Zeitoun + 10, Omar Ibn Said

One of the implicit arguments of Dave Eggers' Zeitoun is that Islam is not wholly foreign to America. This message is hard to miss in the almost too perfect American Dream story of the title character and in his marriage to a white, Southern, practicing Muslim. Throughout the book Muslim families and mosques are part of the fabric of the setting, woven into America as often as they are represented as foreign.

In this context, the similarities between Zeitoun's story and that of Omar Ibn Said seem important. Said was born in West Africa in the 1770s and trained as a theologian. He was kidnapped and enslaved in 1807, and lived out the rest of his life in the United States. While enslaved, he wrote an autobiographical essay that has since become an important primary source for the study of antebellum slavery. A fuller exploration of Said's story can be found here, in a great episode of Backstory Radio on Islam in America.

The relevant part of Said's story takes place when he was imprisoned in North Carolina after escaping from the plantation on which he was enslaved. While in prison (and I am drawing heavily here on Backstory's version of events) Said began to write out the Qur'an on the walls of his cell. Crowds came to see the African American man who could write in strange symbols on the wall and, eventually, onlookers figured out that Said was literate in Arabic and was in the process of writing out his holy book.

The image here is strikingly similar to that of Zeitoun during his imprisonment at Camp Greyhound. A Muslim-American immigrant (though I take the point that "immigrant" is not the correct word for an enslaved man), jailed for a "crime" that appears to us as no crime at all, locked in a cell and attracting the attention of his white jailers because of the way he publicly practices Islam. In each case, the Muslim man is confined within America and becomes an object of suspicion as foreign and unusual because of his status as a Muslim.

If there are parallels between Zeitoun and Said, they matter to the text of Zeitoun because of the way they deepen the ideas of Americanness and foreignness that run throughout the book. On the one hand, Zeitoun is rendered foreign, denied his Constitutional rights and forced outside of the American Dream narrative by the events following Hurricane Katrina. The intertextuality with Said's story, though, suggests that this very process of pushing Muslim Americans outside the mainstream itself has a long history in America. Just as Said is imprisoned and rendered Muslim spectacle, so too is Zeitoun. Thus, in a nice twist that gets to the heart of certain jaded liberal view of the Bush era, the un-American act of rejecting religious and racial diversity is, through the resonance with Said's story, itself revealed to be a quintessential American tradition.