Gabfest Reads: Two Horrifying Days in D.C.
Speaker 1: Welcome to our Fifth Reads. I’m David Plotz, one of the hosts of Slate’s Political Gabfest. In 1977, when I was a first grader in D.C. Public Schools, Lafayette Elementary, the city was gripped for several days by an extraordinary event. And even today, 46 years later, yeah, 46 years later, the feeling of those days remains powerfully in my memory. So powerfully. I literally think about it every time I drive up 16th Street. And now Shahan Mufti has written an absolutely brilliant and mesmerizing and page turning account of an event that you probably never heard of, but which was massively important in shaping America’s relationship to Islam and to terrorism.
Speaker 1: Mufti’s book, American College, chronicles the 1977 siege of Washington, D.C., when a small Muslim group based in D.C., based out of a house on 16th Street, took more than 150 hostages in three buildings killed, a young Howard University journalist nearly killed Marion Barry, then a city council member, soon to be mayor and brought the city to a standstill. The Hanafi Muslim takeover of the Binay Brith, the National Islamic Center and the district building was and I think remains the largest hostage taking ever on American soil. Shahan Mufti You are chair of the Department of Journalism at the University of Richmond. Congratulations on writing a remarkable and magnificent book and welcome to Gabfest Reads.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much, David. It’s great to be with you.
Speaker 1: So there are so many threads in this book. It is a history of Islam in America. It’s a history of the Nation of Islam. It’s a ticktock about a terrifying hostage situation. It’s a story about the most ambitious movie ever made about Islam. It’s also, incidentally, a story about Kareem Abdul Jabbar, but most of all, the story of Hamas. Abdul, call us who is the American caliph of the title. So, John, start by telling us a little bit about Hamas. Call us and who he was and the group that he led.
Speaker 2: So. Right. Amos Abdul Karlis is the Muslim mystic of in the title of the book. And he is, I’d say, the one who wants to be American caliph, the leader of Muslims in America, among several other characters in the book. But Hamas call us is born in Gary, Indiana. He is the grandchild of slaves. His parents had moved north during the Great Migration from the South and settled in Gary, Indiana, where he was born in 1922.
Speaker 2: He described some of his childhood in the book, but my readers really encounter him for the first time when he’s serving in the U.S. Army. He’s a Buffalo Soul soldier and he’s about to get deployed to Europe during the Second World War. But he, the reader, sees him actually at a hospital getting a psychiatric evaluation. And that’s really where the story begins in some ways. And this whole question of his mental condition hovers through the book over him. He’s let go of from from the army and collects from the GI Bill for the good part of his life, remainder of his life.
Speaker 2: But he goes on to do many other things. He ends up in Harlem where he becomes a really successful jazz musician. So he arrives there just as bebop is developing and and plays with some really successful jazz musicians of the time, but also is, you know, a successful jazz musician in his own right, tours through Europe with a band and then returns to New York and and it’s in New York that he is It’s also New York is a place Harlem really is the place where he also encounters Islam for the first time. He kind of his understanding, his belief in Islam evolves over his life.
Speaker 2: But that’s the first time he encounters Islam in the shape of the Nation of Islam, which was a very specific particular group of African-American black nationalists. They were headquartered in Chicago, but had a strong presence in Harlem. And that’s the place where he also meets a famous member of the Nation of Islam named Malcolm X, who are both at Temple number seven in Harlem.
Speaker 1: I was really struck as you the parts about Harlem and parts about him as a musician is how is it that Islam takes hold among black musicians so strongly? Why does that happen?
Speaker 2: Yeah, there were several versions of Islam just ran through Harlem. Some of them were, and a lot of them are coming from the, you know, Marcus Garvey’s movement that had elements of Islam to it. There was the more science temple, which was another Muslim, African-American Muslim movement that had organically developed in the American Midwest as well. And then there was the Nation of Islam, and then there was just more traditional Sunni Islam that was coming through immigrants from Africa, the Middle East, South Asia. So. A lot of this was in Harlem at that time.
Speaker 2: But yeah, the jazz scene was particularly specifically gripped with there was this fascination with Islam at the time, and a lot of big names were, you know, subscribing to Islam, experimenting with it, dabbling in it. I mean, essentially it was a really it was a religion of empowerment for a lot of African-Americans generally, because Islam, the way it was being preached and understood in Harlem and in black communities all over the country was a religion that was the original African religion, that was the religion that the slaves had before they got on the slave ships. So in a way, it was a reclaiming of the past. It was a reclaiming of a lost past.
Speaker 2: And also, you know, a lot of people are drawn to it because of Islam’s emphasis on equality among races between races. So and that was helped by the lack of imagery in Islam as well. So there was a white Jesus that, you know, African-Americans were used to seeing was a very white Jesus. But in Islam, there were no images of the Islamic prophet. There was no image of Allah. So in a lot of African-American imagination at the time, this was a religion that had no color and it could have been black as much as it could it be anything, you know, any thing. And so it really takes stronghold in. And and the Nation of Islam, though, was the first major organized Islamic group that really grew among African-Americans in the United States.
Speaker 1: The events of your book are unfold kind of around a big A for a fundamental conflict between the Nation of Islam and the group that college ends up leaving that leader in the Hanafi Muslims. So what is the nature of that conflict? How does it explode into this series of terrible events in the 1970s?
Speaker 2: So Hamas, he really he joins the Nation of Islam in the 1950s and just shoots up the ranks. He is is is a really remarkable personality, not only as a great jazz musician. He’s also completed his undergraduate degree, first at Purdue, completed it at City College, New York. And he’s one of the very few people in the Nation of Islam, at least who is college educated. The Nation of Islam was already drawing from a lot of the incarcerated in prisons. The Nation of Islam was already spreading pretty quickly. So there were a lot of you know, there was to be a college educated black man in the Nation of Islam was pretty unusual. Hollis really shot through the ranks. So and I explain in the book that it’s overlooked, but Hollis was one of the top few people in that really important black nationalist civil rights organization in the 1950s.
Speaker 2: There’s a photograph in the photo insert sort of him, Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam. He was Elijah Muhammad’s personal secretary at a time and the national secretary for the organization. So he was deeply involved with the with Elijah Muhammad’s personal life. He was scheduling his travel. He was writing. Some people said he was writing op eds on behalf of Elijah Muhammad. It really does. Lee He’s ejected from the organization or is kind of excommunicated from it. After a few years working directly under Elijah Muhammad in Chicago, at the headquarters, he started butting heads with a lot of very important people in Elijah Muhammad’s inner circle. And I described those events in the book to his departure from the organization after he leaves.
Speaker 2: Soon after he leaves, though, is where he encounters Islam for the second time. And that is a the more traditional Sunni version of Islam as practiced by many people in South Asia and the Middle East and Africa. That’s and that a message is coming to him from an immigrant Muslim from the Bengal region of India. And he introduces scholars to the Sunni Islam, but also fills his head with a lot of ideas about what the Nation of Islam actually is. And in that telling, it was a conspiracy hatched by Zionists to derail the growth of Islam in America.
Speaker 2: So basically Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam are a are a Zionist plot and they are sent to destroy Islam in this country and not let it take off. So all this takes that to heart. And because of his bitter experience in the Nation of Islam makes it it becomes a really it’s not it’s only not not only a religious battle from him after for him after that. It’s also a personal battle to stop the growth of the Nation of Islam, which is growing very quickly. But also it’s. The religious mission of spreading the true Islam of Sunni Islam, which he calls and its master calls Hanafi Islam, and spread that throughout America.
Speaker 2: That is the struggle that yeah, as you said, that is the tension that is driving a lot of the events up to the the hostage taking in 1977 in Washington DC and of 1972, Hamas Khalis started a letter writing campaign against the Nation of Islam and started to reveal a lot of what had been told to him by his own teacher is sending Muslim teacher but also drawing on his own inside knowledge of the Nation of Islam.
Speaker 2: And he cast Elijah Muhammad, like I said, as a Zionist agent, as somebody who was there to derail Islam and a liar and all kinds of things that Nation of Islam reacted to that the letter writing campaign very strongly by sending a group of assassins to Washington, DC, where the front office were headquartered by that time. And that’s the Assassins mission was basically to wipe out the Hanafi movement by assassinating Hamas, Abdul Hollis, but also his followers.
Speaker 2: That turned into a bloody Pacific massacre at the Hanafi Center and 16th Street in Washington, D.C.. They did not they did not manage to kill Hollis, but they did kill seven other people, including four of Hamas kolisi’s children. And this one of the youngest one was just nine days old at that time. And he was drowned. That baby was drowned. And the other a few other children were drowned and a lot and a few others, including his wife and daughter and two grown sons, were also shot. That is where this whole thing becomes very personal for Hollis as well. After the nation, he blames the Nation of Islam publicly for it. And soon after in a press conference. And from there, the conflict just continues.
Speaker 1: And so what does he end up doing in March of 1977?
Speaker 2: Before I get to 77, between 73 and 77, he there is there are a series of trials where Hollis is and the fees are hoping to get some kind of closure and justice. The American justice system is moving too slow for them. And after four years of trials and retrials and mistrials, Hollis does decide in 1977 that he has simply had enough and hatches this plan to attack these three locations in Washington, DC. Like you said, the Bernie Brith and Rhode Island Avenue, the Islamic Center, which is just a couple of miles away on Massachusetts Avenue, and then the district building there, which houses the city council, Washington City Council. What triggers this for him is is actually something entirely unrelated, which is a biohazard is a Hollywood film about the Islamic prophet that’s just come out that day.
Speaker 1: This kind of interplay of things, these interplay of forces is fascinating. But so what what does he do? They take over these buildings and demand demands. What.
Speaker 2: A few hours on the morning of March 9th, Hollis and 11 of his followers, they in three different groups take over these three buildings, seven men under the bourbon breath, take over the entire building, take over more than a hundred hostages, most of them employees of Babe Ruth, most of them Jewish. Two or three others go to the Islamic center, take hostages there. Most of them are actually Muslim because it’s the Islamic center and also some of them who had diplomatic or quasi diplomatic status. And at the district building, two other canopies take over the fifth floor of the building where the city council is. That’s the bloodiest location.
Speaker 2: That’s the most violent takeover of all. That’s where there’s a gunfight. Four shots are fired by police and the nephews. And but within a few the first half hour of that standoff, there are three bodies lying on the floor of the fifth floor of the city District Council of the district building. Or one of them, as you said in your intro, was a Howard University young Howard University radio journalist. Another one was a security guard, and the third one was Marion Barry, city councilman who was called, would go on to become mayor. That is the take.
Speaker 2: It happens over a few hours, like I said. And by the time that things are happening in the district building, which the third location, the it’s become very obvious to D.C. police and also the FBI, which quickly becomes involved that this is a coordinated attack on Washington. This are not two, three independent attacks. This is all. This is all one.
Speaker 2: And that is where it’s pandemonium in downtown Washington. Things places are getting evacuated. The National Theatre is evacuating thousands of people. All courts are getting emptied out. National monuments are closed. So Washington, D.C., by 3 p.m. that day on March 9th is under siege.
Speaker 1: And and what does this demand?
Speaker 2: So, yes, call the call. This is first demand is about the movie. There’s a movie about the life of the Prophet Muhammad that’s premiering in New York City and Los Angeles that day. Corliss wants that movie to not play and be stopped. And not only that, he also demands that the reels be removed from the United States for a very for several hours. That’s actually his only demand. I described how the Washington and New York police are struggling to get that movie stopped, which actually does begin at 2 p.m. and starts to play once that demand is somewhat mad because the premiere is actually canceled mid-April, it’s stopped.
Speaker 2: Carlos’s other demands emerge, which include delivering to him at Bani Brith. All the all the accused murderers, the people who were involved at the massacre at the Hanafi Center four years earlier. On top of that, he also demands the president. He wants Wallace Muhammad, who is Elijah Muhammad, son in the Nation of Islam. He has taken over the organization. In the meantime, he wants him delivered, but also his star disciple, the heavyweight champion, Muhammad Ali, to be delivered to him. So he’s asking for bodies to be delivered to all people, to be delivered to him. And he promises to execute justice, whatever that well, most people assumed that meant that he would kill these people.
Speaker 2: And then there’s a third demand, which is he’s asking for $750 in cash. It’s a cryptic demand, but that really is pointing to the four years preceding between the massacre and this hostage taking and the experience that Karlis and the hunt of his head in the court system and the judicial system of Washington, DC and in America. Well, federal judicial system, too. And that is his frustrations. And $750 is really, in his mind, the price of the injustice that he suffered he and the Hanafi suffered in the courts.
Speaker 1: The situation for the hostages is very unpleasant. It does. As I’m not going to give anything away too much. I mean, it resolved mostly peacefully, but it was very unpleasant for the hostages.
Speaker 2: Like I said, the district building was the most violent meeting. I mean, there were shots fired and people died immediately. But it was no less terrifying in the bad breath. Within an hour, they had captured over 100 people. And the way they were captured was just overwhelming force and violence. And there was a there were shots fired at the Bani Brith as well, though nobody died at that location. There were people bleeding from wounds. People’s the hostages there were piled up on different floors at first on top of each other. So there were just mounds of bodies for hours for the first couple of hours that were just stacked. People were just thrown on top of each other in piles.
Speaker 2: And so it was, you know, some of these people just keep in mind, had had escaped the Holocaust in Europe. I mean, there had experienced that. And now they were in Washington, D.C., in the heart of Washington, D.C., with bodies piled on each other, the blood mixing with the urine and sweat. It was just horrific. I spoke to several hostages and and I actually spoke to several hostages who couldn’t bring themselves even after close to 50 for more than 40 years later to talk about these events. They just couldn’t.
Speaker 2: But the event, the takeover of the banana birth was terrible. Eventually, all the hostages were moved to one location on the eighth floor, and that is where the office and the hostages stayed for the remainder of the crisis. Over the next two days, the Islamic center, the third, the second location that was taken over was for perhaps the least violent. It was the least violent. But over there, the officers were also had serious grievances with one one of the hostages who was the director of the Islamic center, who the office believed had betrayed him and had sided with the Nation of Islam. He was an Egyptian imam named Mohamed up to Rauf. So they were but he was equally threatened, constantly berated, threatened that they would behead him, set him on fire. They had a gas can of gas sitting at his feet the whole time. And so, yeah, all three locations were more different. But there was terror in all three places.
Speaker 1: One thing I couldn’t decide after reading your book was, is this America’s introduction, big introduction to Islam and to the idea of terror coming from Islam? Or does that really not start until the Islamic revolution in Iran a couple of years later when American hostages are held overseas? And is this this episode becomes sort of forgotten?
Speaker 2: I think you’re absolutely right. This is something I thought about, too, while writing this. Is that was this the moment? And in retrospect, and having looked at this case, in retrospect, it’s I don’t think that Americans actually made full sense of this at the moment. And it’s through the lens of the Islamic revolution in Iran, which comes only two years later. The heart of his are like appealing their case at that time in the federal courts. But when the Iranian revolution happens. But that really is the moment, I think, where American American consciousness is invaded by this idea of an Islamic militant and Islamic threat and Islamic militancy.
Speaker 2: All this is I mean, the entire pretext of the attack on Washington in 1977 was a religious pretext, though it was a movie about Muhammad. And that whole question of the, you know, the taboo around imagery of Muhammad and portrayals of Muhammad in pop culture. So the pretext of this attack was very much a religious pretext.
Speaker 2: But I think Americans at that time perhaps did not have all the vocabulary and the understanding in general of what Islam was, but also what the power dynamics in the Middle East and in the Muslim world were, and also didn’t even fully appreciate America’s increasingly deep involvement in the Middle East. And that’s a big part of my book, is I’m also tracking American foreign policy in the Middle East and how that dynamic is shaping Kolisi’s life, but also his thinking and his his goal to reach the perch of Islamic America as caliph.
Speaker 1: And I also I think it’s also probably I’ll use the word confusing because I can’t think of a better word confusing for Americans because Islam is a religion which people associate with the Middle East and with primarily with Arabs, I suppose, though not. With the Middle East. And almost everyone you’re writing about in this book is a black American. Is that right?
Speaker 2: There are a lot of black American characters, Muslim, African-American Muslim characters, Black Muslims is what the Nation of Islam call them. So I’m trying to differentiate that, just like generally African-American Muslims in the country. But there are the key players who are also immigrant Muslims, like one of the hostages, Mohammed Abdul Rauf. Colossus, teacher, was an immigrant. Master Farad muhammad, who was the founder of the Nation of Islam himself, which was the black nationalist group that was the first big Islamic group in America. He himself was is believed to be an immigrant. And I talk I try to trace out his background in the book as well a little bit.
Speaker 2: So you’re right. It is. I mean, I think I one of the takeaways from my book is that it it’s hard to extricate the black Islamic tradition in America from the immigrant Islamic tradition in America and that these two things are really tied deeply together. Of course, Islam be the story of Islam in America, begins on the slave ships. That is undoubted. But how it’s revived and the ways in which it develops in the 20th century especially, is a story of both black Islam but also immigrant Islam, and that there is tension between those two as well. That’s something that’s part of the story.
Speaker 1: Can you just briefly touch on Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, because I mean, it’s in your subtitle, neither your title nor subtitle references the fact that Muhammad Ali and Kareem Abdul Jabbar, arguably the two most famous athletes in America at the time, are intimately involved in this entire in all of this. And Jabbar especially.
Speaker 2: Intimately involved and also on the opposite sides of this, That’s what’s so amazing. So while Elijah Muhammad has secured the support of Muhammad Ali and he’s his star disciple, Hollis at the at a similar time manages to attract Kareem Abdul Jabbar. Lewis Alcindor. At the time he was in, he was still at UCLA. The renowned by far the most exciting prospect for professional basketball and scholars reaches out to him, actually call us. And Kareem’s father had had been in the same jazz circles and Harlem. So they knew each other from the Jazz days. And Carlos reaches out to him because he learns about Kareem’s general interest in Islam, which was just budding at that time.
Speaker 2: And Kareem is completely taken by college when he meets him and really throws himself in to the Hanafi movement and to call his mission, because compared to some other groups like the Nation of Islam, but also some of the more militant black groups that Kareem knows about. Strikes Kareem as a much more reasonable guy. And he’s talking about equality of races. But he’s also has, you know, this this thread of patriotism and how blacks belong in America. So Hollis is is preaching this message of of patriotism along with love for all races. And so he sounds quite reasonable to Kareem and he really throws himself in it.
Speaker 2: When Kareem becomes a pro basketball player, though, and the money starts coming, any signs? A massive contract with the Milwaukee Bucks. He starts bankrolling the Hanafi movement pretty much on, you know, singlehandedly. And that is what allows the office to move to Washington, DC, to that really gorgeous headquarters on 16th Street. It wouldn’t have happened without Kareem. Kareem purchased that building for the head office in the early 1970s.
Speaker 1: Are any of the hostage takers alive today and did they talk to you for the book?
Speaker 2: I worked on this book seven years and it couldn’t have been any later. I you know, there a lot of people around, not just hostages, but hostage takers, too, and negotiators and some of the, you know, ambassadors who help with the resolution and all that. So the hostage takers. So there were 12 hostage takers. I and a lot of them have died since, including Hollis. But I was actually able to speak to most of the hostage takers who who are alive.
Speaker 2: Still, there are some of them are still associated with the the the Hanafi group of whatever remains of it. Some of them are really look back at that period in their lives. And though I don’t think anybody used the word cult, but they describe their experiences in that group and in that organization. And under Hollis, as you know, they look back at those events and have no explanation for the ways they were behaving at that time and what they believed. And their understanding of Islam has evolved since they’ve gone actually down many, several traditions of Islam.
Speaker 2: Call us as immediate family, though, who, you know, some of the children who survive are still very much practice Islam in that tradition. The caller’s immediate relatives, blood relatives, none of them actually cooperated with me for this book project. But I did speak to many of figures, including the hostage takers and actually one of his wives as well. He had multiple wives. So, yeah, you know, there it is. And the idea that they’re all over the they’re they’re across the spectrum, their experiences.
Speaker 1: Last question. I’m a native Washingtonian. I grew up here, as I said, as a seven year old. This this experience made a mark on me. I remembered it. It was important to me. And yet, honestly, if you think about the kind of broader history of Washington, if you asked 100 Washingtonians about it, they would not know about this event. It didn’t. It isn’t. It isn’t marked in the city the way 911 is marked in the city. It’s not. It’s not deeply important to the the historical life of Washington. Why do you think or maybe you disagree with that, but it feels to me like this book is a revelation because people don’t know about it. Why don’t we know about it?
Speaker 2: That’s a question I that I’ve had some version of this conversation countless times with the people that I interviewed for the book. A lot of them wondered a lot of the people who are deeply involved with this in any way, who wondered the same thing is how did this get forgotten? And that’s something honestly, I’ve I that’s something that’s hovered over this project. I don’t answer it in my book. It wasn’t the project to answer that. But I think what we were talking about a little earlier, that America honestly didn’t know what to make of this. This was a huge news event when it happened. It was all of the evening network news, all front pages across the country were covering this crisis when it happened. So it wasn’t like this event wasn’t covered in the news. It was big news. It was international news.
Speaker 2: But to make sense of it was another thing in retrospect. And and almost 50 years have passed since the hostage taking. And and this is the first time my book is the first time that anybody has, you know, dived into the dive into the record and tried to recreate the events of that time. So it was forgotten. And you’re right, if anything like this were to happen in America today, we would not there’s no way we could forget about it in 50 years. That’s like saying that January 6th is just going to get forgotten in 40 years, which is not.
Speaker 2: Though they are different events, but it didn’t register. And I think part of it was that Americans didn’t have the vocabulary to describe it. I think it was also over two. It was sandwiched between two other major events that are really the remain present in American memory, which are which is the Munich massacre in Munich. I think that was one where the Palestinian militants took the Israeli athletes hostage and killed, murdered many. And the Iranian revolution of 1979. And in some ways, I think this event in 1977, it bridges our understanding of those two major hostage takings that most people remember. I think the 1977 siege of Washington is what really can allow us to understand how those two moments were connected.
Speaker 1: Shahan Mufti Thanks for joining me on Gabfest read Sharon’s book. American Caliphate is really one of the best books I’ve read in years. You should get it. You should read it. It’s it is gripping. It’s so interesting. I learned so much from it. And it’s just a fantastic read. So listen to it.
Speaker 2: Thank you, David. It’s been a real pleasure. Thanks so much for the kind words.
Speaker 1: That’s it for this month’s edition of Gabfest Reads, Our producer, Cheyna Roth Ben Richmond is senior director of operations for Slate’s podcasts. Alicia montgomery is vice president of Audio at Slate. We’ll be back next month with another edition of Gabfest reads. Until then, me and John and Emily will be back in your feed on Thursday with a new episode of the Slate Political Gabfest.
