The first time I saw a photograph of Omar ibn Said, when I was a young photographer, I felt as if he was speaking to me. I took away one simple instruction: Remember.
Born in 1770 in what is now Senegal, ibn Said was a member of the Fula people, a devout Muslim and a scholar. When he was 37, he was seized in a raid on his village. He was most likely forced onto a boat that carried him to Saint-Louis, the city that would become the capital of French West Africa, and, eventually, across the Atlantic to Charleston, S.C. He was first enslaved there, and later in North Carolina, where he died in 1863.
I came across ibn Said’s image in the late 1990s during a presentation by the historian Sylviane A. Diouf on her book “Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas.” Ms. Diouf spoke about the lives of enslaved Muslims and their efforts toward liberation and self-determination, including writings in Arabic discovered in Panama, Brazil and the Eastern Seaboard of the United States.
Memory is a powerful tool of resistance. I believe ibn Said knew that. He wrote an autobiography in Arabic in 1831: one of 18 surviving texts he penned. Together they offer a rare glimpse into the interior life of an African Muslim scholar enslaved in America. Before he was captured, he devoted 25 years to Islamic scholarship, including the study of the Quran, hadith and Sufism. Much of what he wrote in the Carolinas returns to those years. From memory, he wrote verses from the Quran and lines of Sufi poetry on subjects like justice and God’s sole dominion over the earth, composed prayers and drew elaborate geometric talismans. He mentioned his mother, Umm Hani Yarmak, often in this writing. He also referred often to the family who held him until his death — the Owens — and transcribed Christian scripture, without ever explicitly saying he had converted.
In one letter from 1819, he wrote of his desire to return home: “I wish to be seen in our land called Africa, in a place on the river.”
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