Powell’s Iftâr Remarks

Book Review: A Muslim American Slave – WSJ.com. Amid these unpromising circumstances, members of the American Colonization Society—a group that encouraged owners to free their slaves and organized former slaves to colonize what is today Liberia—asked North Carolina slave Omar Ibn Said to write his autobiography. A literate man of West African extraction who had converted from Islam to Christianity, Ibn Said (ca. 1770–1863) created what today is the only extant example of an American slave narrative written in Arabic. His brief work, under the title "A Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar Ibn Said," is now published in…