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2 Early Southern Religions in a Global Age Jon Sensbach In 1831 an African-born slave in Fayetteville, North Carolina, put his life story to paper. Most slaves in the antebellum South could not read or write, but this author had been raised and schooled a Muslim, and his narrative ran to fifteen pages of Arabic script. Like any autobiography, it captures a piece of the world in miniature, but the world this narrator knew was perhaps more expansive than most. “My name,” he wrote, is Omar ibn Said. My birthplace was Fut Tur, between the two rivers. . . . Before I came to the Christian country, my religion was the religion of Mohammed, the Apostle of God—may God have mercy upon him and give him peace. . . . I sought religious knowledge under the instruction of a Sheikh called Mohammed Seid, my own brother, and Sheikh Soleimon Kembeh. . . . I walked to the mosque before daybreak, washed my face and head and hands and feet, I prayed at noon, prayed in the afternoon, prayed at sunset, prayed in the evening. I went every year to the holy war against the infidels. I went on pilgrimage to Mecca, as did all who were able. . . . I continued my studies twenty-five years, and then returned to my home where I remained six years. Then there came to our place a large army, who killed many men and took me, and brought me to the great sea, and sold me into the hands of the Christians, who bound me and sent on board a great ship and we sailed upon the great sea a month and a half, when we came to a place called Charleston in the Christian language. There they sold me to a small, weak, and wicked man named Johnson, a complete infidel who had no fear of God at all. Now I am a small 46 · Jon Sensbach man, and unable to do hard work, so I fled from the hand of Johnson and after a month came to a place called Fayd-il [Fayetteville]. When I left my country I was thirty-seven years old; I have been in the country of the Christians for twenty-four years.1 From this brief narrative we can reconstruct some of the essentials of Omar ibn Said’s life. He would have been born in about 1770 in presentday Senegal, between the Senegal and Gambia Rivers in West Africa. He was evidently the son of a well-to-do family that could afford to send him to a Muslim academy, perhaps even to the great Malian University at Timbuktu. Without a doubt the dominant aspect of this early part of his life would have been the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that he mentions almost casually, one of the five pillars of Islam that involved an extraordinarily arduous journey lasting years and from which not everyone returned. From West Africa, long caravans of the faithful made their way by camel slowly across the Sahara, tracking Muslim trade routes and commercial towns, more than three thousand miles to Cairo and down the Arabian peninsula to the holy city. “The point of a pilgrimage, of course,” according to historian Richard Wunderli, “is movement: from the mundane to the mysterious, from normal time and space to enchanted time and space, from homes and familiar surroundings to the unfamiliar ‘light’ of a holy place.” In Mecca, the shrine of sacred renewal, Said would have mingled with thousands of pilgrims from around the Muslim world, all “temporarily freed from their worldly bonds of rank and status.” Perhaps he stayed in Mecca for weeks or months, resting and basking in this holy light before turning north and west again across the desert, his duty to Allah fulfilled. The perilous journey home took many months, and Said was fortunate to survive it, as few did.2 Once returned, and newly snared in the slaving wars that still plundered West Africa in the early nineteenth century, this former pilgrim would have been thrust into exactly the opposite experience during the Middle Passage to America. The stinking hold where he was shackled with hundreds of captives for six weeks was a desolate, unholy place, a desacralized conveyor of imprisonment and death, utterly profane except for whatever spark of the sacred the enslaved Africans could keep alive amid the blasphemy around them. And so, having moved from enchanted to disenchanted time and space, Omar ibn Said emerged from the slave ship in Charleston in...

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