Film Omer Ibn Said عمر إبن سيد "The Scholar Slave"

Film Omer Ibn Said عمر إبن سيد "The Scholar Slave"

Omer Ibn Said (عمر إبن سيد) was born in 1777 in a place called Futa Toro "between the two rivers" referring to the Senegal and the Gambia rivers that separate those two countries. His father, who was a wealthy man, was killed in an inter-tribal war when he was five, and Omar and his family had to move away to another town. 

Omar when he was 6 years old went to Islamic School (مدرسة ) in Bundu.

He spent 25 years of his life studying with prominent Muslim scholars, his own brother Sheikh Muhammad Said (شيخ محمد إبن سيد ), as well as two other religious leaders. Learning a range of subjects including mathematics, astronomy, business, and theology. He then returned to his own town and lived there for another six years, until a "big army" came and captured him and sold him to a man who took him "to the big Ship in the big Sea."3 After sailing for a month he arrived in Charleston, South Carolina, where he was bought by a man called Johnson, who apparently was cruel to him. So he escaped, was captured and landed in jail in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where he spent 16 days. That is where he began writing in Arabic on the walls of his jail, and where he was discovered and eventually taken into the household of Jim Owen and his brother John Owen, the Governor of North Carolina (1828-1830) with whom he remained until his death in his late eighties.