Muhammad Abdullah, Lahore-Ahmadi Americans and the Black Muslims of America

Abstract

Abstract Imam Muhammad Abdullah (1905–1992) has played a pivotal role shaping the Islamic experience in Fiji and America, two vastly different countries that spanned over six decades. Yet even today, his real historic identity is still shrouded in murky obscurity while his legacy lay mired by layers of confusing myths. This makes him at once fascinating and frustrating. Because Abdullah remains a figure of devotion and a contested site of memory across Islamic movements, it heightens the necessity amongst scholars to disentangle the mythical Abdullah from the historical Abdullah. This essay investigates Abdullah and the Lahore-Ahmadi’s complex entanglements with Wallace Muhammad’s black Muslim community. Their paths were curiously erratic and messy; at times intersecting on a personal, co-conspiratorial level in early 1960s Philadelphia and at other periods they chartered their own separate ways in the mid 1960s after the murderous bloodbaths of Nation of Islam’s religious feuds. From 1970, the pair rekindled their collaboration as their respective organizations became symbiotically intertwined with mixed ramifications.