From Voice of America
In 1807, a wealthy 37-year-old scholar was captured in West Africa, in what is now Senegal, and transported to the United States to be sold into slavery.
That man, Omar Ibn Said, lived the remainder of his life enslaved in the American South, and his story might have been forgotten if not for the handwritten autobiography he left behind.
Written in Arabic and recently acquired by the Library of Congress, “The Life of Omar Ibn Said” is not only a rare handwritten personal story of an American slave, but it’s also one of the first intimate accounts of the early history of Muslims in the United States.
Ibn Said was among the approximately one-third of American slaves who were Muslim. While the exact number of enslaved Muslims is unknown, up to 40 percent of those who were captured and enslaved came from predominantly Muslim parts of West Africa.
“It challenges this notion of this being a Christian nation,” says Zaheer Ali, an oral historian at the Brooklyn Historical Society and project director of the Muslims in Brooklyn project. “It opens us up to understanding that there were non-Christians present at the founding of this nation, and not only at the founding of this nation, but that helped build this nation…It challenges the idea that this was a quote ‘Christian nation’ from the beginning.”
America’s first Muslims were slaves
The subsequent erasure of the black Muslim identity among the enslaved people in the United States was part of a strategy to strip enslaved Africans of their individual identities and reduce them to chattel both legally and in the public imagination.
