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Kambiz GhaneaBassiri created this viewing guide for the documentary film Prince Among Slaves (2007), directed by Andrea Kalin, produced by Unity Productions Foundation in association with Spark Media and Duke Media.

To view places on the Sub-saharan itinerary of Leo Africanus, Harvard University’s WorldMap "Leo Africanus' Places" website includes a set of map overlays on a 16th century map, with descriptive information and contemporary photographs from the…

In 1550, a remarkable book about Africa, La Descrittione dell’Africa, came off the Giunta press in Venice, as the first volume of Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s celebrated series of Voyages. It had been written by an African, Ramusio assured…

A prevalent institution of the Islamic world throughout its history,slavery (ʿubūdīyah, riqq) had a crucial influence on societies and cultures of Islam. Slavery was common in pre-Islamic and contemporary societies in the Mediterranean basin,…

Muslim life in America is summarized in a U.S. State Department booklet. The booklet was published by the State Department and the Bureau of International Information Programs (a State Department agency) in 2009. It includes profiles of American…

The BBC Arabic film Leo Africanus: A Man between Worlds by Moroccan journalist Badr Sayegh retraces key locations visited by Leo Africanus, the Muslim born as Hasan al-Wazzan in the 1480s. Captured by pirates, he was given as a slave to the Pope and…

Timeline: Number of Captives Embarked and Disembarked per Year, 1525-1867

The stories of numerous Muslim individuals who were brought as slaves to the United States are available in state and national archives. Omar ibn Said, Abd al-Rahman Ibrahima, Nicholas Said, and Mahommah Gardo Bacquaqua are among those who are the…

For information related to narratives of Muslim slaves transported to the Americas between 1514 and 1866,The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database comprises nearly 35,000 individual slaving expeditions. Records of the voyages have been found in…

The map of the volume and direction of the transatlantic slave trade pinpoints the place in the Gulf of Mexico where Abdurrahman ibn Sori, the subject of Prince Among Slaves, disembarked as one individual in the flow of slaves from all regions of…

English text: The foregoing copy of the Lord’s Prayer was written by Prince Abduhl Rahhuman in Arabic, at my request and in my presence on the 29th day of December 1828 in Philadelphia, at which time and place he related to me in detail the…

Because Muslim women in Egypt have controlled their property, or rather because some of the wealthy women controlled their property, we find women as well as men setting up charitable endowments which are known as awqaf [plural]. A waqf [singular] is…

Portrait of African-American freed slave Yarrow Mamout painted in 1819 by Charles Wilson Peale, in the Philadelphia Museum

Omar ibn Said, (b. 1770?), a freed slave living in North Carolina, is the author of this page written in Arabic script. A note in English on the back states, “The Lord's Prayer written in Arabic by Uncle Moreau (Omar) a native African, now…

The handwriting on the front under the portrait reads, "Uncle Moro" (Omeroh), the African (or Arab) Prince whom Genl. Owen bought, and who lived in Wilmington N.C. for many years, and died in Bladen Co. in 1864, aged about 90…

This 1986 novel, originally published in French as Léon, l’Africain, is the imagined autobiography of real-life geographer, adventurer, and scholar Hasan al-Wassan (ca. 1494–ca. 1554), whose far-reaching travels in the sixteenth…

Moving between past and present, anthropologist Amitav Ghosh presents a lyrical portrait of life in Egypt, as well as broad histories of that country, Tunisia, and India’s Malabar Coast. Ghosh weaves strands of his own life in rural Egypt into…

Edward E. Curtis IV places a treasure trove of information about Islam in the United States at the reader’s fingertips. The primary sources that make up this collection are arranged chronologically: from the early nineteenth century to World…

This book tells the little-known story of Abd al-Rahman Ibrahima, a Fulbe Muslim of elite ancestry who was captured in an ambush, sold to English slavers, and enslaved in the United States in 1788. After forty years in America, most of them spent in…