This is the next installment of Courage and Consequence — a series about relatively unknown individuals in history who made courageous decisions under extraordinary pressure, and had to live with what followed.
Omar ibn Said needs to be remembered.
The Cell
He was a small man and frail. 
The cell had a fireplace. The fireplace had ashes. In the ashes there were coals.
He took up a coal and wrote on the wall.
He wrote in Arabic, because Arabic was the language of his learning and the language of his prayers. He wrote what he had been taught for twenty-five years to write. He wrote petitions to God. He wrote the names of God. He wrote his own name.
The jailers came and looked. They could not read what he had written. But they understood that whatever he was, he was not what they had supposed him to be.
That was the first thing.
The Scholar
He had been born around 1770 in Futa Toro, a place between two branches of the Senegal River. The country was Muslim and the schools were old. They were part of an intellectual world that reached east to the libraries of Timbuktu. His father was killed when he was five. He was raised by an uncle. He studied under his elder brother, Sheikh Muhammad Said, and under two other teachers. He studied for twenty-five years. He learned the Qur’an. He learned grammar and law and arithmetic. He learned astronomy. He came home and taught.
He was a Fula and he was a scholar and he was a free man.
Then, in 1807, an army came. It killed many men. It took him to the great sea. He was sold to the Christians. He sailed for a month and a half. He came to Charleston. By the next year the United States had closed the overseas trade. He was among the last cargo of the legal traffic. The trade went on anyway, but his crossing was the legal one.
In Charleston a man named Johnson bought him. Of Johnson he wrote, in his own pen and his own language, that he was small, weak, and wicked, a complete infidel who had no fear of God. He kept him at hard labor in the rice fields. After a time, the scholar ran.
He ran north for about a month. He stopped to pray. They took him near Fayetteville and put him in the cell with the coals.
The Owens
The wall-writing made him a curiosity. The town came to look at him. A man named James Owen came also, and James Owen had a brother who would become governor of North Carolina. The Owens bought him. They took him to a plantation in Bladen County called Milton. He was given a small house. He was given a horse. He was set to lighter work because he was not strong.
The Owens were kind in the way the slaveholding gentry sometimes were. They wanted his soul. They procured him an English Qur’an so that the act of reading might draw him toward English. They wrote to John Louis Taylor, Chief Justice of North Carolina, and Taylor wrote to Francis Scott Key, who had written a song about a flag. Key helped them obtain an Arabic Bible from a missionary press in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. They gave it to him in 1819.
On December 3, 1820, he was received into the First Presbyterian Church of Fayetteville. The papers said he had thrown aside the Koran and worshipped at the feet of the Prince of Peace. The papers said many things. Newspapers usually do.
He went to church with the Owens for the rest of his life. He was offered freedom and passage to Liberia, more than once. He refused. He said he did not know whether his family was still alive. He said he was old and feeble. He said little else about it.
He stayed enslaved for fifty-six years.
The Book
In 1831 he was sixty-one. A man named Sheikh Hunter asked him to write his life. He wrote it in Arabic. Fifteen pages of quarto paper. Good paper. The kind a man chooses when he is writing for a posterity he cannot see. It is the only known autobiography by an enslaved person in America written in a language other than English.
He began it where any Muslim scholar would begin. He wrote out, from memory, the sixty-seventh chapter of the Qur’an. The chapter is called Al-Mulk. The word means dominion. It means sovereignty. It means ownership.
The chapter says all things belong to God. Not some things. All things. The chapter says God owns the heavens and the earth and the stars and the bodies of men. It says no one else owns anything, ever.
He wrote that chapter first, and then he wrote his life.
The translator in 1925 thought the chapter was beside the point. He almost cut it. He published it only because he was unsure. He missed what Omar had done.
Omar had begun the autobiography of an enslaved man with a sermon, written in his enslaver’s house, declaring that no man owned him.
After the surah he wrote, in a flat understatement: “From ‘Umar to Sheikh Hunter: You have asked me to write my life. I cannot write my life.”
Then he wrote it.
The Double Tongue
He praised James Owen as a kind man. He may have meant it. He praised the church. He may have meant that too, in part. He wrote that before he came to America his book was the Qur’an, and now it was something else.
But in his Bible, in the margins, he wrote, “Praise be to Allah.” He wrote, “All good is from Allah.” He wrote dedications to Muhammad in a language no one in the Owen household could read.
In 1857, when he was eighty-seven, a visitor at Rockbridge Alum Springs in Virginia asked him to write the Lord’s Prayer in Arabic. The visitor took the document home, satisfied. On the back, the owner wrote a note attesting that the bearer was a devoted Christian. On the front, what Omar had actually written was Surat An-Nasr — the chapter of the Qur’an about people coming into Islam in multitudes. The note attesting to his Christian devotion was written by a man who could not read a syllable of what he had been given.
Modern scholars call this taqiya. It is the Islamic practice of concealing one’s faith under threat. He used it for fifty-six years.
Eighteen of his manuscripts survive, by the latest count. He wrote letters with Qur’anic verses embedded as code. He wrote the Lord’s Prayer for parlor visitors who marveled at the script and never asked what was underneath it. He outlived most of his enslavers. He died at Owen Hill in 1863 or 1864, ninety-three or ninety-four years old, and was buried under a stone that has since been lost.
That was the consequence. He had refused to be erased, and they had not been able to erase him.
The Recovery
The autobiography passed from hand to hand. It disappeared in the 1920s. It was found in a trunk in a Virginia attic in 1995, sold at auction the next year, and acquired by the Library of Congress in 2017. In January 2019 the Library digitized it. Forty-two documents now make up the Omar Ibn Said Collection.
In May 2022 the Spoleto Festival USA premiered an opera by Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels called Omar. In May 2023 it won the Pulitzer Prize for Music. It opened less than a mile from Gadsden’s Wharf, where the small man with the strong pen had first stepped onto the soil of his captivity.
In 2024 a new translation by Mbaye Lo and Carl W. Ernst — I Cannot Write My Life — finally read his Arabic with the care it deserves. It won the American Academy of Religion’s book award.
A mosque in Fayetteville bears his name.
The Lesson
There are courages that take a moment and consume a life. The man who charges the line. The man who refuses the order.
There are also courages that take a life and consume nothing visible at all.
This was the second kind.
Omar ibn Said could not free himself. He could not rescue his people. He could not, in his lifetime, tell the truth out loud. So he did the only thing left to a scholar with a pen.
He wrote the truth in a language his captors could not read. He wrote it on good paper. He laid it down where time could find it.
Time found it.
The record they wrote about him said he had been converted, contented, grateful, transformed. The record he wrote about himself opened with the chapter called Sovereignty.
Both records survive.
Only one of them was written by him.
That is what he gave us.
He gave us his own voice in his own language across two centuries of silence.
He gave us the witness of a literate, brilliant, captive man who refused, day by day for fifty-six years, to disappear into the story other men were telling about him.
Omar ibn Said needs to be remembered.
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Sources: Library of Congress, Omar Ibn Said Collection, African and Middle Eastern Division (digitized 2019); Mbaye Lo and Carl W. Ernst, I Cannot Write My Life: Islam, Arabic, and Slavery in Omar ibn Said’s America (UNC Press, 2024); Ala Alryyes, A Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar Ibn Said (University of Wisconsin Press, 2011); Davidson College Archives & Special Collections; UNC Wilson Special Collections Library; National Endowment for the Humanities; Pulitzer Prize citation for the opera Omar by Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels (2023).
Next in this series: Harriet Jacobs — A Hidden Attic, a Public Book, and a System Indicted.
About the Author
Charles C. Jett is a Naval Academy graduate (Class of 1964), Harvard MBA, Professional Certified Coach (PCC), and the author of Super Nuke! and the architect of the Field Studies methodology endorsed by the U.S. Department of Labor and Harvard. He writes the Courage and Consequence series at criticalskillsblog.com and civicsage.com.