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  • Region contains "Sub-Saharan Africa"

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…

1871-1874 Turkish and Egyptian forces conquer the territory of today’s Sudan. 1881-1885 Muhammed Ahmad declares himself al-Mahdi, or awaited guide, and begins reconquest of Sudan. Mahdi’s forces capture…

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…

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…

“There is a passage in the Qur’an that says if you memorize the Qur’an and teach it to others, you will be successful in this life and the next life.” In Koran by Heart, the young scholar who says this has already committed…

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…

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…

Leila Aboulela’s novel Minaret follows the spiritual journey of a young woman exiled from her home in Sudan and forced to invent a new life in London, far from the comforts of her privileged childhood and secular education. She supports herself…