As he writes, “On the surface, it is Muhammad who brought Islam as the warning to the Kuffar, the infidels who denied him. And every time a multitude is thrown therein, its keepers will say to them: “Did no one come to warn you?” “Yes,” they will reply, “he did come, but we rejected him (as a liar) and said: ‘God has revealed nothing: you are in grave error.'” And they will say: “If only we had listened and understood, we should not now be among the heirs of the Fire.”Īlyrres asks us to consider who is the person who came to warn those suffering in hell. When they are flung into its flames, they shall hear it roaring and seething, as though bursting with rage. The main section of the sura that reverberates over the short narrative are the verses that discuss those who suffer in hell for not accepting the prophet Muhammad’s message. By beginning his narrative with the passage, Said is partaking in the construction of his own narrative, and the passage serves as an undercurrent throughout. but it has been thought best to print the whole.” What constitutes “autobiographical”? When one writes an autobiography, one constructs the text, in whatever way one chooses, presenting information and omitting information. Franklin Jameson deemed this section “not autobiographical.” He wrote, “The earlier pages of the manuscript are occupied with quotations from the Koran which Omar remembered, and these might be omitted as not autobiographical. Said opens the narrative with a passage from the Surat al-Mulk, and in his 1925 translation, J. Rather, Said uses his rhetoric, specifically passages from the Quran, to speak against his enslavement. Of of the only instances where Said directly confronts the institution of slavery occurs near the end of the narrative when he writes, “I reside in our country here because of great harm.” Apart from this, not much appears, at least on the surface, to confront the peculiar institution. Alryyes points out that we need to read it as a subversive text, one that confronts those who enslave Said and others. How then, are we to read Said’s narrative. Would it behoove him to speak openly about the horrors of slavery? No, it would not. Unlike individuals like Frederick Douglass, Harriett Jacobs, Henry Bibb, and more, Said remained enslaved. Alyrres does note that the narrative found its way to ACS member Timothy Dwight and that it appeared in 1831, the same year as Nat Turner’s Rebellion.Īlyrres’ asks, “As terror swept the South in the wake of ‘the Turner Cataclysm,’ were Southern Colonizationists and sympathetic slave owners looking for a ‘good’ slave narrative to counter the effects of Turner’s dangerous example?” This is a question worth considering, and it is a question to keep in mind when reading Said’s narrative. Said tells us that Sheikh Hunter asked him, but Alryyes could not determine Sheikh Hunter’s identity. To show this, we must remember that someone asked Said to write his narrative. However, as Alryyes’ argues, and I do as well, this is far from the truth. Said’s narrative, on the surface, reads like a pro-slavery text written by an enslaved man. There is no, apart from one early instance, any escape. It does not begin with, “I was born.” There is no scene of family separation. As well, Said’s text does not follow the tropes that James Olney and others have identified with the slave narrative tradition. Said’s narrative is not long in fact, it’s less than 15 in Alryyes’ edition.

Alryyes’ introduction provides useful information to situate students in the period, specifically focusing on David Walker’s Appeal and the American Colonization Society. I had students read Ala Alryyes’ introduction to A Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar Ibn Saidand his translation of Said’s text. I plan to write about each of these texts, but today I want to focus on Said’s narrative. For this semester, in my multicultural American literature course, I chose two new texts that I had never read before: Hala Alyan’s Salt Houses and Omar ibn Said’s 1831 narrative. In every class, I choose to teach a few new texts that I have never read.

Omar ibn said manuscripts