American Caliph The True Story of a Muslim Mystic, a Hollywood Epic, and the 1977 Siege of Washington, DC By Shahan Mufti, Macmillan 2022 384 pages.
Do you remember where you were when Islamist terrorists launched the earliest mega strike on the US homeland? I suppose I was at work that Wednesday 46 years ago at Broadway and White Street in lower Manhattan. This was before 9/11/2001 and even earlier than the first WTC bombing on February 26, 1993.
It happened March 9, 1977, in a three-pronged assault on Washington, DC, in which heavily armed Black militants under the banner of Islam took over the B'nai Brith International complex, the District Building (City Hall), and the capital's Islamic Center. They brutalized, traumatized, humiliated over 150 hostages, brought about three deaths – and managed to achieve their principal demand, halting the screening of a motion picture set to premiere later that day near New York's Times Square.
Shahan Mufti's grippingly vivid retelling
of the siege of Washington transported me back to that fateful year. A former
reporter and now chair of the journalism department at the University of Richmond,
Mufti has sorted out a complex affair creating a page-turner. His antihero (in
my view, villain) is Hamaas Abdul Khaalis (the Muslim "mystic" of the
title), born Ernest Timothy McGhee in 1922. In many ways, his book is a work of forensic psychiatry. Khaalis, whose
symptoms included hearing voices and seeing visions, found a home in Elijah
Muhammad's Nation of Islam (the Black Muslims). After a falling out, he took
over a Sunni-leaning sect dubbed the Hanafi Muslims and convinced Kareem
Abdul-Jabbar, the former Lew Alcindor, to bankroll him. This obviated the need
to continue robbing banks to make ends meet.
An unstable, cantankerous though compelling personality, Khaalis, like Malcolm X, had been talent scouted by Elijah Muhammad and, like Malcolm, raised through NOI ranks, becoming a member of the Messenger's inner circle at headquarters in Chicago.
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| Hamaas Abdul Khaalis |
On January 18, 1973, believing Khaalis
was at home, a NOI hit squad entered the Hanafi townhouse and massacred seven, including Khaalis's five young children (drowning the nine-month-old), his adult son and another sect member. They beat and left for dead one of his wives; she survived but never fully recovered, and his adult daughter. Khaalis returned home to this horrific blood-soaked scene.
As if the killings were not heartless enough, during the funerals, Mufti
writes, "Black Muslims jeered and heckled while waving copies of the
newspaper Muhammad Speaks," all but claiming ownership of the
carnage.
Khaalis called on the broader
Muslim community (then as now comprised
mostly of South Asian and Middle Eastern immigrants), diplomats from Islamic
countries, and particularly Muhammad Abdul Rauf, the Egyptian-born director at
the capital's Islamic Center, to denounce NOI's black Muslims. However, the
foreigners did not want to get drawn into an intramural dispute between African
American Muslim schismatics or go against the increasingly influential Elijah
Muhammad.
Nor did the federal government find prosecuting the case against the hit men easy. One participant turned government
informer was tortured horribly and then murdered in his prison cell. Louis
Farrakhan, at the time Elijah Muhammad's spokesman, publicly warned that "traitors
and stool pigeons" would be risking their lives if they testified against
the hit team. The case against the killers all but collapsed. Adding
insult to injury, in a legal twist, Khaalis was ordered to pay $750 in court
fees.
The justice system and the local Muslim establishment failed him. The trauma of it all further unhinged him.
***
But that alone did not set off
the events of March 9, 1977. Hamaas Abdul Khaalis and his susceptible acolytes
launched their terror spree to stop the screening of The
Message, a film
about Muhammad, made by Moustapha Akkad, a Syrian-born Muslim. His intention
was to show the nobility of Islam; in keeping with Islamic strictures, he did
not actually portray the prophet. The murderously whacky Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi bankrolled the
picture. Having seen a poster for the movie, Khaalis convinced himself
Moustapha Akkad was a blasphemer.
Khaalis selected the B'nai B'rith
as a target because – to paraphrase Willie Sutton – that's where the Jews were.
The Islamic Center was on the list because Imam Muhammad Abdul Rauf snubbed his
request to denounce Elijah Muhammad after the family was killed. It is not
clear to me why City Hall was attacked. That is where Hanafi gunmen shot council
member Marion Barry and a young news reporter named Maurice Williams. Barry
survived to become DC mayor; the reporter's wounds proved fatal.
On the day of the takeover, Israeli
prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in his first term (1974–1977), was seeing the
newly elected US president Jimmy Carter at the White House. The Hanafi Muslims
were nasty anti-Zionists though Rabin's presence in the capital was a coincidental
backdrop. British Prime Minister James Callaghan would also be in town the
following day to see Carter. Police worked frantically to nix his White House 21-gun
salute, fearing it would be misconstrued by the nearby militants as the
beginning of an operation to free the hostages.
Back in Manhattan, the producer agreed, as demanded, not to screen the film. Khaalis next announced he wanted authorities to turn over the men dispatched by the Nation of Islam to massacre his family; he further demanded the $750 he had been humiliated into paying in court costs even as the killers went free. He did, in fact, get his money back, but not the assassins. By the time of the takeover, NOI was in transition led by Elijah Muhammad's son Wallace who was trying to take the family's business into legitimate realms. No one had the power (or will) to deliver the killers into Khaalis's hands.
By now, everyone knew the name Khaalis and was learning about the Hanafis. If he had an ultimate mission it was to be accepted as the Caliph of America. "The Hanafi takeover of Washington remains, to this day, the largest hostage-taking in American history and the first such attack by Muslims on American soil. The attack, which had been planned and executed by Americans right under the noses of American law enforcement, found the nation's capital stumped," Mufti writes.
***
In telling the story of Khaalis
and the Hanafis, Mufti walks us through the heterodox world of African American
Islam, concentrating on the Nation of Islam today led by 89-year-old Louis
Farrakhan. Faithful to the Messenger, and light-years more magnetic, he supplanted
Wallace Muhammad. When Farrakhan passes from the scene, NOI may go through a
succession crisis just as it did when Elijah Muhammad died in 1975. The stakes have
never been more consequential: controlling a vast financial, religio-cultural,
and political enterprise; and overseeing the mecca of black antisemitism. Farrakhan is one
of the best-known and revered personalities
in black America. Thanks partly to his efforts, at least 40% of
the community believes Jews block their societal progress.
Mufti sketches NOI's story because
it is integral to framing the Hanafi terror attack. He tells us that Islam has
long appealed to black Americans because many
enslaved people brought to the New World were from Muslim lands. Sure, African coreligionists
and Arab slave traders served as enablers, but Mufti
doesn't go there.
The theological overlap between mainstream Islam and the Black Muslims of NOI is rather vague. NOI originated with "Master
Fard Muhammad" – whose identity and ethnicity have never been established –
but whose "fantastical dogma," in Mufti's words, combined elements of
Islam, science fiction, and black racial supremacy. Whites, he taught, are
devils in human guise. When Fard disappeared in 1934, Elijah Muhammad (née Poole)
took control of the sect, building it into a multi-million dollar operation
with its own militia, ties to the black underworld, and eventually quasi-diplomatic
relations with the Arab Middle East. Elijah Muhammad's most precious recruit
was Malcolm Little (later Malcolm X). When the charismatic Malcolm shifted to
mainstream Sunni Islam and challenged his mentor on ethical and religious
grounds, NOI gunmen assassinated him in 1965.
***
The Hanafis unleashed their
siege with automatic firearms, machetes, garrotes, and gasoline-filled
containers. Khaalis led the gang members that took over B'nai B'rith,
treating the Black employees he encountered viciously. Some hostages
were slashed; Khaalis smashed the face of Hillel rabbi Samuel Fishman with
the butt of his gun. They insulted – "Filthy Jew bitch” – and abused them; they ranted about
the Holocaust "lie" and how the "Zionists" had plotted to
murder his family through the NOI. “I am Khalifa Hamaas Abdul Khaalis. There are
no innocent victims in a holy war," he declared.
At the Islamic Center, three brothers
belonging to the Hanafi sect held the hostages. Khaalis checked in on them by
telephone from the B'nai B'rith offices. He harangued Muhammad Abdul Rauf, the
center's director and imam, for "prostituting" himself to the Jews.
At the District Building, the hostages were held on the fifth floor near the
city council chamber.
Mufti is good at explaining how widely the hostage situation was covered by the media in the age before 24/7 cable
news. The story led the national news on CBS, NBC, and ABC that first night.
Khaalis was interviewed live on the radio. He also spoke to UPI's Helen Thomas
(known for her hostility to Zionism). And he conversed too with Max Robinson, a
celebrated black TV anchor.
The coordinating system for handling
terrorist attacks on the US homeland was in its infancy, and there were no clear
lines of command, Mufti points out. Federal anti-terror statutes were primarily
enacted after 9/11.
***
The Hanafi siege ended with a
whimper after a three-man delegation of ambassadors from Muslim countries met
with Khaalis in the B'nai B'rith lobby, engaged him deferentially in a
discussion of the Koran, and, crucially, expressed their "deep sorrow for
what had happened to Khaalis's family four years earlier," writes Mufti. Khaalis
and the delegation deliberated over Koranic verses that referred to Jews as apes
and swine. The ambassadors said the lesson was that Muhammad's agents decided their
love for Allah had to be greater than their hatred of the Jews. It was up to
Allah and not Khaalis to forgive or punish. After several hours, one diplomat
suggested that Khaalis release 30 hostages as a goodwill gesture. "'Why
don't I release all of them?' he finally said. No one spoke. No one knew what
to say. Khaalis was serious. He repeated that he was ready to let everyone go,"
writes Mufti.
When it was over, Khaalis was
released on his own recognizance as part of the deal while the other hostage
takers were detained. Khaalis's next goal was to address the Muslim World
League scheduled to meet in Newark, New Jersey, on April 28, 1977. In the
meantime, however, the government recorded Khaalis mouthing off – in
violation of the deal he had struck – about killing his enemies. Law
enforcement agents arrested him, and on July 23, 1977, a court sentenced him to
325 years of incarceration. A model inmate, he died at age 81 in 2003.
***
So, now 1977 is less blurred in my mind.
Besides the Washington siege, I distinctly remember it was the year when New
York City's electricity failed during a July heat wave. As the blackout struck,
thousands of looters seized
the occasion. It became known as the "night of
the animals," a 25-hour plundering spree that ruined
thousands of businesses. Whole neighborhoods in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and East
Harlem were devastated for years. The NYPD union had been on a slowdown to
protest city plans to make cops ride in police cars alone instead of in pairs. Some
police did not show up for work. Those who did found themselves overwhelmed by the
looters. Afterward, mayor Abe Beame said the looting was so fast and furious that
he did not have time to ask the governor for National Guard assistance. I also
remember that in 1977, Yitzhak Rabin's Labor Party lost to Menachem Begin's Likud,
and by November, Begin was hosting Egypt's Anwar Sadat in Jerusalem.
***
Khaalis’s black Muslim Hanafi sect faded from the scene. While NOI continues to have small-time competition on the Jew-hating front from various cults – some Black Hebrew Israelite groups, for example, and from the likes of rapper Kanye West – no black Muslim organization has emerged to truly match the wicked dynasty that Elijah Muhammad built.
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FURTHER READING
Louis Farrakhan, the Jews &
"Middlesex"
https://elliotjager.blogspot.com/2005/12/louis-farrakhan-jews-middlesex.html
The Messenger: The Rise and Fall
of Elijah Muhammad by Karl Evanzz
