Omar ibn Said was enslaved in 1807 in Senegal and died enslaved in America in 1863 at around ninety years old. He was buried in the family plot of his enslaver, and while he was alive, newspaper articles were written about him that stressed how noble he was – some said he was the son of a rich merchant, others the son of a chief or king – and above all that he was a Muslim convert to Christianity who attended church services with his owner’s family as if they were his family. Today, Omar stands for a different story. In 2019, Roy Cooper, the governor of North Carolina, declared 23 May to be Omar ibn Said Day in recognition that he ‘wrote 14 manuscripts including the only surviving autobiography written by a slave in their native language currently housed in the Library of Congress’. In Cooper’s proclamation, Omar is made to represent all of the enslaved whose lives went unrecognized and whose contributions to America went unacknowledged and uncompensated. This is how history changes. For the better, we hope.

The authors of this book have a more ambitious agenda, one for which their backgrounds as scholars of Sufi Islam and African Islam make them especially well equipped. They want to restore Omar as a Muslim and to remind us that Islam in West Africa south of the Sahel has a long pedigree, but also that African Islam is often dismissed as not locally authentic or overlooked as not as sophisticated as Islam elsewhere, and that this erasure has its roots in the era of the transatlantic slave trade. Pro-slavery ideology in the nineteenth century required uncivilized and pagan Africans. Muslims, because they were literate and therefore arguably civilized, were removed from the imaginary Africa as foreign, even as an emerging missionary movement found that Arabic could be useful as a linguistic entrée to West African societies.

Omar’s ‘autobiography’ (Mbaye Lo and Carl Ernst always put this word in scare quotes) was first translated in 1831, when he was sixty years old, and it has been translated a handful of times since. Yet, the authors insist, such translations were marred by the linguistic shortcomings of the translators, and above all by their prejudices. Omar wrote in Arabic when he quoted the Qur’an and he was likely fluent in Arabic as it was the lingua franca among co-religionists in his homeland. He also wrote in Ajami, the Arabic-derived script that West African Muslims used to transliterate other languages – in Omar’s case both his own native tongue and the English he heard spoken around him in North Carolina. By Omar’s telling, he was in a Muslim school for over twenty years. Although they stress that the ostensible autobiography tells us very little about him as a man, they make much of a phrase, ‘I cannot write my life’, to characterize that era and Omar’s place in it.

That Omar wrote made him extraordinary in his lifetime – a celebrity. Captured in a raid on Fulbe in Futa Toro by ‘anti-Islamic’ Bamana (p. 17), he was sold in Charleston and then escaped, only to be captured and held in jail, where the Arabic phrases that he scratched on the wall eventually caught the attention of James Owen, the governor of North Carolina and one of the largest plantation owners in the state. Owen purchased Omar and kept him as a sort of pet. While in Owen’s care, he scribbled, in Arabic letters, phrases that Owen gave as gifts to various friends and acquaintances in his circle. Those Arabic phrases he wrote and gave as keepsakes were said to be snippets from the Bible – evidence of conversion. Photographs of Omar (one graces the book’s cover) also survived because they seemed to signal a pro-slavery narrative. They show a man who might easily be described as dignified, intelligent, comfortable and at ease with himself, and this ease could be seen as a reflection of his enslaver’s generosity. As one owner of a photograph wrote on the back: Omar ‘was treated as a pensioner and friend the remainder of his life’ (p. 157).

For Lo and Ernst, this story of Omar the comfortable and Christian slave was entirely a fiction. Omar could not write his life because few could read what he wrote and therefore they projected their prejudices onto the pages he produced. When his autobiography was translated, crucial passages were dismissed as incomprehensible. Lo and Ernst offer an updated translation that reveals how much he remained a Muslim and how deeply educated in Islamic Sufi traditions he was. Despite spending decades away from his homeland, he could quote from memory not only important passages from the Qur’an but also other texts associated with the Sufi tradition. ‘I cannot write my life’, the authors emphasize, emerges from such a Sufi ethic. If it were merely an apology about forgetting how to write, then it is immediately contradicted by the words he inerrantly remembered and recorded. Omar ibn Said could not write his life as a standard autobiography. How he experienced his captivity is, unfortunately, lost to us. But he could write his religion. And this fact reminds us that the Muslim faith is old in Africa and that Muslim Africans were more common than we used to imagine among the 388,000 Africans transported to America as chattel slaves. Omar’s texts, Lo and Ernst hope, will insert Islam into the root of America.