F20 Black Atlantic: Resources, Pedagogy, and Scholarship on the 18th Century Black Atlantic

Omar Ibn Said' Autobiography

This week, in re-reading over Omar ibn Said’s Autobiography and the Osman and Forbes piece, I am reminded of the ways in which Said conflates ideas of nationality, culture, language, and religion. Throughout his narrative, as noted by Osman and Forbes, Said consistently refers to his captors, their culture, and their English language as if they are functions of the Christian religion. When I initially read his narrative, I assumed that this conflation was a result of Said’s own cultural and religious overlap between his Muslim and Fula identities. However, Osman and Forbes have sufficiently convinced me that his conflation of Western white people with Christians was not only a result of their overlapping, but was also an intentional Othering of Christian peoples from an African Muslim Weltanschauung. With this idea in mind, I think that we can read Said’s Autobiography not only as a narrative that celebrates Christian conversion or praises the Owens (his captors), but more deeply as a historical disruption in the history of the Atlantic Slave trade. By this I mean that Said’s narrative challenges Western colonial hegemony by rendering Christians through an equally hegemonic gaze. What is most notable to me is that Said, who is literate prior to his experience of the Middle Passage, brings a unique Islamic/Fula epistemology that decenters the godly authority Christians believe their established colony is ordained by. Yet, Said does not contest this Christian doctrine of dominion, authority, and hierarchy by merely proposing a Muslim counterpoint. Instead, by virtue of writing his narrative in Arabic and imbuing it with Qur’anic scripture, Said refuses a Christian theological structuring of his life, and thus refuses adopting a hegemonic Christian worldview.

While this resistance is evident in Said’s autobiography, it is also important to ask whether or not Said is representative of a wider group of literate Muslim Africans who survived the Middle Passage or if his autobiography is more idiosyncratic. In either case, Said’s narrative speaks to a particular silence or omission in previous understandings of the Black Atlantic archive. While his narrative is not the only Muslim African slave narrative written in the Black Atlantic, his offers a compelling account, written outside of English and Christian paradigms and traditions, ultimately decentering the authority of colonial accounts of the Black Atlantic.
 

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