An African prince falls from the heights of a sophisticated and educated society into the depths of slavery and ignorance in Mississippi. Abdul Rahman’s willpower to remain a faithful servant to God overcomes the obstacles of being a slave in antebellum America, and reminds the world of the long-forgotten first Muslims in North America

by Saleha N. Ghani

The image of an African slave in north America does not include a man who spoke three languages. History books do not tell us about a slave who, even after forty years of captivity, still remembered how to recite the Fatiha. Not many people have ever heard of the African prince that was worked on a plantation in Natchez, Mississippi for forty years before President John Quincy Adams and Secretary of State Henry Clay shook hands with him and helped him return to Timbuktu.

Abdul Rahman Ibrahima Sori spoke Arabic, Pulaar (the language of his people, the Fulbe) and English and was the son of King Sori of Futa Jallon, present-day Timbuktu, where an Islamic state of cattle herders had organized thou-sands of schools for their children’s education. He knew more about mathematics, science and religion than did his owner Thomas Foster. He was a natural leader and was promoted to serve as a general in his father’s army. West Africa was then convulsed in unending warfare among various West African powers, brought on by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. It was during one such war in 1788 that the prince was captured at the age of 26 and sold to European slave traders for “guns, powder, two bottles of rum and eight hands of tobacco.” His capture was neither his defeat nor the end of his jihad. He was captured while defending his people in West Africa, then enslaved as he struggled to maintain his Islamic identity in the wilderness of 18th-century Mississippi.