Born to a wealthy family in West Africa around 1770, Omar Ibn Said was abducted and sold into slavery in the United States, where he came to the attention of a prominent North Carolina family after filling the walls of his room with piteous petitions to be released, all written in the Arabic language, as one local newspaper reported. Ibn Said soon became a local celebrity, and in 1831 he was asked to write his life story, producing the only known surviving American slave narrative written in Arabic.
In A Muslim American Slave, scholar and translator Ala Alryyes offers both a...