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From: H-Net Staff <revhelp@mail.h-net.msu.edu>
Date: March 23, 2012 8:57:58 AM EDT
To: <H-REVIEW@H-NET.MSU.EDU>
Subject: H-Net Review Publication: Green on Alryyes, 'A Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar Ibn Said'
Reply-To: H-Net Staff <revhelp@mail.h-net.msu.edu>
Ala A. Alryyes. A Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar Ibn Said.
Madison University of Wisconsin Press, 2011. xii + 222 pp. $19.95
(paper), ISBN 978-0-299-24954-0; ISBN 978-0-299-24953-3.
Reviewed by Hilary Green (Elizabeth City State University)
Published on H-Empire (March, 2012)
Commissioned by Charles V. Reed
Reevaluating Islam and Slavery in the Antebellum United States
Ala Alryyes has made a valuable contribution to the understanding of
the religious and intellectual lives of enslaved persons in the
antebellum United States with the new English translation and
contextual essays of _A Muslim American Slave:_ _The Life of Omar Ibn
Said._ This critical study explores the history of Islam in America
through the narrative of Ibn Said and its various interpretations by
missionaries, proslavery advocates, and scholars. The work's main
contribution is the new English translation of the Ibn Said's
narrative itself. By presenting Ibn Said's Arabic text alongside
Alryyes' English translation on facing pages, the book adds a degree
of authenticity to the slave narrative, many of which had been
assumed by an earlier generation of scholars to be fictitious
accounts written by former slaves in collusion with abolitionists.
Moreover, this translation offers insights into the shifting
historical interpretations of Ibn Said's narrative from its
publication in 1831 to the Isaac Bird translation that appeared in
the _American Historical Review_ in 1925. This translation and the
encompassing introductory essay offer further insights into how early
historians used Ibn Said's narrative to forward particular
narratives of slavery, Islam in the United States, slave resistance,
and the antebellum religious traditions of African Americans.
Like the American Colonization Society missionaries, slaveholders,
and ethnographers who endorsed Ibn Said's narrative, Alryyes astutely
shows how J. Franklin Jameson and early readers of the _American
Historical Review_ translation misread Ibn Said's narrative by
ignoring his use of Arabic, the Quran, and literacy as tools of
resistance and subterfuge. Rather, Jameson and other early scholars
of slavery used Ibn Said's narrative, like other slave narratives, to
promote a more sanguine image of slavery in which slaves happily
toiled on plantations under the guidance of their benevolent
Christian slaveowners, who only meted out light punishments when
necessary. While the author fails to discuss this popular
interpretation of the "peculiar institution" or its overturning
beginning in the 1960s, Alryyes convincingly demonstrates the ways in
which scholars have continued earlier interpretations, such as
viewing Ibn Said and other Muslim slaves in the United States as
novelties or as exceptions to the predominant Christian religious
culture of African Americans. This definitive study rectifies
previous misinterpretations.
The contextual essays by Alryyes and other historians of slavery
firmly place the narrative into historical context. These essays
capture the truly global context in which Ibn Said lived. One gains
deeper knowledge of how Ibn Said's narrative compares with other
slave narratives written by Muslim Americans in the essays by Allan
Austin and Michael Gomez. Ghada Osman and Camille Forbes's literary
analysis reveals how Ibn Said continued to adhere to a sense of self
and an African identity through his writings and critiques on the
West, Christianity, and African American slaves. Robert Allison's and
Sylviane Diouf's complementary essays provide the necessary American
historical context of Ibn Said's world at the time he wrote his
autobiography and the African historical context at the time of his
capture and sale to the Atlantic slave trade that was missing from
the opening introductory essay by Alryyes.
Interestingly, neither Alryyes' introduction nor the other essays
contextualize how U.S. historians viewed slave narratives as
"fiction" at the time the _American Historical Review_ translation
appeared. By not acknowledging this major historiographical debate,
one can easily overlook the significance of J. Franklin Jameson's
recommendation that readers ignore the Quranic verses "remembered" by
Ibn Said "as not autobiographical" (p. 83). Furthermore, its
inclusion would further demonstrate the importance of the new
translation and study among scholars of slavery, African American
religion, and Islam in the United States. Just as Islam operated
outside the purview of mainstream American religious culture until
more favorable conditions emerged in the twentieth century, as
Alryyes poignantly points out in the introduction, likewise, more
favorable conditions toward the importance of slave narratives,
Islam, and slave resistance were necessary in order to more fully
understand Ibn Said's narrative, his religiosity, and his adherence
to an African identity rather than an African American identity.
Notwithstanding, this critical study will enrich any undergraduate
and graduate seminar on slavery, religion, literary resistance, and
the development of an African American Islamic tradition under
slavery.
Citation: Hilary Green. Review of Alryyes, Ala A., _A Muslim American
Slave: The Life of Omar Ibn Said_. H-Empire, H-Net Reviews. March,
2012.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=35270
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.
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