[April isn’t
just National Poetry Month; it’s also National
Arab American Heritage Month. So this week I’ll highlight a handful of the
many compelling Arab American stories & figures I feature in the final
chapter of my book
We the People, leading up to a
weekend post on contemporary Arab American writers!]
On watching an
inspiring figure and text finally enter our collective memories, and the need
to push further still.
Omar
(or Umar) ibn Said (or Sayyid; ah, the complexities of historical and
cultural names!) was from the Fulani people in the 19th century West African nation of
Futa Tooro (part of modern day Senegal), and was kidnapped into slavery
sometime around 1807 (when he was in his 30s, and not long before the 1808 legal
abolition of the slave trade). He was brought to Charleston, SC, enslaved
to a brutal master there from whom he escaped to Fayetteville, NC in August
1810, and recaptured, imprisoned, and eventually sold to a kinder master, James Owen of NC’s
Bladen County. Owen, a devout Presbyterian, purchased Said both a Qur’an in
English and a Bible in Arabic, in order to help Said learn English but also to
discuss religion with him in an effort to convert him to Christianity. It’s
unclear whether Owen succeeded, but in any case Said remained committed to
expressing his Muslim and Arab American experiences and identity; in 1831 he completed a
fifteen-page autobiography in Arabic, which has been recovered (in
conjunction with another prominent Muslim American, on whom more in a moment)
and remains the oldest extant Arab American text.
I spent much of
my life entirely ignorant of Said’s story and autobiography; but while many of
the figures and texts I highlight in this space remain largely unknown in our
broader collective memories and conversations, Said and his book have actually
started to receive some national attention in the last couple years (the same
period in which I learned about them). The Library of
Congress put Said’s book (the full title of which is The Life of Omar ben Saeed, called Morro, a Fullah Slave in
Fayetteville, N.C. Owned by Governor Owen) on digital display in early 2019,
and that digitization led to a good deal of follow-up news coverage (at least
compared to most 19th century figures and texts), such as this
March 2019 story from the Boston public radio station WBUR. That visibility
in turn has prompted additional scholarly and pedagogical work with
Said’s narrative, as illustrated by this wonderful November 2019 Teaching
United States History post from my friend Matthew
Teutsch on his experiences teaching the book. I know the structure of my
posts often follows up second paragraph points with a “but,” and I am about to
make a somewhat similar rhetorical move—but I want to be very clear that this
increased visibility and attention for Said and his book are entirely good
things, and indeed a great model for adding histories and stories to our
collective memories.
My “but” in this
case is just an argument that we should not see Said or his book as in any way individual,
unique, or isolated (a trend I’ve seen in at least some of the news coverage),
but rather as part of broader Muslim and Arab American communities and networks
in the early 19th century. Said himself offered a perfect starting
point for focusing on the latter in 1836, when he sent a copy of his book to Lamine
Kebe, a Muslim American former slave living in New York City. Kebe
had purchased his freedom after some forty years of slavery in South
Carolina and Alabama, and had moved to New York where he became a prominent
community leader known as “Old Paul.” Prominent enough to be known to Said as a
fellow Muslim American to whom he should send his book; and enough of a
community leader to keep
Said’s book alongside more than thirty other works on Muslim and Arab
identities, cultures, and religion, a collection that was discovered after Kebe’s
death and has become an inspiring research archivist for all those interested
in these 19th century American communities. Which, as I hope this
whole week’s series has made clear, should be all 21st century Americans.
Next Arab
American story tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Arab American figures or stories you’d highlight?
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