Omar ibn Said

Omar ibn Said (about 1770 – 1864) was a Fula Muslim scholar from Futa Toro in present-day Senegal who was captured in 1807, carried across the Atlantic, and spent the remaining fifty-seven years of his life enslaved in North Carolina. He wrote fourteen manuscripts in Arabic, among them the short autobiography of 1831 that is the only known Arabic autobiography by a person enslaved in the United States. He was also known as Uncle Moreau and Prince Omeroh.¹²

He was born about 1770 to a wealthy family in Futa Toro, an Islamic state on the middle Senegal River. There he spent twenty-five years studying with prominent Muslim scholars, learning subjects that included mathematics, astronomy, business and theology. In 1807 he was captured during a military conflict and transported to the United States. He escaped from a cruel enslaver in Charleston, South Carolina, and made his way to Fayetteville, North Carolina, where he was recaptured and jailed; there his Arabic writing on the jail walls drew attention, and he was sold to James Owen, whom his autobiography describes as gracious towards him. The Owen family, impressed by his education, gave him an English translation of the Qur'an and, with Francis Scott Key's help, an Arabic translation of the Bible. Offered more than one chance to return to Africa, he chose to remain, uncertain that his family and people were still intact. He lived into his mid-nineties, still enslaved at his death in 1864, and was buried in Bladen County.¹³

Of his fourteen Arabic manuscripts, the best known is The life of Omar ben Saeed, called Morro, a Fullah Slave in Fayetteville, N.C., written in 1831 and now held by the Library of Congress, which acquired it in 2017. It describes events of his life and reflects, in the English article's reading, his steadfast adherence to Islam and his openness towards other God-fearing people; it opens with Surat al-Mulk, a chapter about God's sole sovereignty over human beings. His other manuscripts include copies of short Qur'anic chapters, now in the North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina, and a letter of 1819 to Major John Owen, James Owen's brother, dense with Qur'anic references and geometric figures. His Arabic-annotated Bible is held at Davidson College.¹²

It is often said that Omar ibn Said converted to Christianity in 1820. The English article states plainly that this conversion is disputed. Against the claim stand his own writings: dedications to Muhammad in his Bible; a card of 1857 on which he copied Surat an-Nasr, a chapter about people entering Islam in multitudes, whose reverse another hand mislabelled as the Lord's Prayer; and an autobiography that still praises Muhammad and speaks of Jesus as "the Messiah" and "our master", framings the article notes are the Qur'an's own. Literary analysis cited there suggests he wrote for two audiences at once — the white readers who wished to use his supposed conversion, and Muslim readers who would recognise the Qur'anic devices — and one scholar argues his spiritual ambiguity may have been deliberately cultivated. The Urdu article's text says he was pressed to accept Christianity but kept Islam in his heart, although its categories file him among converts to Christianity; the French article, a translation of the English one, adds "Sunni Islam" in its infobox alone. The museum records what the sources support: a Muslim scholar whose claimed conversion his own writings contradict, and for whom no source names a madhhab or order. His faith value therefore stands as unknown, with every reading preserved in the data record.¹⁴³

In 1991 a mosque in Fayetteville renamed itself Masjid Omar ibn Sayyid in his honour. The opera Omar, by Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels, based on his life, premiered at the Spoleto Festival in Charleston in 2022 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2023.¹

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