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The True Story of a Muslim Mystic, a Hollywood Epic, and the 1977 Siege of Washington, DC
by Shahan Mufti
The riveting true story of America's first homegrown Muslim terror attack, the 1977 Hanafi siege of Washington, D.C.
Late in the morning of March 9, 1977, seven men stormed the Washington, D.C., headquarters of B'nai B'rith International, the largest and oldest Jewish service organization in America. The heavily armed attackers quickly took control of the building and held more than a hundred employees of the organization hostage inside. A little over an hour later, three more men entered the Islamic Center of Washington, the country's largest and most important mosque, and took hostages there. Two others subsequently penetrated the District Building, a few hundred yards from the White House. When a firefight broke out, a reporter was killed, and Marion Barry, later to become mayor of Washington, D.C., was shot in the chest. The deadly standoff brought downtown Washington to a standstill.
The attackers belonged to the Hanafi Movement, an African American Muslim group based in D.C. Their leader was a former jazz drummer named Hamaas Abdul Khaalis, who had risen through the ranks of the Nation of Islam before feuding with the organization's mercurial chief, Elijah Muhammad, and becoming a spiritual authority to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Like Malcolm X, Khaalis had become sharply critical of the Nation's unorthodox style of Islam. And, like Malcolm X, he paid dearly for his outspokenness: In 1973, followers of the Nation murdered seven Hanafis at their headquarters, including several members of Khaalis's family. When they took hostages in 1977, one of the Hanafis' demands was for the murderers, along with Muhammad Ali and Elijah's son, to be turned over to the group to face justice. They also demanded that the American premiere of Mohammad: Messenger of God―an epic about the life of the prophet Muhammad financed and supported by the Libyan leader Muammar Gadhafi―be canceled and the film destroyed. The lives of 149 hostages hung in the balance, and the United States' fledgling counterterrorism forces―as yet untested―would have to respond.
Shahan Mufti's American Caliph gives a full account of the largest ever hostage taking on American soil and of the man who masterminded it. Informed by extensive archival research and access to hundreds of declassified FBI files, American Caliph is a riveting true-crime story that sheds new light on the disarray of the 1970s and its ongoing reverberations.
"In this gripping, meticulously researched history, journalist Mufti recounts the March 1977 siege of three buildings in Washington, D.C. ... Expertly drawn from FBI files, wiretap transcripts, and interviews, this captivating history fascinates." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A brisk, engrossing work of investigative journalism." - Kirkus Reviews
"In crackling prose, journalist Mufti delves into Khaalis' connections to Elijiah Muhammad's Nation of Islam...Mufti deftly weaves America's cynical Middle East policy, the star quality of Muhammad Ali and Kareem Abdul-Jabaar, and the tortured production of a biopic about the prophet Muhammad into this real-life thriller." - Booklist
"Those interested in fundamentalism, Islam in the United States, Middle East politics, and film will especially appreciate this book." - Library Journal
"American Caliph is a kaleidoscopic and utterly enthralling tale of an audacious crime that forever transformed our national conversations about race, terrorism, and Islam. Shahan Mufti elegantly weaves together the stories of a slew of fascinating characters, ranging from petty tyrants to legendary athletes, to create a stranger-than-fiction saga that will make you gasp and marvel. This is one of the mightiest feats of journalism I've ever had the good fortune to savor." - Brendan I. Koerner, author of The Skies Belong to Us and Now the Hell Will Start
"A fast-paced thriller that reads like the best John Le Carre novels...except this story isn't fiction. American Caliph is a wild whirlwind of a book with a crazy cast of characters―some of them familiar, all of them unforgettable―and a plot that would be hard to believe if it weren't all true. Shahan Mufti is a terrific writer." - Reza Aslan, author of Zealot and An American Martyr in Persia
This information about American Caliph was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Shahan Mufti is the chair of the Department of Journalism at the University of Richmond and a former daily news reporter for the Christian Science Monitor. He is the author of The Faithful Scribe: A Story of Islam, Pakistan, Family, and War, and his writing has appeared in Harper's Magazine, the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and The Nation, among other publications.
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