Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to Global Literature and Slavery
- The Cambridge Companion to Global Literature and Slavery
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology
- Introduction
- Part I Contexts and Contestation
- Part II Forms and Figures
- Part III Legacies and Afterlives
- Part IV Metaphors and Migrations
- Chapter 12 Itineraries of Arabic across Oceans and Continents
- Chapter 13 Apartheid’s Ghosts
- Chapter 14 African Boat Narratives, Disposable Bodies, and the New Native Survivor
- Chapter 15 Mediterranean Afterlives of Slavery
- Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
Chapter 12 - Itineraries of Arabic across Oceans and Continents
Edward Wilmot Blyden and Muslim Slave Writing in the Americas
from Part IV - Metaphors and Migrations
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 December 2022
- The Cambridge Companion to Global Literature and Slavery
- The Cambridge Companion to Global Literature and Slavery
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology
- Introduction
- Part I Contexts and Contestation
- Part II Forms and Figures
- Part III Legacies and Afterlives
- Part IV Metaphors and Migrations
- Chapter 12 Itineraries of Arabic across Oceans and Continents
- Chapter 13 Apartheid’s Ghosts
- Chapter 14 African Boat Narratives, Disposable Bodies, and the New Native Survivor
- Chapter 15 Mediterranean Afterlives of Slavery
- Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
Summary
From the Georgia Sea Islands to Jamaica to Brazil, enslaved African Muslims precariously re-established textual traditions and networks by writing letters in Arabic and transcribing sacred texts from memory. Bearing witness to their rich and cosmopolitan educational backgrounds, African Muslims in the New World used Arabic literacy to subjectively and objectively overthrow the chains of slavery. They narrated as well as propelled their itinerant diasporic histories through literary and epistolary models, from Scheherazade to al-Hariri, studied in the markets and madrasas of Africa and the Ottoman Empire. Edward Wilmot Blyden, born in the West Indies but resident for the majority of his life in Liberia, engaged deeply with the Islamic culture of the Sahel. He provided extensive documentation about Islam in West Africa, attuned to the ways it was woven together with the Islamic world of the Ottoman Empire and Indian Ocean world. His research and travels frame how future researchers, scholars, and activists would perceive the cosmopolitanism of African Muslims such as Job ben Solomon, Abu Bakr as-Siddiq, and Nicholas Said among many others, and how they sought to re-member their narrative, familial, and sacred ties to Arabic and Islam.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Companion to Global Literature and Slavery , pp. 201 - 218Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022