Muslim Slave Narratives
Written 100 years after Job’s memoirs, Said’s narrative is much shorter, follows a similar structural blueprint. Jameson first lays out the provenance of the text before shifting to the translated narrative, which Said originally wrote in Arabic. Although Said’s narrative isn’t as heavy-handed as Job’s in its appeal to Christian religious ideology, Said’s conversion to Christianity does figure prominently in the text. However, this conversion seems to be in name only, as the text indicates that Said likely retained his Islamic faith. Notably, both Job and Said were imprisoned for vagrancy after running away from abusive masters. Also notable is that Said’s narrative, like Job’s, is not a narrative of liberation. Job’s does eventually purchase his freedom, but that feat is hardly the focus of the text. At the end of Said’s narrative, he is still enslaved and remarks upon the kindness and gentleness of his master, Jim Owen, by whom he has been owned for 20 years at the time of his writing. The two Muslim slave narrators thus significantly expand the expected terrain of the slave narrative as a genre, which compels the reader to analyze the text beyond familiar tropes.