Before the Republic

Islam and the Making of Black America

ESSAY ONE  ·  PART TWO OF THREE

Survival as Spiritual Discipline

PREVIOUSLY, FRIDAY, JUNE 19 — PART ONE:  We began with a correction. Islam did not arrive in America with immigrants, or in 1913, or in 1930. It crossed the Atlantic in chains, in the bodies of West African men and women, as many as a third of them Muslim and many of them scholars. We met Job ben Solomon, who made a new prayer cap each time his was destroyed and prayed anyway, and Bilali Muhammad, who wrote Islamic law on the island that gives Sapelo Square its name. Here, we continue with two more men written into the American record and with the question their lives force upon us.

Omar ibn Said: The Autobiography That Begins with Allah

Omar ibn Said was born around 1770 in Futa Toro, in what is now northern Senegal. He was a Muslim scholar who studied under at least twenty-one teachers over the course of a twenty-five-year education, the kind of formation that, in the Islamic world of his time, produced judges, imams, and university professors. He was neither a farmer nor a laborer. He was a man of books.

He was enslaved in 1807 and brought to Charleston, South Carolina. After years of brutal treatment, he escaped and was captured in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where he was jailed. In his cell, he wrote Arabic on the walls. A local observer, recognizing the script, summoned James Owen, a local dignitary who eventually purchased him. Omar ibn Said spent the rest of his long life in relative comfort in the Owen household in Fayetteville, regarded as a curiosity, an exhibit of educated African faith.

In 1831, Omar ibn Said wrote his autobiography. It is fourteen pages long, composed in Arabic, and it begins not with his name, nor his condition, nor a plea, but with Surah Al-Mulk. The sovereignty of God. The first ayah:

“Blessed is He in whose hand is the sovereignty, and He has power over all things.”

Let us sit with that for a moment. A man enslaved for twenty-four years, whose name had been changed and whose freedom had been extinguished, chose to open the story of his life not with his voice but with the voice of Allah. He did not begin with protest. He began with praise.

He did not begin with protest. He began with praise.

Omar ibn Said’s life story is the only surviving autobiography of an enslaved African in America written in Arabic. It is held at the Library of Congress. It begins with Al-Mulk, sovereignty, and ends, in its last pages, with a testimony that has been debated by scholars ever since: a statement that appears to describe his conversion to Christianity. Few scholars today accept the final pages as a genuine conversion; most see evidence of dictation, coercion, or strategic performance. Others observe that a man whose opening salvo was Surah Al-Mulk was not a man who had abandoned his theological convictions.

His name was Omar ibn Said. In the Owen household, they called him Uncle Moreau.

Yarrow Mamout: He Was Here

In 1796, a man named Yarrow Mamout gained his freedom in Maryland after decades of bondage. He was, by all accounts, somewhere between sixty and eighty years old. He purchased a small house in Georgetown. He invested in bank shares. He was known in the Georgetown community as a man of humor and industry, a man who ate no pork and drank no liquor, who prayed regularly and spoke of God without embarrassment.

In 1819, Charles Willson Peale, the same artist who painted many of the Founding Fathers, painted his portrait, a large, detailed oil painting that hangs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art today. He is shown wearing a blue cap, looking directly at the viewer. His expression is composed, shrewd, and alive. He is not pictured in servitude. He is pictured as a man.

A few years later, the Georgetown artist James Alexander Simpson painted Yarrow Mamout as well; that portrait hangs in the Peabody Room of the Georgetown Public Library today. Yarrow Mamout is, to our knowledge, the only enslaved-then-freed African Muslim depicted by the same artist who painted the Founding Fathers.

He was not a Founding Father. But he was there. He was building a house in Georgetown while the Constitution was being debated in Philadelphia. He was praying toward Mecca while James Madison was writing about the separation of church and state.

While the Constitution was debated in Philadelphia, he built a house in Georgetown. He was praying toward Mecca while Madison wrote about the separation of church and state. He was here.

What It Meant to Be Muslim

What did it mean to be Muslim in this land, in this time? What does it mean to fast during Ramadan when there is no community to break the fast with, when the only people who might recognize the date are enslaved people you cannot freely speak to, and when the food placed before you every other day of the year violates every standard of halal consumption you were raised to observe?

What does it mean to pray five times a day when you have no control over your time, when the call to prayer is replaced by a bell summoning you to labor, and when the ground you kneel on belongs to the man who owns your body?

What does it mean to memorize the Qur’an, to hold it entirely in your chest, every word, every pause, and every breath, when the text cannot be physically present, when the book would be confiscated or burned, and when no one around you knows what you are reciting or why?

It means “I carry this.” They cannot take what they cannot see. It means the tradition is carried in the body. It means I will teach my children Al Fatiha before they can read it, so that even if every physical copy of this book is destroyed, Al Fatiha will not disappear. It means I face Mecca from a country that does not know where Mecca is, and my prayer is no less a prayer for that.

It means survival as spiritual discipline. Faith as refusal. Remembrance as resistance.

This is not a metaphor. Bilali Muhammad wrote Islamic legal commentary while managing a plantation. Omar ibn Said opened his autobiography with Surah Al-Mulk. Job ben Solomon made a new prayer cap after someone destroyed the first one and then went back into the woods to pray. These are not symbolic acts. They are the literal practice of Islam under conditions designed to exterminate it.

The Qur’an survived the Middle Passage because human memory survived the Middle Passage, and because human memory survived, we are here.

COMING SUNDAY, JUNE 21 — PART THREE:  If faith were this real, this documented, this learned, then its absence from our textbooks would not be an accident. In the final installment, we turn to what America chose not to remember and to one last man, a prince held forty years in Mississippi, who never stopped praying. And we close where the series begins: with the long memory that outlasted the chains.

Nisa Muhammad is a lover of most things Black and Muslim, especially modest fashion. She is Sapelo Square’s Director of Content and Programs. She has been with Sapelo since the beginning and has served as politics editor and intern coordinator. Dr. Muhammad is the creator of Sapelo’s highly successful Freedom School.