Interchanging Relations: Middle East and US Turbulence

2021

This thesis examines African Muslim slaves and their Arabic writings that influenced their enslavement. The first part of my research considers the historical context that weaves two American presidents together with their distant interaction with Muslim slaves. It also discusses three prominent Muslim slaves in American history: Ayyub bin Suleiman, Abdul Rahman Ibrahima, and Omar ibn Said. Throughout the discussion of the lives of these three men, I analyze their Arabic writing and their use of mimicry throughout, and the ways in which this influenced their patrons’ views of them. The second part explores their differing levels of Arabic literacy and how they were subject to varying degrees of Arabization and exoticization. The last part discusses the absence of their writing in the field of American literature and the American slave narrative genre while arguing for their inclusion in these areas.

It has been ordinary to talk about how the Third World is misrepresented in American and European narratives, literature and all sorts of media. Many theorists have been and are still inventing new terms by which they describe the ―Othering‖ of the colonized to reflect the superego of the ―Self‖. In his Orientalism, Edward Said explains elaborately how Arabs are mistreated in those narratives and films that show them in a very negative and passive attitude. It is too vague whether those representations reflect reality or just aim to distort the portrayal of Arab natives for the rest of the world. Many claims say such colonial writings aim mainly in legislating colonialism. Orientalists who visited Arab countries managed their writings to glorify their nations, culture and lands by means of subverting histories, cultures and religions of other nations. These people succeeded in recommending their own cultures and civilizations as the idealized examples from which others should learn. In brief, they neglected the history and identity of the colonized as Daniel Defoe does in his Robinson Crusoe by letting the story‘s European protagonist give a new name and a new identity to the native Friday, as if the later was not born except in the moment of being saved by the European hero. Accordingly, people have started to believe in such stereotype. America is drawn so beautifully to the rate that makes non-westerners dream of it as a paradise on earth, the land of dreams and the heart of liberty and equality. Hundreds of thousands of peoples from the so called the Third World started their voyages to America to look for luxuries they had heard of and dreamt of. Whether they found what they expected or not can be discovered in their reactions through their diaries, anthologies and narratives. Their reactions, as explained in sections 5 of this study are varied. Some never liked what they saw. Others enjoyed being there but did not notice all that exaggerated descriptions they had heard of. In short, America is like any other place of the world where one has to work hard to live, but even worse for reasons of materiality as explained in this study when analyzing some Arab narrative writers about this spot of the world. Why to hate America or why to admire it can be derived from within certain interests of those who portrayed America in their writings, TV programs or international press. However, because of time constrains, this paper focuses on a number of Arab travelers narratives about the USA. This paper is intended to analyze writings of some Arab writers who went to America for various purposes and revealed what they felt during their visits in their travel accounts. Their reactions depend on the purposes of their visits, the image they had drawn and the religious perspective they owned. Accordingly I will attempt to make a general but short detailed analysis of these writings.

Damascus University Journal, 2005

Arabic slave narratives, written by Muslim Africans, are records of protest against slavery in America left by ex-slaves. In these narratives, there is the slave narration and there is the reformist editor; therefore, authenticity of the narratives is in doubt, for being used as abolitionist propaganda. An ex-slave, Omar Ibn Said, left more than fourteen manuscripts; only one of these was translated into English in 1836. The authors of these narratives, focusing on the slave’s being converted into Christianity, directed the style since they had the freedom to re-narrate and control what was said and published as in the narratives of Selim of Algeria and Prince Abdul Rahaman. These Arabic narratives found no way for publication, since they used the Arabic language. What have been published were translated excerpts from the original manuscripts or oral translations. Despite their shortcomings, Arabic slave narratives were contributions to the American cultural history in the nineteent...

The Historian, 2008

The author of this study has written a fascinating book that examines two centuries of African American journeys to Africa. Using representative individuals for successive generations, James T. Campbell explains Africa's persistent hold on African Americans. The cast of characters includes the famous Langston Hughes and W. E. B. DuBois and the less known Ayuba Suleiman Diallo and William Henry Sheppard. Suspended between two continents and cultures, such men harbored ambivalence toward America, where they faced slavery, racism, discrimination, and lack of economic opportunity. At the same time, cultural echoes of Africa reverberated through their subconscious and the continent of their forefathers exerted a powerful and mysterious pull. The result was an amalgam of unrealistic expectations and journeys to Africa that rarely exceeded expectations. The long shadow of colonization and its tragic consequences stalk the book's pages. Liberia and, to some extent, Sierra Leone show there was a uniquely American quality about returning to Africa. Emigrants did not want to become Africans but wanted to create a society where they were free to enjoy the privileges denied them in North America. As Campbell archly observes, "early proponents of African emigration revealed just how profoundly American they were" (30). Even though Liberia was an obvious failure, colonization was fairly popular in the 1850s and it experienced resurgence thirty years later. That repatriation to a fetid and dangerous nation could hold such sway is testimony to the bleak prospects that African Americans faced in the United States. African American missionaries regarded Africa as particularly fertile ground for the spread of the Gospel. They were, perhaps, too successful, and pressure from European colonial officials forced American churches to limit the number of black missionaries. Campbell ironically notes that during the nadir of race relations in the United States, a movement emerged where African Americans tried to spread the blessings of Christianity and American civilization. Intellectuals and journalists went to Africa with high hopes of finding paradise or being automatically accepted in society. Langston Hughes, for instance, famously threw his books overboard as a symbolic jettisoning of European culture. Ironically, Africans assumed the light-skinned Hughes was a white man. The indifference of Africans was a startling eye-opener.

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2018

Literate African Muslim slaves were differentiated from the rest of the slaves and given a special status and some of them could leave back to Africa having shown their unworthiness of slavery. African Muslim slaves in British North America have left important biographical and autobiographical evidence of their presence. Literacy was the key factor in a context where a literate African slave was an oxymoron in antebellum America whose vision of the world was governed by the dominant white racial frame. The racial discourse of Enlightenment admitted the presence of exceptions to the general rule of Africa as devoid of any attainments of civilization: this was prompted by the presence of literate Africans; literacy was a sign of reason that gave enlightened Europeans and Americans a pause for thought regarding Africa that soon dissolved into the sea of a dominant white racial frame. Muslims were not exempted from racism even though they were placed above illiterate Africans. Orientalism preached a different type of racism based on culture not on biology. In the midst of it all, African Muslim slaves worked hard to maintain their identity through writing, ritual practice, using their Arabic names. Literacy put them on equal cultural footing with intellectuals of the time but that did not change the asymmetrical relationship of power in favour of the white slave owner.

Journal of Global Slavery, 2016

The concept “second slavery” as applied to the resurgence of slavery as a factor of production in the Americas in the nineteenth century emphasizes radical changes in the economies of the Atlantic world. The expansion of slavery in the southern United States, Cuba and Brazil occurred in the context of the emergence of an independent Haiti, where slavery had once been dominant but was now abolished, and where the British shifted from being the most important nation in the slave trade to the champions of its abolition, ultimately emancipating the slaves in their colonial empire. The comparable expansion in slavery that occurred in Islamic West Africa as a result of jihad in the same era must be placed in the context of other developments in the Atlantic world. Unlike second slavery in the Americas, developments in the jihad states resulted in economic autonomy, not the growth of the global economy.

Millars, 2017

Sa'id, que tomó el nombre de Nicholas Said después de haber sido bautizado, procedía del estado musulmán de Borno en la década de 1850. Seguirá un periplo que le llevará a través del Sahara hasta La Meca, Istambul y San Petersburgo. Posteriormente viajó como criado por Europa occidental, el Caribe y Norteamérica. Su trayectoria desde que era hijo de un poderoso general y gobernador en Borno hasta su estatus esclavo en el Imperio otomano y, después, como sirviente libre entre la nobleza rusa, le llevó por último a alistarse en el 55º regimiento de Massachusetts integrado completamente por negros durante la Guerra Civil en los Estados Unidos.

This paper briefly surveys the early American perceptions of Muslims as reflected in the Barbary-related literature, and follows some of the traces of that past in Today's American culture. The four themes of traditional European Orientalism can be easily found in the early American literature on Barbary: Islam is portrayed in this literature as the religion of political tyranny, anti-Christian darkness, sensual pleasures, and oppression of women. What is new in this study is the American context in which these themes function. Timothy Marr believes that Islam was used by the early Americans as a " cultural enemy " , an " oppositional icon " that helped the new nation build its own identity. This rhetorical use of Islam against internal and external enemies seems to have responded to an American need for creating a new nation's self-consciousness. Marr called this internalization of Islam " domestic Orientalism " and its external projection " imperialism of virtue " .

Journal of the Early Republic