County. The Thirteenth Amendment, which abolishes slavery throughout the United States, will only be ratified in December 1865.
Omar ﵀ dies a few months before that date. Ninety-four years old. He has never been free. He has never seen his wife and children in Futa Toro again. He has never prayed a jumu’ah with other Muslims. He has never again heard Arabic spoken by anyone who could speak it fluently.
He is buried somewhere in Bladen County. His gravestone is not preserved with certainty. The place is — in keeping with the custom for one who dies in slavery — not clearly marked.
But his writing exists. In Washington, 38.89°N and 77.00°W, in a climate-controlled collection, lies a fifteen-page bundle. It is one of the most precious documents of all African-American history. It is, for the Muslims among that diaspora, a relic in the true sense of the word: a fabric seen through an eye that other eyes could not see through.
Why His Name Counts Today
Why do we tell this in The Hague?
Because Omar ibn Said ﵀ is not only an American story. He is an Atlantic story. The Torodbe families from which he came, the Fulani communities of Futa Toro and Futa Jallon, in the same period in which he was shipped to Charleston also saw people leave for the Dutch Caribbean. The slave registers of Suriname contain Pulaar names. Karim. Bilali. Salih. Mamadu. Some of those names have been washed away over the course of two centuries, others have remained as a family name or first name.
If your family line in Suriname, in Curaçao, on Aruba, in Trinidad can be traced back — and for many in this hall that will be partly possible, for others that thread lies underwater — then it is not unlikely that somewhere in that line a Torodbe Fulani stands. Someone from the same Senegal-Futa region from which Omar ﵀ came. Someone who could read Arabic before he was put on the ship. Someone whose faith, in one or two generations under plantation pressure, was washed away, but whose dhikr perhaps still, very somewhere deep, has carried over as a Gullah rhythm or a Winti pattern or a half-Christian family prayer.
We cannot be certain about that. We must not exaggerate. But we may say: if you tonight are an Afro-Caribbean Dutch Muslim, then the chance that you carry something — a name, a facial form, a habit, a half-memory — from the world of Omar ibn Said ﵀ is not small.
And even where that direct genealogical thread is invisible: his survival of faith, under conditions specifically designed to murder that faith, is a gift to every Muslim who came after him. He held on not only for himself. He held on for us. He has, in one cell in Fayetteville, in one fifteen-page bundle, proved that iman can travel through an ocean and come out alive on the other side.
That is no romance. That is proof.
He Was One
He was one. He was not the only one.
In the generation of Omar ﵀ and before and after him, hundreds of thousands of West African Muslims were transported across the Atlantic Ocean. Researchers like Sylviane Diouf and Michael Gomez estimate that fifteen to twenty percent of the enslaved in the Americas were Muslim. Others estimate higher. For the Caribbean the figures are harder, but not lower. Most of those people have left no manuscript behind. Most of their names have been swept out of the archives, or were never put into them. Most of their faces we do not know.
Omar ibn Said ﵀ is the voice that speaks through that silence. He is not the exception. He is a witness.
We now go to the others. We go to Bilali Muhammad ﵀ on Sapelo Island, whose grandchildren in the 1930s could still recite the Fatiha. We go to Ayuba Suleiman Diallo ﵀ whose Arabic letter brought him from a Maryland cell to London. We go to the Malê uprising in Bahia, where in January 1835 — four years after Omar ﵀ wrote his autobiography — Hausa and Yoruba Muslims in Brazil rose up, prayed before they marched out, and prepared their plan on Arabic prayer tablets.
We go to what was lost. And we go to what remains.