One Nation, Under Gods

by Manseau, Peter

  “Prince was educated and perhaps is still nominally at least a Mahomedian,” the newspaper reporter remarked. “I have conversed with him much upon this subject, and find him friendly disposed to the Christian religion. He is extremely anxious for an Arabic Testament. He has heard it read in English, and admires its precepts. His principal objections are that Christians do not follow them. His reasoning upon this subject is pertinent, and, to our shame, is almost unanswerable.”

  While Omar ibn Said, Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, and Abd al-Rahman each found themselves the accidental beneficiaries of their non-Christian religious backgrounds, most other enslaved Muslims allowed their faith to slip under the surface. Understandably, many who received religious instruction from those who enslaved them or from traveling preachers repeated back the terms of Christian devotion they had been compelled to learn but kept their true religious inclinations hidden. The emergence at this time of a fully blended Muslim Christianity on southern plantations was noticed far more often in the middle of the nineteenth century than is remembered today. Describing what he would have viewed as the poor progress of slaves learning the true religion, the missionary Charles Colock Jones lamented that the “Mohammedan Africans remaining of the old stock of importations, although accustomed to hear the Gospel preached, have been known to accommodate Christianity to Mohammedanism. God, say they, is Allah, and Jesus Christ is Mohammed—the religion is the same, but different countries have different names.”

  Jones and others of his ilk saw this as a general inability on the part of enslaved Muslims to understand Christian revelation, but it more likely reflects an unwillingness to fully reject beliefs and practices smuggled aboard slave ships, even while nominally and pragmatically accepting the terms of the dominant creed. Ignoring the lessons of those who claimed to own them, enslaved men and women clung to what Jones called “dreams, visions, trances, voices—all bearing a perfect or striking resemblance to some form or type which has been handed down for generations.” Jones, whose 1842 book The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States was both a history of plantation-based proselytization and a how-to guide for pious slave owners, regarded the continued spiritual connection of slaves to their old ways as mere obstinance. For others, however, such acknowledgment that enslaved Africans had their own enduring traditions of belief, practice, and learning was the beginning of the realization that they were also entitled to basic human rights.

  Though there was a connection between awareness of the traditions maintained by enslaved Muslims and growing wariness of slavery among some Christians, it would be an overstatement to say that Sheriff Mumford bringing Omar ibn Said to his home suggests he had abolitionist sympathies of his own. He may have simply been an opportunist, or the worst kind of public servant. Omar ibn Said had come into his sphere of influence through his role as an officer of the law, but in short order the escaped slave seems to have become his property. He did not stay long with Mumford, however, but soon came under the authority of one James Porterfield Owen, a general in the War of 1812 and scion of a prominent political family that included a future governor, his brother John.

  Making the best of a bad situation, Omar ibn Said remained with the family of General Owen for the rest of his life. When asked if he would like to leave the Owen plantation, he is said to have responded emphatically, “No no no no no no no.” We know this and other details of his life only because, twenty years after he found himself locked in the Fayetteville jail, twenty years during which his reputation grew and he entered the service of this well-known North Carolina household, he was asked to write the story of his life.

  Composed in Arabic in 1831 but not translated until 1848, The Life of Omar ibn Said, Written by Himself is, like many other slave memoirs of the time, framed as a conversion narrative. Yet to read between the lines is to discover a different story—a story about the surprisingly flexible meaning of religious conversion in American history.

  Instructed to write the story of how he was brought to America and there found the Christian faith, he did so dutifully. The account he produced, however, is not exactly what his Christian patrons must have had in mind. Perhaps pragmatically, he mentioned more than once his newfound belief in Jesus Christ, but before any such affirmation of the tradition he had been compelled to join, he took the opportunity to make his own life story a testimony of and memorial to the way of life from which he had been torn. He had known liberty and autonomy in another language, and so writing in Arabic now, he expressed both the longing to be free, and his judgment against those who had captured him, with a fervor he apparently never expressed off the written page.

  “In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate,” he wrote, beginning his life story with the Basmala, the phrase that begins the Quran itself, as well as 113 of its 114 suras. On the pages that follow, before a single mention of his place of birth, his family, or any other information about his life, he transcribed from memory most of the sixty-seventh sura, Sura al-Mulk, the identifying word of which, mulk, is often translated as “ownership,” “dominion,” or “control.” As the most recent translator of Omar ibn Said’s words, the scholar Ala Alryyes, points out, this meaning makes the sura the “perfect allusion to slavery.” It is fitting, then, that the verses that follow are concerned primarily with divine judgment and wrath directed at those who do not know the true God—the “Christian men” who stole Omar ibn Said and the kafir, infidel, who purchased and abused him.

  “Blessed be He in whose hand is the mulk,” he writes, identifying the source of true ownership or control, no matter the laws that allow one man to presume to own another. This holder of mulk alone “has power over all things.” And as for those others who defile God’s dominion with delusions of their own: “We have adorned the lowest heaven with lamps, missiles to pelt the devils with,” he writes. “We have prepared the scourge of fire for these, and the scourge of Hell for those who deny their Lord: an evil fate! When they are flung into the flames, they shall hear it roaring.”

  Only after establishing through scriptural evidence the punishment due to those who usurp the power of the divine by presuming to own others does Omar ibn Said recount the tale of how he came to be captured, brought to America, and eventually introduced to the Christian faith by the Owen family. He sings their praises as slaveholders who are kinder than most, but presents his conversion with little fanfare—as more of a practical than a heartfelt reshaping of his spirit.

  When he lived in a Muslim land as a follower of Muhammad, he explained, “To pray, I said: Praise be to Allah, Lord of all Worlds, the Compassionate, the Merciful; Sovereign of the Day of Judgment; It is you we worship, and to you we turn for help; Guide us to the straight path; The path of those whom you have favored with grace; Not those who have incurred your wrath; Nor of those who have strayed. Amen.”

  Now that he was in a land of Christians, however, other prayers were required: “And now I pray in the words of our Lord Jesus the Messiah: Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy Kingdom come, thy Will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from the evil one for thine is the Kingdom, the power, and the glory for ever and ever. Amen.”

  By entwining the story of his life with verses from the Quran and an acknowledgment of the new Christian terms to which he must adapt, Omar ibn Said created less a tale of conversion than a syncretic narrative: Like that of so many others, his is a story not of the religious remaking of a people but of a people remaking religious traditions to serve their altered circumstances. Viewed through the lens that understands conversion not merely as a change of heart or the adoption of new beliefs but rather as a negotiation that takes place on the margins of a dominant faith, Omar ibn Said’s entire autobiography becomes an invocation of judgment on those who deserve it. To read of cruelty perpetrated with religious justification is to see
the spiritual unsustainability of slavery laid bare. From the start of his story, when he explains that he was sold in “the Christian tongue,” Omar ibn Said stubbornly asserts, to any Christian who might read his tale, that a supposedly Christian nation has been built on the most un-Christian system imaginable.

  Commenting on Omar ibn Said’s handwritten words in the early twentieth century, the historian John Franklin Jameson proposed that the “earlier pages of the manuscript are occupied with quotations from the Koran which Omar remembered, and these might be omitted as not autobiographical.” Yet it could be argued that the judgment alluded to by these quotations was perhaps the truest expression of Omar ibn Said’s thoughts on the source of the traumas of his later life. His quoted verses serve as reminders of what should have been obvious: that the men and women who had been taken in shackles from Africa brought with them their own religious assumptions, their own religious learning, their own sense of the forces, despite their current circumstances, that controlled the world.

  It was perhaps the very stubbornness of Islam among its adherents that led to its broader impact on American culture. The fact that Muslims who had received religious training, as Omar ibn Said had, could recall elaborate texts and prayers decades after they had last heard or seen the Arabic language challenged Christian preconceptions about the kinds of places their enslaved population had come from, and exactly what kinds of lives they had seen stolen away.

  Reflecting this, there was a noticeable shift in the purposes to which Muslim stories were put in American culture during Omar’s lifetime. Mention of Islam or “Mohammedanism” in the press in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was largely limited to accounts of captivity—white captivity—among the supposedly barbarous Moors. In the year of Omar ibn Said’s capture and transport to the Carolinas, for example, a popular account of one such supposed enslavement of an American in North Africa reworked the traditional tropes of kidnap and spiritual infection that had made tales of whites trapped among the Indians so popular in the previous century. The History of the captivity and sufferings of Mrs. Maria Martin (subtitle: who was six years a slave in Algiers, two of which she was confined in a dark and dismal dungeon, loaded with irons for refusing to comply with the brutal request of a Turkish officer) offered readers a salacious story couched within an overview of the history and religion of the people of Algeria. “Among these are the Moors or Morescos, who were driven out of Spain about the end of the sixteenth century,” the preamble to the book’s action explains, “and the Arabians who trace their descent from those disciples of Mahomet who formerly subdued this country.” The role of Muslims in this and other narratives was to serve mainly as fearful villains in far-off places: dark counterpoints—in complexion and morals—to the virtue of white Americans.

  Yet a half-century before the Civil War, some early abolitionists began to propose that Islam might have something to teach Christianity. This inversion of expectations can be seen in the remarkable trend that emerged in which Muslims who were slave owners in other countries began to be described by Christian opponents of slavery as being fair and just to those they enslaved. The point of such stories, at first, was to shame Christian slaveholders into acting likewise. Shouldn’t followers of Jesus show themselves to be even more magnanimous than the supposedly perfidious Moor?

  An 1810 edition of the New Hampshire Patriot recounted a tale it called “Mohammedan Forbearance,” in which a Muslim is presented as a model of religious devotion and moral uprightness. “With whatever contempt a Christian may regard the faith of Mohammed,” the unsigned writer states, “certain it is, that the strictness with which the observance of religious ceremonies is enforced, the alacrity with which the performance of moral duties is distinguished, and the reverence paid to the Koran by most of his followers, might be usefully imitated by the professors of purer doctrines.” The case in point for this writer was, not accidentally, the treatment of slaves.

  A singular instance of forbearance, arising from the powerful influence of religious principles, is recorded in the history of the Caliphs. A slave one day during a repast, was so unfortunate as to let fall a dish which he was handing to the Caliph Hassan, who was severely scalded by the accident. The trembling wretch instantly fell on his knees, and quoting the Koran, exclaimed: “Paradise is promised to those who restrain their anger.” “I am not angry with thee,” replied the Caliph, with a meekness as exemplary as it was rare. “And for those who forgive offences,” continued the slave. “I forgive thee thine,” answered the Caliph. “But above all, for those who return good for evil,” adds the slave. “I set thee at liberty,” rejoins the Caliph, “and give thee ten dinars.”

  At a time when the abolitionist cause was in its infancy in New England, Islam was used as a parable—a moral instruction that seeks at once to enlighten, and perhaps to embarrass its audience. Not only should slaves be freed, this story suggests, they should be paid reparations. Fifty-five years before some freed slaves were granted “forty acres and a mule” in the last days of the Civil War, it was unheard-of for even the staunchest abolitionists to call openly for such a plan. Yet couched in a story of another place and another faith, such dangerous notions could be put before the conscience of the public. If a Muslim Caliph could heed his supposedly lesser religion’s call to free slaves and improve their lives, how could Christians, even if they held the religion of Muhammad in contempt, not be moved to do likewise? That this was the intended message of the New Hampshire Patriot is reinforced by the newspaper’s slogan, a well-chosen line from James Madison: “Indulging no passion which trespass on the rights of others, it shall be our true glory to cultivate peace by observing justice.”

  Nor was this message always so subtle. Seven years later, the Connecticut Courant published a lengthy report called “Treatment of Negro slaves in Morocco,” calling for Christians to learn moral virtues from those who professed Islam. The abolitionists responsible for the report did not deny that Muslims were implicated in the slave trade—often as owners, sometimes as merchants—but they made the argument that followers of Muhammad treated their captives more humanely than did the followers of Christ.

  The Moors, or Moselmen, purchase their slaves from Tombuctoo.… These slaves are treated very differently from the unhappy victims who used to be transported from the coasts of Guinea, and our settlements on the Gambia, to the West-India islands.… After being exhibited in the souk, or public market-place, they are sold to the highest bidder, who carries them to his home, where, if found faithful, they are considered as members of the family.

  Problematic though it may be as a variant on the infantilizing treatment Africans endured under the Christian yoke, the alternative model of Islamic slavery championed by the abolitionists was based on spiritual principles that would have been familiar to a Christian audience. Leading the enslaved to faith was regarded in both religious environments as a benefit to all.

  Being in the daily habit of hearing the Arabic language spoken, they soon acquire partial knowledge of it; and the Mohammedan religion teaching the unity of God, they readily reject paganism, and embrace Mohammedanism.

  The more intelligent learn to read and write, and afterwards acquire a partial knowledge of the Koran: and such as can read and understand one chapter, from that time procure their emancipation from slavery; and the master exults in having converted an infidel, and in full faith expects favour from heaven for the action, and for having liberated a slave.

  Even for those who were not so quick to learn to read Arabic and recite the Quran, slavery was considered, in the Muslim context (at least as far as the abolitionists believed), a temporary condition. The enslaved within Islam, the article claims, “generally obtain their freedom after eight to ten years of servitude; for the more conscientious Mooselmin consider them as servants, and purchase them for about the same sum that they would pay in wages to a servant during the above period; at the expiration of which term, by giving them their liberty, they,
according to their religious opinions, acquire a blessing from God.” Granting freedom to the enslaved was not an act of charity by which property was sacrificed. It was an opportunity to accumulate merit through an act considered more holy “than the sacrifice of a goat, or even a camel.” Lest this notion fully undermine the social fabric of a nation built on slavery, the article’s author rushes to suggest, “I have known some slaves so attached to their owners from good treatment, that when they have been offered their liberty, they have actually refused it, preferring to continue in servitude.”

  As to the conclusions that Christians should draw from this, the author pulls no punches. “While we contrast the account given above… with the manner in which the negroes have been treated for three centuries past by people calling themselves by the hallowed name of Christian,” he writes, “what can we say other than that, the one with his heart believeth in the religion he professes, and the religion of the other lies only in his lips.” Muslims, in other words, were the true people of faith—at least as far as bringing their beliefs to bear on the practice of slavery was concerned.