Omar ibn said autobiography definition
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Omar ibn Said was born around 1770 in an African region then called Futa Toro, near the Senegal River, which now forms Senegal's northern border with Mauritania. After receiving 25 years of schooling in Africa, he was enslaved and transported to Charleston, South Carolina. Not long after his arrival and sale to a local planter, Said escaped and made his way to Fayetteville, North Carolina, where he was imprisoned after entering a Christian church to pray. After garnering attention for writing on the walls of his prison cell in Arabic, Said became the legal property of General James Owen of Bladen County, who allegedly recognized Said to be an educated man and treated him well. Said's later conversion to Christianity rendered him a celebrity of sorts, and his story—with an emphasis on his conversion—was recounted in several magazines and historical pamphlets. Said moved with the Owen family in 1836 to Wilmington, North Carolina, and again to a farm on the Cape Fear River during the Civil War. He is believed to have died at the age of 94, but the exact circumstances of his death are unknown.
Since 1831, when Said first recorded his autobiography as a 15-page manuscript in Arabic, it has undergone multiple translations, and the original manuscript was unlocated f
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A Slave Memoir Becomes an Opera
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 and nothing to man.
“So it’s a way, if you want, of pointing to the slave owners that really they have no right to own slaves,” said Mary-Jane Deeb, the retired chief of the African and Middle Eastern division of the Library of Congress, in a podcast. “[Ibn Said] never says it. He just puts this verse of the Qur’an in.”
Deeb spearheaded the preservation of Ibn Said’s handwritten autobiography when the Library of Congress acquired it in June 2017, after the previous owner, Derrick Beard, auctioned a 42-document collection at Sotheby’s.
When Nigel Redden, the general director for the Spoleto Festival USA, heard about the autobiography, he thought it was ripe for opera. The Spoleto Festival USA, named after its original counterpart in Italy, is a performing arts festival that takes place in Charleston every year, and Charleston was where Ibn Said arrived in America.
“In exploring Charleston’s history, we’re exploring American history,” Redden said.
He brainstormed with staff about who should compose the opera and landed on m
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