$43.49
Author: Mufti Shahan
Number Of Pages: 384
Details: About the Author
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.
Product Description
One of Publishers Weekly’s best nonfiction books of 2022
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.
Review
“Ambitious and commendable . . . Mufti’s ticktock of the siege, the book’s climactic centerpiece, is a tour de force. Using police records, an F.B.I. report and government wiretaps, he recreates the two days of terror and violence in tense, vivid detail.” ―Jonathan Mahler, The New York Times Book Review
“[American Caliph] packs a lot into its fast-turning pages . . . Shahan Mufti pulls out all the stops to tell the extraordinary but largely forgotten tale of a man deranged by grief and ambition . . . Mufti artfully weaves wider historical events into his story . . . These elements supply the rich context of a saga that builds in tension until the last gripping moments.” ―The Economist
“[American Caliph] tells the extraordinary story of a dramatic hostage incident . . . Mufti does a terrific job of putting [the Hanafie siege] in the context of the times, of events and tensions both national and international.” ―Claire Messud, Harper’s
“Fascinating and meticulously researched . . . American Caliph provides a nuanced portrait of Khaalis . . . A haunting book.” ―Jonathan
Release Date: 22-11-2022
Package Dimensions: 35x237x600
