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Segment from Islam and the U.S.

O, People of America!

Scholar Ala Alryyes tells the story of an escaped slave who began writing in a mysterious script on the walls of his jail cell in North Carolina. Read more here.

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BRIAN: Welcome to the show. I’m Brian Balogh.

PETER: I’m Peter Onuf.

ED: And I’m Ed Ayers. And we’re going to start today near Fayetteville, North Carolina. It was there, back in 1810, that an escaped slave held in a local jail attracted a flurry of attention. And what drew curiosity seekers were the strange and unknown characters he had written from right to left on the walls of his cell.

ALA ALRYYES: I can’t imagine the characters being very precise, but I can imagine that someone eventually was able to look at them and say, oh, this looks like Arabic.

ED: This is Ala Alryyes, who has written about this man, Omar Ibn Said. Omar knew Arabic, the language of Islam, because he had been an Islamic scholar in West Africa in the years before he was captured and enslaved. After his imprisonment in Fayetteville, Omar was returned to slavery and eventually sold to the prominent Owens family of North Carolina. In the following years, his fame as a slave literate in Arabic steadily grew, which is in part why, a few decades later, he was allowed to write his life story. The Life of Omar Ibn Said, written by himself, was published in 1831.

ALA ALRYYES: So this is the only extant autobiography written in Arabic by a Muslim American slave. Through it, we have access to both his original world– that is, the world he came from, West Africa– and an attempt to negotiate his situation in the US as a slave.

ED: Because Omar was still enslaved when he composed this narrative, it’s perhaps not too surprising that his account of life with the Owenses isn’t very critical. Nor does he seem unhappy about his apparent conversion to Christianity. But Alryyes says that what you see in that document isn’t necessarily what it seems, either when it comes to religion or to his feelings about being owned.

ALA ALRYYES: So one interesting thing about the narrative about his life, his autobiography, is that he opens it with a Quranic sura.

ED: A sura is a chapter of the Quran.

ALA ALRYYES: The sura’s central idea is that God is the one who has the power and the ownership of all things and persons. And opening your slave narrative, as it were, with a text that says that God is only one who has ownership of all things seems to me it could not be just an accidental feature of his autobiography, but a choice that has an organic connection to his possession as a slave, right? In other words, he is using the sura to kind of negate the very possibility that one man can own another man.

ED: In his autobiography, Omar describes how he was taken from the region of current-day Senegal and, quote, “sold into the hands of a Christian man.” In this, Omar was far from alone. As many as 15%, maybe more, of the half-million African slaves who were brought to British North America were Muslim. But within a generation or two, Islam had faded away in America. And that, says Alryyes, is what makes this unique document so important.

ALA ALRYYES: Omar’s autobiography is not the full story, but it is a clear example of the fact that Islam and America did not just meet on September 11, 2001, and that they had a lengthy, complex, and more interesting relationship than that.

PETER: That lengthy, complex, and interesting relationship is what we’re going to be exploring for the rest of the hour today. How has Islam figured into the story of America? And what has it meant to be Muslim here in generations past? We’ve got stories about the rediscovery of Islam by African Americans after slavery and about the very different strains of religious practice imported by immigrants a few decades later.

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Islam and the U.S. Lesson Set

Note to teachers:

In the lesson material that follows, students will have the opportunity to develop and practice several of History’s Habits of Mind. The Habits of Mind provide life-long advantages. They help students build mature thought processes for both learning and living.

In learning about the Founding Fathers’ attitudes toward other religions and their acceptance and toleration of diverse religious beliefs, students can observe the impact made by individuals who have made a difference in history. These men were forerunners of the American way toward a religiously accepting and diverse society. Reading statements of the Founders about religious diversity helps students understand the significance of the past in shaping the present. Learning from primary sources gives authenticity to student learning. But a look at the frustrations of Adams and Jefferson as they attempt to deal with the Barbary States also shows the limitations of individual action and underscores the complexity of historical causation. Adams and Jefferson were representing a weak, disunited country, trying to achieve diplomatic ends on a severely limited budget. These lessons also provide excellent opportunities for students to comprehend the interplay of change and continuity in history. The dialogue between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson over whether military action or diplomatic activity is the best approach to dealing with the Barbary Pirates has echoes in our own time regarding the best approach to preventing a nuclear Iran. The compare and contrast activity for the Barbary Wars and the Gulf Wars also develops this Habit of Mind, as well as helping students to appreciate the often tentative nature of judgments about the past. It is important for students of history to realize that historians disagree. A variety of perspectives come into play as historians make judgments about the past. The research activity exposes students to a variety of secondary sources on the Barbary Wars. They will also develop independent research skills as they learn more about the Gulf Wars of our own time. In addition to developing History’s Habits of Mind and research skills, these lessons provide instruction in the Common Core competencies in reading and in writing arguments supported by evidence. Primary sources appear in both their original form and in modified versions to afford readers with various strengths the opportunity to read documents from the past. Students need guidance in learning how to frame an argument and express a position supported by evidence. The discipline of history is particularly well-suited for developing these skills.