The American Caliph Committee: A Brief History of the First Seven Years of Mufti’s Independence from the Era of World War II
A group of people calledDAVies. Shahan Mufti is a professor of journalism in the University of Virginia. “American Caliph” is his new book. The Siege of Washington, D.C. in 1977. On tomorrow’s show, we take stock of the January 6 committee’s work – its public hearings, final report and the hundreds of witness interview transcripts it has released. We’ll speak with The New York Times’ Luke Broadwater, who covers Congress. He has reported on the work of the committee from the beginning, as he was in the Capitol on the day of the assault. I hope you will join us.
I would like to give a note to our audience before we start. Our conversation today will include a description of harm to children. We won’t dwell on it at length or include graphic details, but it is part of the story that unfolds here. Hamaas Abdul Khaalis is at the heart of the story. Tell us a bit about him, his early life.
There is a person named Musa. Yeah, they’re on a mission. Even though he’s out of trouble with the law, there is still a question over whether he has a mental illness or if he’s just a master manipulator. These questions are what I tend to look over the whole story. He really succeeded when he set out to do something. Like I said, he completed college. The Nation of Islam has a reputation for shooting through the ranks. He brings people to the cause, most of them young men, African American men because he has a new mission of bringing Sunni Islam, Hanafi Islam, to America. They will do everything in their power to get their mission started, even if it’s just trying to rob banks. They get into a really – you know, they try to take over the Black Arts Repertory Theatre and school, which was led by LeRoi Jones, later known as Amiri Baraka. They get into a gun fight…
But my reader will meet him first when he’s going through a psychiatric evaluation at the station hospital on the base. And that’s where it first emerges that he may be suffering from some – possibly from some kind of mental illness or disorder. He had been in the army and was let go but ended up in Harlem as a jazz musician and a very successful one. And he tours through Europe with his band. But that is also where he first encounters in Harlem Islam and becomes a Muslim.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/01/04/1146891542/american-caliph-revisits-one-of-the-most-dramatic-hostage-crises-in-u-s-history
The Nation of Islam – a movement for establishing supremacy and supremacy in American Islam. Mufti: Yes, yeah, with guns
There are people who say “das.” Right. The Nation of Islam, their practices and beliefs were distinct from Sunni Muslims, which were also in the United States, many of them who had emigrated from other countries. So remind us of what the Nation of Islam’s particular beliefs and theology were.
Mufti. Yes, yeah. The Nation of Islam is a fascinating organization, and I get into it in some detail in the book. But they have beliefs that are – have borrowed from Islam but some of them are entirely original. They believe in the superiority of the black race. And so the Nation of Islam teaches its followers that the white man was a creation of a scientific experiment, eugenics experiment gone awry, and that the white man is actually the devil and the Black man is divine. And this movement is – attracts a lot of people in Detroit at first and throughout the Midwest and the Northeast. The movement starts to grow in Black communities throughout the Northeast and Midwest and also on the West Coast. And it really is a message that is empowering in some ways and – but is also resentful of the place that African Americans occupy in American society at that time. And what alarms – and the FBI is very early on to this. And what alarmed them most is also the militant wing of this organization.
MUFTI: Yes, with guns. They move in. They establish a school with guns and get some press coverage. They’re trying to bring Islam to America in order to establish supremacy, but they also have a mission of establishing supremacy in American Islam. The person is not holding back. In New York City and later in Washington D.C., they get involved in all sorts of schemes to make sure that they win.
DAVIES: People who know the history of the Nation of Islam will remember that Malcolm X was a charismatic star who became known as the “godfather of the Nation of Islam”, but he died in 1965, at the age of 35. The boxer Cassius Clay is recruited by Elijah Muhammad and he becomes Muhammad Ali. And it’s interesting that Khaalis brings in his own athlete to join his movement.
One of the top NBA draft picks goes to Milwaukee and sign a million dollar contract before financing the Hanafi operation. And that really is what allows Khaalis and the Hanafis to – well, most importantly, move to Washington, D.C., establish a really nice headquarters on 16th Street and plant themselves in the heart of the American capital, in the heart of American power. The moment is when Khaalis is able to challenge the power of the Nation of Islam in a way that he hasn’t been able to before.
Hamaas Abdul Khaalis, the person we’ve been talking about, established his own Muslim movement in the Hanafi tradition. He insulted the leader of the Nation of Islam in the early ’70s when he sent a bunch of letters to other people. It seems like from then on, it was a fight between the two leaders and the movements.
The man is named Mufti. Yeah. So this moment where – Khaalis has established himself, with the help of Kareem, at this headquarters in a really, you know, beautiful building on 16th Street in Northwest Washington, D.C. By the way, the FBI and the Washington police are already watching this kind of (ph) as soon as they move to Washington, D.C., and they’re watching them pretty closely. They do not notice that Khaalis buys a Xerox machine. You know, they don’t make much of it. He will start writing letters and printing copies of them and sending them to Elijah Muhammad’s followers.
And a part of this organization – within this organization, there is a really an element of an organized crime unit that’s also developed. And people within that organized crime unit take note of these letters. They’re coming from a person who has knowledge of the Nation of Islam. And so they receive these as – almost as threats, but at the very least as threatening – letters that threaten the existence of the Nation of Islam.
You said that they arrive at the headquarters to assassinateKhaalis. They discover a house full of children and close family members of Khaalis. He had multiple wives. They enter and cut loose and in a fashion that this – this organization that had developed in Philadelphia was called the Black Mafia, but also the Muslim mob. And they were notorious in Philadelphia for real violent crime. In their usual fashion, they started attacking the children in the house and the grown ups as well.
And these men decided that they could not leave behind – even leave behind the children as potential witnesses and decided to drown them. And it was – it – and it was just – you know, it was a horrific massacre. The next morning’s papers called it the worst massacre in the history of the nation’s capital.
“Star Wars” as a Project of the Arab David Lean in the Middle East. What happened to Khaalis in 1974, when Israel and Arab neighbors fought in the war?
MUFTI: Right. So as Khaalis and, you know, his group are watching the events in the Middle East, the 1967 war between Israel and Arab neighbors, Akkad, this man born in Aleppo, Syria, who has come to the United States in the ’50s just with one dream of making it in Hollywood, he’s also watching these events in the Middle East. And that’s kind of what inspires his project. He wants to tell the story of Islam to America. And his medium is film. He would like to be the Arab David Lean. He wants to create an epic, an unforgettable epic in which the – he will tell the West the story of Islam and specifically the story of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad.
You can’t show Muhammad. A majority of the Muslims around the world think that way. Muhammad has been depicted in paintings in Islamic history and this is a complicated history. But it’s a widely accepted taboo. He has a way to circumvent it by using the camera to relay his point of view. So you can view things through Muhammad’s eyes in the film. This is the method of implementing the device that he proposes. He starts looking around for Hollywood executives and studios. It doesn’t look like an idea to tell the story of Muhammad but never see him. And he’s shot down very quickly. Yeah, so that’s his proposal.
DAVIES: He eventually gets funding and gets Hollywood stars, right? Anthony Quinn is in it. He also goes to religious authorities and gets the boxes checked, right? People said it’s okay. He is given funding. Hundreds of extras, special- trained horses and huge sets are included in the movie he is going to make. And then in 1974, (laughter) he has to stop. What happened?
MUFTI: Yeah. And, I mean, it was – it took 10 years, this project, 10 years and $17 million, according to Akkad. Just as a reference, “Star Wars” came out in 1977 as well. And George Lucas, I think, put the cost of that – “Star Wars” at 11 million.
A lot of it comes from Muammar Gaddafi, that’s what Muti is asking. Muammar Gaddafi used his influence to help provide a lot of diplomatic cover for the film. So like you said, the film was not shut down once, but shooting was shut down several times because there were very powerful figures in the Middle East who were opposed to this project, especially – particularly in Saudi Arabia.
DAVIES: So they get it done. They premiere it in London, I believe. The American premiere of it is scheduled for March 1977. Hamaas Abdulkhaalis is the Hanafi leader that we’ve been talking about. He is at a low point in his life. Members of his family were murdered. He felt like he didn’t get justice. He is quite angry about it. This leads to a hostage taking. This is a large operation. Let’s just walk through it. There were three different locations, most of them at the Washington headquarters of B’nai B’rith, which is a longstanding and very large and influential Jewish organization. What happens there?
MUFTI: So just to kind of contextualize this, this is March 9, 1977. Jimmy Carter has been in office all of – what? – 50 days at this point. The first big hostage crisis of his administration is about to happen. He doesn’t know. He is hosting the Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin that morning, who – and it’s a really important meeting that a lot of people are paying attention to because Carter has come into office. He is going to make peace in the Middle East a central focus of his foreign policy.
They’re still trying to piece this together when the Hanafis hit the third target, which is the district building, which is kind of how – the city council for Washington, D.C. And it’s just a few hundred yards from the White House, visible from Carter’s bedroom, actually. Two Hanafis, who are unrelated, take over the fifth floor of that building. The most violent place of the whole takeover was there. The third building is where there was a fire – gunfight between security, police and the Hanafis. And that is where, within a few minutes of the takeover, there are three bodies lying on the marble floor bleeding. The security guard is one of them. One of them is a young radio reporter, a 24-year-old young radio reporter. The third one is a councilmember of the Washington, D.C., City Council.
But by the time they do that, the other demands, Khaalis’ other grievances have already come forward. He wants the murderers, the people who had entered the Hanafi Center in ’73. Some of them are behind bars. Some of them are not. One of them had been acquitted. Some of them were still in the process of being tried. Khaalis wanted all of them delivered to him at the B’nai B’rith, where he said he would execute justice, which most people assumed to mean that he would behead them or execute them somehow. When I started research for the book, it didn’t make sense to me that he wanted $750. It seemed irrational. That was a specific amount of money that he had to pay in court fees during the trial of the killers at Hanafi Center. It was a symbolic figure for him that he believed was the price of justice or injustice that he had to suffer.
DAVIES: For two days, this went on. And I thought we should hear a bit of – a little bit of Khaalis’ voice. He was on the phone a lot, talking with the police and reporters, and there was some tape where he was. Max Robinson, an African American TV news anchor, had a relationship withKhaalis from the coverage of the massacre of his family at the Hanafi Center. So we’ll hear – what we’ll hear is him talking to Max Robinson about his demands, and you’ll hear a reference to the $700 – $750 fine as part of the court proceedings. And also, you’ll hear at one point, Khaalis turns away from the phone to give some instructions to his followers who were holding the hostages. The hostage crisis is happening at the moment. The journalist Max Robinson speaks first.
He is named Khalid. I want them and the $750. You have to inform the public that I’ve turned down millions of dollars. The judge holds me in contempt because I charged the murderers that killed my babies. Now, what do you think about that? You think that I’m going to play dead? I wonder what you think about me. A kind of jokester? I take my faith serious. You think I went through all that as a joke? Do you?
KHAALIS: brother, what about those sharpshooters? They might have moved them somewhere else. Keep stacking, boys. Keep stacking, boys. Move it quickly. Make them move faster, Latif. Work them.
And that is – he was there present in the B’nai B’rith. And that is where, you know, there was – there wasn’t – nobody died immediately at that location – actually, at no point. There was a lot of physical abuse there. Khaalis himself knocked some people out with – at least one person out with the butt of the gun, it emerged. People were shot, they 888-282-0465 888-282-0465 888-282-0465 888-282-0465 888-282-0465, and several moments were piled up. And for Jewish hostages, you know, a lot – some of these Jewish hostages had actually, you know, escaped the Holocaust in Europe. And for them to be – you know, these – this trauma was triggering, you know, really old wounds.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/01/04/1146891542/american-caliph-revisits-one-of-the-most-dramatic-hostage-crises-in-u-s-history
America’s Cabibbo Revisites the Most-dramatic-hostage-crises-in-u-s-history
I wanted to know if you thought he was a good guy given the number of cases where he has had mental health issues. His wife, at one point, committed him for treatment, you know, many years before. I mean, do you think he was mentally ill?
It’s called Muntiti. I think I have a question, in the end, I leave for the reader to decide. It’s interesting – his encounters with a psychiatrist and his mental evaluations are always going on at a time when he’s in some trouble. He might be about to be deployed, or possibly he is about to be prosecuted for a bank robbery, which could cause his mental illnesses to Flare up. Having said that, I am no psychiatrist. And I wouldn’t – I cannot diagnose anybody, especially who I never met and who’s not around anymore.
It’s possible that his mental condition and mental state was such that he had things like delusions of grandeur and the way he excelled at manipulating people. It’s not easy to tell. But he was clearly not handicapped always by these – well, by his condition. The ability to manipulate people and charm people could point to a condition that allowed him to do them, as well as a condition he suffered from.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/01/04/1146891542/american-caliph-revisits-one-of-the-most-dramatic-hostage-crises-in-u-s-history
The Story of Khaalis and the American Embassy: From the Holocaust to the Holocaust, and Back to the United States – What have I Done about the Holocaust?
MUFTI: That’s right. I spoke to many people around the time of the massacre of his family, and four years later he was taken hostage. And not one remembered Khaalis ever shedding a tear, which was remarkable and scary for a lot of people. The story that the Iranian ambassador told him was about his family and how his grandfather had been murdered and his grandmother had decided to forgive him, like I said before. Somehow, that story captured a lot of what Khaalis was feeling and had been – what was in his mind and in his heart leading up to the hostage taking. It collapsed the political and the personal and the religious and the psychological in a way that finally penetrated Khaalis’ armor. He broke down. He embraced the ambassador, and he wept for several minutes and just – as everybody in the room just watched silently, wondering what this would lead to. But eventually Khaalis stopped crying, took a seat again and informed the negotiators at the table that he was ready to let all hostages go.
DAVIES: He hugged the Iranian ambassador and cried. You said you had never heard of him crying over the deaths of his children.
MUFTI: I started this book, and I found the Obama administration episode in it, so I’ve been writing a book about it. America was a different place when I started this book. And then I’ve been working on this book ever since. I have been watching what’s been happening in America since, and I’ve been with one eye. And, you know, I worked through – on this book through the Trump presidency. And I’ve worked on this book through the Muslim ban conversation and build the wall and George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter movement and the January 6 attacks on Washington and, before that, people beating down the Supreme Court – door of the Supreme Court when Justice Kavanaugh was being sworn in.
It has been interesting to watch America – American – contemporary American history unfold as I was working on this book. There are a lot of reasons why this is relevant. You know, even at this moment, there is an big ongoing controversy where a university professor at a Minnesota university has been fired for showing the images of the Prophet Muhammad in a classroom. And, you know – and that was in some ways my gateway into this story, was that idea of blasphemy in Islam. But, you know, I think it’s what has been most – the most powerful thing for me has been kind of seeing the disillusionment that Khaalis felt with America. And I’m seeing a lot of people lose faith in America. And this is the story of what one man was driven to do by – when he completely lost faith.
Source: https://www.npr.org/2023/01/04/1146891542/american-caliph-revisits-one-of-the-most-dramatic-hostage-crises-in-u-s-history
FRESH AIR: Black, White and Black: From the Trial and Massacre of the Black Body to Malcolm X’s Assassination
Danny Miller is the executive producer of FRESH AIR. Our technical director is also an engineer. Our interviews and reviews are edited by a number of people. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. Dave Davies is for Terry Gross.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. The text may not be complete in its final form, so it may be revised in the future. Availability and accuracy may be different. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
“The trial and massacre of the black body” by George Floyd is a great essay that asks if the police will be held accountable for the death of a black person. Black, a keen observer as well as a scholar, exposes, time and again, the shield of cultural protection that surrounds white male patriarchy and power and the way this often leads to the murder of Black individuals going unpunished. Perhaps the most painful essay to read, this one is packed with examples that show the perpetuation of racial abuse and unfettered discrimination against Black people despite the outcome of the Floyd case. Black leads a painful tour of the deadly consequences of unfettered racism, from the bodies of those on the Amistad to those of the King family to Breonna Taylor.
Editor’s Note: Peniel E. Joseph is the Barbara Jordan chair in ethics and political values and founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is a professor of history. He is the author of “The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century.” The views he expresses are of his own. View more opinion on CNN.
A new chapter has been added to the tale of Malcolm X’s life and death in order to discuss race, democracy and the criminal justice system in the US. Malcolm X’s 1965 assassination remains an American tragedy, one which reflects the ongoing struggle to achieve Black dignity and citizenship, even for historical icons such as Malcolm.
The killing of Malcolm has been shrouded in mystery and led to conspiracy theories. We know what we do know. According to historian Zaheer Ali, the FBI and NYPD didn’t inform prosecutors that they had undercover officers at the scene of the assassination. Both agencies were aware of the increasing death threats against Malcolm X emanating from the Nation of Islam (NOI).
During the Second Reconstruction, Malcolm X was Black America’s prosecuting attorney, sometimes called the civil rights and Black Power eras. Malcolm charged America before the bar of history and in front of the entire world with a series of crimes against Black humanity. He took Black dignity as a given and, over time, came to advocate for Black citizenship with equal fervor.
Malcolm’s father was murdered in 1931 and is widely believed to have been racially motivated. By the late 1930s, Louise, the sole provider of a family of eight children, was placed in a psychiatric hospital in Kalamazoo and young Malcolm was on the road to a period of juvenile crime that would find him arrested and then imprisoned from 1946 to 1952.
The NOI was a religious organization and grassroots version of Islam that fused certain aspects of Garvey’s teaching of Black political self-determination with the teachings of the Messenger of God.
In an era before mass incarceration, but when Black Americans were still being disproportionately punished by the criminal legal system, Malcolm publicly repudiated law enforcement agencies and the role they played in upholding structural oppression. His time in prison gave him a glimpse into the ways Jim Crow segregation constrained Black people’s educational attainment, and how they made a legal living.