It is a very important manuscript because it changes the narrative on slavery. It is an American story and it should be in the Library of Congress so that everybody can see it.” So the Library did find the money to buy it and we purchased it in the summer of 2017. You have to buy it because some other country is going to buy it and it should be in the US. So, fast forward, fifteen years later in 2017, the owner let us know that the manuscript was for sale at Sotheby’s. Beinecke Digital Collections, Yale University Library We had no money at this point to buy this manuscript. And we said we wish we had this manuscript. And so the person who had this manuscript said “I wish one day that this manuscript would be at the Library of Congress.” That was in 2002. And then he was caught and shipped off to South Carolina.”Īnd he wrote his memoirs. One of these scholars brought in this manuscript of Omar Ibn Said and he said “…here is a manuscript by a West African, who is a scholar, and who was a wealthy man. So we had a number of scholars who attended the conference and each one was talking from a different perspective. But the early groups that came in the seventeenth and eighteenth century came from West Africa. But they came much later, more in the nineteenth and the twentieth century. And then afterwards came the others, from Asia, from Europe, from the Middle East and so on. So it turned out that the first people were from Africa because they were brought in as slaves. The conference focused on how Islam came to America when did the first Muslims arrive and who were thesefirst people. It was shown in the library in 2002 at a conference on Islam in America. And this collection included acritical document, Omar Ibn Said’s autobiography. But we were aware of this collection before and we wanted to acquire it. And the Library bought it from Sotheby’s in London. This is a collection of forty-two documents. Mary-Jane Deeb | By Isil Acehan | The Maydan from Ali Vural Ak Center for Global I on Vimeo.Ĭould you please tell us about the acquisition process and where the collection came from? The Omar Ibn Said Collection At the Library of Congress | An Interview with Dr. Mary-Jane Deeb, Chief of the African and Middle Eastern Division at the Library of Congress, about the Omar Ibn Said collection and its significance. Isil Acehan from the Maydan team interviewed Dr. The earliest iterations of the collection was created thanks to the efforts of Theodore Dwight Weld, a prominent abolitionist and the first secretary of the American Ethnological Society, who knew of Said and other enslaved African Muslims. The Omar Ibn Said Collection, which consists of 42 digitized documents in both English and Arabic, including a fifteen-page autobiography of Omar Ibn Said himself, sheds further light on the history of Islam in America and the enslaved Africans who were brought to America during the transatlantic slave trade. The Library of Congress (LOC) recently acquired and made publicly available online a unique collection showing the only known surviving slave narrative written in Arabic in the United States. Currently she is a visiting scholar at the Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University. For the 2017-2018 academic year, she served as a post-doctoral fellow at John XXIII Foundation of Religious Sciences in Bologna, Italy. Isil also received a Smithsonian Institution, Baird Society Residential Scholarship to conduct research in the Smithsonian Institution. In 2009-2010 academic year, she was a Turkish Cultural Foundation fellow. In 2008, she received a Scholar in Residence grant from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities to conduct additional doctoral research. She was a Fulbright visiting fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University in the academic year 2006-2007. Isil received a number of scholarships, research grants and residential fellowships to conduct her doctoral and post-doctoral research. degree in history from Bilkent University, Turkey. Her scholarly interests focus on early Turkish/Muslim immigrants in North America, and Middle Eastern immigrant and diaspora communities in the United States. Isil Acehan is an historian and researcher from Turkey.
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