The second artifact is a card bearing Said's Arabic script. May God have mercy on the prophet Mohammed." In this document, Said had appended a traditional Muslim invocation to a holy text of the Judeo-Christian tradition-in a language which his master(s) could not understand. The re-translation reveals that the psalm is prefaced with the statement, "In the name of God, the merciful and gracious. Wilson of the Princeton Theological Seminary. The first is a transcription of the 23rd Psalm, which Said recorded in Arabic and which was later translated back into English by Professor R.D. Two surviving artifacts of Said's Arabic writing provide insights into the complicated interplay betweenChristianity and Islam during his life as an American slave. Surat al Mulk transcribed by Omar bin Said (1770-1864) He is believed to have died at the age of 94 (circa 1864), but the exact circumstances of his death are unclear. In 1836, Said moved with the Owen family to Wilmington, North Carolina, and again to a farm on the Cape Fear River during the Civil War. In any case, Said's (apparent) conversion to Christianity rendered him a celebrity of sorts, and his story-with an emphasis on his conversion-was recounted in several magazines and historical pamphlets. But now I pray 'Our Father,' etc., in the words of our Lord Jesus the Messiah," Said writes (p. He never explicitly rejects Islam, the religion of his upbringing, or professes faith in a Christian God rather, Said focuses on the linguistic differences between his old and new prayers. The anonymous author of The Christian Advocate article proclaims Said's conversion from "the Mahomedan religion" to Christianity, noting that after receiving an Arabic translation of the Bible, he "now reads the scriptures in his native language, and blesses Him who causes good to come out of evil by making him a slave." Said's own language, however, reflects more ambiguity about his religious beliefs than do the accounts of his Christian admirers and advocates. One of the tantalizing mysteries surrounding Said involves his religious faith, or faiths. Said garnered attention by writing on the walls of his prison cell in Arabic, and he soon became the legal property of General James Owen of Bladen County, who recognized Said to be an educated man and, according to Said's autobiography, treated him well. After he was enslaved and sold to a South Carolina planter, Said escaped and made his way to Fayetteville, North Carolina, where he was imprisoned after entering a Christian church to pray. Omar ibn Said (also referred to as Omeroh, Umeroh, Moro, Morro, Meroh, Moreau, and Monroe) was born around 1770 in an African region then called Futa Toro, near the Senegal River, which now forms Senegal's northern border with Mauritania. In July 2013, 1182 years after he first recorded his story, Documenting the American South commemorates the life of Omar ibn Said (and other enslaved African Muslims), highlighting several items from our digital collection of North American Slave Narratives. In 1831 Said composed his autobiography (in Arabic) the manuscript was later translated and published in the American Historical Review. In July 1825, a Philadelphia journal, The Christian Advocate, published a short biographical sketch of "Prince Moro" by an unnamed "physician at Fayetteville, in North Carolina." The piece describes a remarkable runaway slave who, after being captured and jailed in Fayetteville, "wrote in a masterly hand, writing from right to left, in what was to an unknown language." The unknown language was Arabic, and the remarkable runaway was Omar ibn Said, an African Muslim who had studied arithmetic, business, and theology before he was enslaved, shipped across the Atlantic, and sold in Charleston, South Carolina, at age 37.
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