Jefferson’s Muslim Fugitives

The Lost Story of Enslaved Africans, their Arabic Letters, and an American President

By: Jeffrey Einboden

Narrated by: Paul Boehmer

Length: 12 hrs and 55 mins

Publisher's summary

On October 3, 1807, Thomas Jefferson was contacted by an unknown traveler urgently pleading for a private "interview" with the president, promising to disclose "a matter of momentous importance". By the next day, Jefferson held in his hands two astonishing manuscripts whose history has been lost for over two centuries. Authored by Muslims fleeing captivity in rural Kentucky, these documents delivered to the president in 1807 were penned by literate African slaves, and written entirely in Arabic.

Jefferson's Muslim Fugitives reveals the untold story of two escaped West Africans in the American heartland whose Arabic writings reached a sitting US president, prompting him to intervene on their behalf. Recounting a quest for emancipation that crosses borders of race, region and religion, Jeffrey Einboden unearths Arabic manuscripts that circulated among Jefferson and his prominent peers, including a document from 1780s Georgia which Einboden identifies as the earliest surviving example of Muslim slave authorship in the newly formed United States.

Revealing Jefferson's lifelong entanglements with slavery and Islam, Jefferson's Muslim Fugitives tracks the ascent of Arabic slave writings to the highest halls of US power, while questioning why such vital legacies from the American past have been entirely forgotten.

©2020 Oxford University Press (P)2020 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

A Real Struggle

I really struggled to finish this book.

I did finish it because the subject is interesting. The title is a little misleading, in that the book is about much more than Jefferson’s interactions with the Arabic writings of 2 runaway slaves. It covers Jefferson’s involvement with Muslims and North Africa over the course of his career and also delves into the contradictions inherent in the conflict between Jefferson’s expressed ideals and the fact that he owned slaves. The book is meticulously researched, and Einboden deserves much credit for unearthing several heretofore unknown Arabic writings by slaves.

I struggled because Einboden repeats himself so much that the book is easily twice as long as it needed to be. Einboden also stretches to find connections, frequently mistaking coincidences or ironies for actual connections.

Further, I found at least five factual errors:
• Einboden identified 1785 as the date of the Constitutional Convention, rather than 1787.
• He identified 1787 as the date when the Bill of Rights was drafted, rather than 1789.
• He said 13 states were needed for ratification of the Constitution, but Article VII stipulates that the Constitution would become effective when it was ratified by only 9 states, and in fact it went into effect with only 12 states having ratified.
• He called the US the world’s newest republic in 1807, overlooking Haiti.
• He identified Harvard, Yale and Princeton as part of the Ivy League, which was not created until 1954.

With better editing, this could have been a first-rate book.

Finally, the narration is better suited to a bodice-ripper than to a piece of scholarship.