Creatures, it’s the 1970s! Let’s all get hijacked while smoking!
“My Children Are Buried Here”
I picked up Shahan Mufti’s American Caliph: The True Story of a Muslim Mystic, a Hollywood Epic, and the 1977 Siege of Washington, DC because it was about something that started a few blocks from where I grew up. At a large house on Sixteenth Street, just north of Rock Creek Park, Nation of Islam members attacked a renegade Black Muslim man’s family, murdering his son and grandchildren and leaving two of his three wives for dead. Four years later that NOI critic, Hamaas Abdul Khaalis, masterminded the takeover of three buildings in downtown DC, in a two-day-long hostage crisis that led President Jimmy Carter to consider putting the District under martial law (again lol). So far, so heartbreaking and so local. But there are aspects of Khaalis’s story that I think will be of interest to many of you, especially all those interested in reconciliation and restoration after violence.
There were all kinds of things I didn’t know about the background to the massacre on Sixteenth Street. I’d sort of assumed that the majority of American Muslims were always from the Arab diaspora, but it turns out that until the immigration reforms of the 1960s, most were African-American i.e. normal Black people born in the USA. The Nation of Islam wasn’t the first group of Black American Muslims, but it became the largest by far. It also became a lot more cultlike and intertwined with organized crime than I’d realized. There’s a fascinating sub-narrative here about one of Elijah Muhammad’s sons, who left the Nation for a more traditional Sunni Islam, but returned under severe duress after Malcolm X’s assassination—and began to try to haul the Nation toward noncriminal, boring normie Sunni beliefs.
But before any of that happened, Khaalis left the Nation and began a letter-writing campaign against it, which prompted the attack on his family, which prompted the takeovers of the District Building (where the city government met), B’nai Brith (a Jewish fraternal organization that became an advocacy group for Jews and for the State of Israel), and the Islamic Center. Khaalis’s men held a total of almost 150 hostages. He demanded that authorities stop the premiere of a movie depicting the life of the Prophet Muhammad, destroy the film, and turn over to him the men who had attacked his family and those responsible for the murder of Malcolm X.
Mufti’s prose is pretty workaday, and I think he leans a bit too heavily on the second half of his title: the idea that Khaalis’s story is about the many-sided battle to be the leader of all American Muslims, the Caliph. That’s part of it, sure, but Khaalis clearly had several other motives, from justice to self-defeating anguish to exercise of his own hold over his followers. The relationship between Khaalis and the men who actually carried out the takeovers and held the hostages remains opaque here. They’re described as following his orders without hesitation or question, but we never see him gather them together or earn their obedience. How did he end up with a cult?
The first half of the title, though—that’s close to Khaalis’s heart. Again and again he insists that he is a true American. That insistence begins early and never lets up, not even when he’s in an American prison. When the hostage negotiators offer him a plane ticket to the messed-up country of his choice, he retorts, “Who would stand up for the faith? Who? I never traveled out of America in my life except when I was a musician. … This is my country. My teacher is buried here from Pakistan, my children are buried here, my mother and father are buried here.”
Khaalis is sadistic toward the hostages—not physically violent, but he seems to enjoy terrifying them. He froths with hatred toward Jews, and makes it clear that he has no interest in mercy toward the Jewish hostages at B’nai B’rith. His grief and rage seem to have pushed him into a place where peace is no longer possible. But then he speaks with three diplomats, from three Muslim-majority countries.
Some of the reviews for American Caliph praised the tick-tock of the hostage drama, and that was compelling in a standard true-crime way. The description of Khaalis’s meeting with the diplomats, by contrast, was genuinely electrifying. Two of them are serious men, religious men, who quote the Koran and try to speak to Khaalis’s particular nexus of neuroses, doctrine, and longing. One of them is a playboy, the stereotype of the diplomat who loves caviar and parties and flashy cars. And when the religious men reach an impasse, the playboy speaks. The story he tells convinces Khaalis to free all the hostages.
After the massacre at the house on Sixteenth Street, Khaalis got some kind of justice from the American adversarial system, but not enough—and that justice came with horrific costs, as his wives were forced to relive their near-murder again and again in courtrooms. The diplomats show Khaalis a way of mercy. He takes it. And then… well, and then he is still the person he was, he gets caught on wiretap making violent threats, he continues to scramble for international influence from prison, et cetera. There’s a story here about what reconciliation can do, but also about what it might not do.
This is just a newsletter, so I’m not going to try to weave the other elements of Mufti’s narrative in elegantly. But the story of the movie, Mohammad: Messenger of God is also pretty fascinating—and ends with a horror-film history stinger that made me literally gasp. Meir Kahane makes a late, extremely unwanted appearance. And this is also the story of America striding into the Middle East, olive branch and oil rig in hand: head first, eyes closed, can’t lose! That, too, is an intensely American story, with “American” here meaning what it meant for Graham Greene.
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“The Angel Gabriel From Heaven Came”
Crescent-moon spire of the Islamic Center via the Center’s website, used under a Creative Commons license.