AMERICAN CALIPH

The story of a hostage takeover that shocked the country.

On March 9, 1977, nearly 150 people were taken hostage at B’nai B’rith headquarters in Washington, D.C., “the largest and oldest Jewish service organization in America,” and two other sites, an attack orchestrated by Hamaas Abdul Khaalis, the Sunni leader of the Hanafi movement. Mining thousands of documents from FBI files and Department of Justice records, trial transcripts, and interviews with five of the hostage takers and more than a dozen hostages, journalist Mufti fashions a tense, often grisly account of the events leading up to the two-day standoff and the arrests, trial, and aftermath of “the largest hostage taking in American history and the first such attack by Muslims on American soil.” Born Ernest Timothy McGee in 1922, Khaalis changed his name when he joined the Nation of Islam. After serving as a close aide to the organization’s leader, Elijah Muhammad, Khaalis derided the Nation as a corrupt “self-serving family oligarchy.” Aligning himself with a new spiritual master, he formed a rival group, which attracted support from basketball star Lew Alcindor, whom Khaalis renamed Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Mufti recounts violent conflicts and fractured leadership both within and among American Muslim groups. In 1973, the Nation’s wrath against Khaalis led to the gory massacre of seven members of his family, including children. Even after some perpetrators were convicted, Khaalis felt “spurned by American justice.” One of his hostage demands was that the men who killed his family be brought to him for justice. Another was that the release of a biopic about the life of Muhammad be stopped and the film reels destroyed. Although Khaalis’ anger, desire for revenge, religious convictions, and psychological demons fueled the siege, Mufti places the event in the larger context of America’s involvement in the tumultuous history of the Middle East, South Asia, and northern Africa.

A brisk, engrossing work of investigative journalism.