A Muslim American Slave

The Life of Omar Ibn Said

By: Omar Ibn Said, Ala Alryyes - editor

Narrated by: Amir Abdullah

Length: 7 hrs and 27 mins

Publisher's 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, 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 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 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.

©2011 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System (P)2024 Tantor

Title misleading

The title was misleading for me. I thought I was getting a book of his life story and that’s what drew me in. What he was able to write was breathtaking, and left me wanting more. However it was repeated over and over in the book. Prayers for my ancestors….. Always