Overview

"Born to a wealthy family in West Africa around 1770, Omar Ibn Said was abducted and sold into slavery in the United States, where he came to the attention of a prominent North Carolina family after filling ""the walls of his room with piteous petitions to be released, all written in the Arabic language,"" as one local newspaper reported. Ibn Said soon became a local celebrity, and in 1831 he was asked to write his life story, producing the only known surviving American slave narrative written in Arabic. In A Muslim American Slave, Ala Alryyes offers both a definitive translation and an authoritative edition of this singularly important work, lending new insights into the early history of Islam in America and exploring the multiple, shifting interpretations of Ibn Said's narrative by the nineteenth-century missionaries, ethnographers, and intellectuals who championed it. This edition presents the English translation of Ibn Said's Arabic narrative, augmented by Alryyes's comprehensive introduction, contextual essays and historical commentary by leading literary critics and scholars of Islam and the African diaspora and other writings by Omar Ibn Said. The result is an invaluable addition to our understanding of writings by enslaved Americans and a timely reminder that ""Islam"" and ""America"" are not mutually exclusive terms."

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Omar Ibn Said was a Fula Islamic scholar from Futa Toro in West Africa who was enslaved and transported to the United States in 1807. There, while enslaved for the remainder of his life, he wrote a series of Arabic-language works on history and theology, including a short autobiography. Amir Abdullah (he/him/his) is an actor, playwright, and audiobook narrator residing in Los Angeles. He has been seen on stage at Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, The Geffen Playhouse, The Edinburgh Fringe Festival, California Shakespeare Theatre, A Noise Within Theatre, and other theaters around the US. On screen, Amir most recently appeared on Chicago Med and on the last season of Empire and has been seen on other network shows and films. As a narrator, he is a four-time Golden Earphone Award winner and an ALSC Notable Children's Recording recipient. Most known for narrating the YA series Tristan Strong, he has lent his voice to dozens of other prolific authors' works such as Ibram X. Kendi, Kwame Mbalia, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Dubois, Eric Jerome Dickey, and more. You can hear him as the voice of Yasir in the videogame Abo Kashem and in the HP Lovecraft Society Radio Plays and as a regular on the Open Door Playhouse. He can be seen and heard in commercials for Ford, Adidas, Kaiser Permanente, and Facebook, as well as many others. As an actor Amir won Best Actor at the Movieville International Film Festival for his work in the film The Untimely Concurrence. Amir's playwriting debut, Pray to Ball, had its world premiere at Skylight Theatre Company in Los Angeles and won the Ovation Award for Best Set. He graduated with an MFA in acting from Pennsylvania State University and a BFA in acting from the University of Miami. Ala Alryyes is associate professor of comparative literature and English at Yale. He is author of Original Subjects: The Child, the Novel, and the Nation. He lives in Brooklyn.

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