JACKSON, Miss. — While Mississippi’s racial politics loomed awkwardly as much as the state flags incorporating the Confederate Battle emblem flying on nearby buildings, scholars gathered in the state capital this past weekend for two conferences, one on the legacy of Islamic West Africa, another on slavery.
Dr. Sylviane Diouf, a writer at New York’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, discussed Islamic scholars who were captured and enslaved, most notably Omar ibn Said, who penned an autobiography.
“Muslims used literacy to maintain their identity, to plan revolts … literacy was subversive in the Americas,” Diouf said. She said their writings “tell us about the triumph of the human spirit … that the transatlantic slave trade did not obliterate it.”
Omar ibn Said, a prominent scholar from the region between the Senegal and Gambia rivers, was captured in 1807 and sold to Europeans. He ended up on a North Carolina plantation. His autobiography was sold at auction in 1998 to collector Tariq Beard, who also was a presenter at the conference.
More than three dozen scholars, religious leaders and community activists examined the influences of West African Islam on the world, how slavery has impacted American culture, and the ties between slavery and Islam. The four-day conference was the result of joint leadership between Mississippi’s International Museum of Muslim Cultures, Tougaloo College and Brown University, with grant funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
One of the keynote speakers at the first conference on “Islamic West Africa’s Legacy of Literacy and Music to America and the World,” was sociologist Dr. James Loewen. He discussed historical distortions found in his reading of 18 high school textbooks for his landmark book Lies My Teacher Told Me.
Opening his presentation with “Columbus discovered America in the same way that I discovered oregano,” he went on to say “the latest batch” of textbooks improved somewhat in their treatment of the “discovery” of America due largely to protests raised by Native Americans and others. But there are still serious problems with the texts, he said.
