Omar ibn Said ﵀
Carried away from Futa Toro, set ashore at Charleston, imprisoned in North Carolina — in 1831 he wrote his life story in Arabic, on a field in the southern United States. It is all we possess.
Life
He was born around 1770 in Futa Toro, the region along the Senegal River that today belongs to Senegal. He came from a Fulani family prosperous enough to let him study for twenty-five years. In his own 1831 manuscript he names his teachers. He learned Arabic, memorized the Qur’an, studied Maliki fiqh, tafsir, tawhid. He was, in other words, what in his own world was a tâlib: a student on his way to becoming a malam himself.
Around 1807 — he was thirty-seven — a war fell upon his region. He was taken captive, carried to the coast, put on a ship. He describes that voyage in his own words: a month and a half at sea, and ashore in a “great house that in the Christian land is called Charleston”. He was sold to a man he calls “Johnson” and who, by his account, mistreated him. He fled. He walked north, two hundred kilometers, perhaps more. In Fayetteville, North Carolina (~35.05°N, -78.88°W), he was caught and thrown into a prison cell.
There happened what would shape his life. While he sat in the cell, he began to write on the walls with charcoal. In Arabic. An unknown language to his guards — a visible sign that this man was not what they thought he was. The news spread locally. He was bought by James Owen in Bladen County, North Carolina, a planter and member of a prominent family (his brother John Owen later became governor of the state). There Omar spent the rest of his life, almost sixty years, until his death in 1864 — a year before the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in the United States.
He did not see Emancipation.
Faith and culture
In 1831, after more than twenty years on the Owen plantation, he wrote an autobiography of about fifteen manuscript pages in Arabic. This is — and we must feel the weight of this sentence — the only surviving Arabic slave narrative from the antebellum US South. It exists. A man who had been carried away from Futa Toro wrote on American soil, in a language his masters could not read, the story of his life, a story that opens with the basmala and continues with Qur’anic verses.
The outside of the manuscript looks like a Christian conversion. He writes about Jesus, about the Bible, about Christian prayer. But modern researchers — Ala Alryyes (Yale), Sylviane Diouf, Ghada Osman — have shown that the text is ambiguous. The opening is not a Christian prayer but surat al-Mulk (Qur’an 67), a chapter that Muslims have traditionally read over the dead. Other passages quote surat al-Nasr and al-Fatiha. He appears, in Diouf’s words, to be employing a takiyya strategy: outwardly a conversion, inwardly a continuation of his faith. He speaks of his twenty-five years of study in Futa Toro with unmistakable pride — a pride no convert would show about his “pagan past”.
He wrote in total about fourteen Arabic manuscripts during his enslavement. Most consist of Qur’an citations, alternating with personal lines. One Biblical Lord’s Prayer he calligraphed in Arabic — but the handwriting experts read in it the rhythm of a qasida. His faith was his secret country.
Legacy
His 1831 autobiography has, since 2019, been the property of the Library of Congress in Washington DC, where it is digitally available. The official English translation by Alryyes (A Muslim American Slave, 2011) finally made it accessible to a broad public.
For us — Afro-Caribbean Muslims listening tonight in a Dutch hall to this history — Omar ibn Said ﵀ is the closest personal thread between West Africa and the Black diaspora in the Atlantic world. Most of the Muslim Africans carried away during the Middle Passage left no written trace. Their faith vanished within one or two generations under the pressure of the plantation and the forced mission. Omar’s manuscript is a voice that speaks through that silence. He was no exception — researchers estimate that between five and ten percent of the Africans enslaved in North America were Muslim, mostly from Senegambia, Futa Toro, Futa Jallon, Bornu. But he is the written witness we have.
His life raises a question we may not gloss over. A scholarly man of fifty-five years, formed in one of the most refined Islamic learning traditions of West Africa, spent his last fifty-four years as the property of an American planter, in a region where he could never perform a jumua prayer with others, never visit a madrasa, never make Hajj. He held on nonetheless. Not triumphantly — quietly, inwardly, in his own Arabic. That is the dignity line that runs through his manuscript. We honor that line by speaking his name.
On the map
Futa Toro (~16.3°N, -13.5°W) as birth ground. Charleston, SC (32.78°N, -79.93°W) as port of arrival — the gate through which hundreds of thousands of West African Muslims entered American slavery. Fayetteville, NC (35.05°N, -78.88°W) as the cell where he wrote with charcoal on the walls. Bladen County, NC (~34.62°N, -78.55°W) as the plantation of James Owen, his last fifty-four years. Library of Congress, Washington DC (38.89°N, -77.00°W) as the current resting place of his manuscript. Together with Bilali Muhammad ﵀ on Sapelo Island, these points on our map form the first American branching of the West African Islamic world.
Primary sources: Omar ibn Said ﵀, The Life of Omar ibn Said, Written by Himself (Arabic manuscript, 1831, Library of Congress); English translation by Ala Alryyes in A Muslim American Slave (2011). Sylviane Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (1998, rev. 2013). Ghada Osman & Camille Forbes research on the Qur’anic openings.
Stage pronunciation: “Omar ibn Said” as O-mar ibn sa-EED; “Futa Toro” as FOO-ta TO-ro; “Bladen” as BLAY-den; “Fayetteville” as FAY-uht-vil.
Uncertainties:
- Birth year “around 1770” — his own statement in the manuscript points to 1770–1773.
- Date of capture “around 1807” — generally accepted on the basis of his own statement that he escaped to Fayetteville three years after arrival and became Owen’s property in 1810.
- The name “Johnson” of the first owner is his own statement and not definitively confirmed in US archives.
- The takiyya interpretation of the Christian passages has been scholarly consensus since Alryyes/Diouf but remains interpretive.
- The number of surviving Arabic manuscripts in his hand is usually put at “fourteen” but some estimates are slightly lower.