![]() At about 26 years old he became a captive, transported and enslaved in America for forty years. He was a cavalry officer, a father and a husband in his homeland before suffering an unexpected defeat in war in 1788. Prior to being abducted and sold into slavery in America at nearly 40 years old, he had married, had children and had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. According to Sylvaine Diouf, author of Servants of Allah, Omar Ibn Said “ may have been the only person who actually wrote – openly – an autobiography while still enslaved.” 1 His autobiography is the only known surviving American slave narrative written in Arabic.Īs for Ibrahim Sori, he was a prince and amir from the Fouta Djallon region of Guinea, West Africa. Omar Ibn Said for example, was born around 1770 in Futa Toro on the Senegal River to a wealthy family and educated in the Quran and other Islamic religious sciences. It is estimated that nearly thirty percent of the Africans enslaved in the United States Antebellum South were Muslim. In this article, I’ll share why the Timbuktu manuscripts and the writings of African Muslims who were enslaved in America – like Omar Ibn Said and Ibrahim Sori are important to my artistic practice, and why they are an important opportunity for all of us to learn more about ourselves (especially Black people and Muslims) from those who came before us. As an artist who works with archives relating the Black Muslim heritage especially, this is truly exciting for me! There was a world that still persists – where people like Omar Ibn Said – an African scholar, and Ibrahim Sori – an African prince wrote their own ideas and documented their own history in non-European languages. These ideas, innovations and histories are documented in over 40,000 Timbuktu African manuscripts dating as early as the 11th century and have been digitally preserved and recently made available to the public for the first time. There was a world before European enslavers came into contact with West Africa and abducted thousands of Africans from their homeland to enslave them in America.
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