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

Title: A Muslim American slave : the life of Omar Ibn Said / translated from the Arabic, edited, and with an introduction by Ala Alryyes.
Author: Said, Omar ibn, 1770?-1863
Publication: Madison, Wis. : University of Wisconsin Press, ©2011.

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Request for On-site Use Request Scan Not available - Please for assistance.	Text	Request in advance	E444 .S25 2011	Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

Alryyes, Ala A., 1963-

Description

xii, 222 pages : illustrations, facsimile, maps; 23 cm.

Summary

Born to a wealthy family in West Africa around 1770, Omar Ibn Said was abducted and sold into slavery in the United States, where he came to the attention of a prominent North Carolina family after filling "the walls of his room with piteous petitions to be released, all written in the Arabic language," as one local newspaper reported. Ibn Said soon became a local celebrity, and in 1831 he was asked to write his life story, producing the only known surviving American slave narrative written in Arabic. In A Muslim American Slave, scholar and translator Ala Alryyes offers both a definitive translation and an authoritative edition of this singularly important work, lending new insights into the early history of Islam in America and exploring the multiple, shifting interpretations of Ibn Said's narrative by the nineteenth-century missionaries, ethnographers, and intellectuals who championed it. This edition presents the English translation on pages facing facsimile pages of Ibn Said's Arabic narrative, augmented by Alryyes's comprehensive introduction, contextual essays and historical commentary by leading literary critics and scholars of Islam and the African diaspora, photographs, maps, and other writings by Omar Ibn Said. The result is an invaluable addition to our understanding of writings by enslaved Americans and a timely reminder that "Islam" and "America" are not mutually exclusive terms. This edition presents the English translation on pages facing facsimile pages of Ibn Said's Arabic narrative, augmented by Alryyes's comprehensive introduction and by photographs, maps, and other writings by Omar Ibn Said. The volume also includes contextual essays and historical commentary by literary critics and scholars of Islam and the African diaspora: Michael A. Gomez, Allan D. Austin, Robert J. Allison, Sylviane A. Diouf, Ghada Osman, and Camille F. Forbes. The result is an invaluable addition to our understanding of writings by enslaved Americans and a timely reminder that "Islam" and "America" are not mutually exclusive terms.

Series Statement

Wisconsin studies in autobiography

Uniform Title

Project Muse UPCC books
Wisconsin studies in autobiography.

Subject

Genre/Form

Autobiography
Autobiographies
Biographies
History
Sources
Autobiographies.
Slave narratives.

Bibliography (note)

Includes bibliographical references.

Language (note)

English translations on pages facing facsim. pages of Arabic text.

Processing Action (note)

committed to retain

Contents

Introduction : "Arabic work," Islam, and American literature / Ala Alryyes -- The life of Omar Ibn Said, written by himself / translated by Ala Alryyes -- Autobiography of Omar Ibn Said, slave in North Carolina, 1831 / translated by Isaac Bird ; with an introduction and notes by J. Franklin Jameson -- Muslims in early America / Michael A. Gomez -- Contemporary contexts for Omar's Life and life / Allan D. Austin -- The United States and Barbary Coast slavery / Robert J. Allison -- "God does not allow kings to enslave their people" : Islamic reformists and the transatlantic slave trade / Sylviane A. Diouf -- Representing the West in the Arabic language: the slave narrative of Omar Ibn Said / Ghada Osman, Camille F. Forbes -- Appendix 1: Omar's earliest known manuscript (1819) / Translated by John Hunwick -- Appendix 2 : Letter from Reverend Isaac Bird, of Hartford, Connecticut, to Theodore Dwight, of Brooklyn, New York (April 1, 1862) -- Appendix 3 : "Uncle Moreau," from North Carolina University Magazine (September 1854) -- Appendix 4 : Ralph Gurley's "Secretary's Report," from African Repository and Colonial Journal (July 1837).

ISBN

9780299249540
0299249549
9780299249533
0299249530

LCCN

2010044625
40019677821
40019665461
99944182688

OCLC

674935213
SCSB-11723485

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library