Fourteenth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

Omar ibn Said’s Autobiography illustrates the presence of Islam on North American shores since the antebellum period, but it also illustrates the silences, erasures, and delegitmiation of Islam that has become a trope in American political discourse, if only implicitly and by implication. My paper explores how this autobiographical work foreshadows and undergirds a traditional of black autobiographical writing that confronts racial second-class citizenship as a social paradigm in the United States that crystallizes with The Autobiography of Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley. Said’s autobiography evinces the roots of a society that has not only been hostile and intolerant toward populations of African descent in deed and in ideology, but also one that also nurtures a deeply anti-Islamic worldview and sees Islam as a formation that has no place in American society. Said’s Autobiography ultimately shows the congruence and symbiosis of anti-black and anti-Islamic attitudes as foundational to white supremacy.