A Slave Memoir Becomes an Opera
Omar Ibn Said died in 1863 at the age of ninety-three, an ocean away from where he was born. He was known as “Uncle Moreau,” and his obituary in the Raleigh, North Carolina, Weekly Standard, describes his Christian piety, after being converted from “heathenistic” Islam. By then Ibn Said had been a slave for 56 years. Much of his identity had been lost or erased. Or was it? When he was sixty-three, Ibn Said penned a 15-page autobiography in Arabic. He opened with a verse from the Qur’an called the Sūrah al-Mulk. Mulk means dominion or ownership. In Islam, everything belongs to God ...
Source: neh.gov