By Paul M. Barrett

Many readers of Muslim Wakeup know the name Siraj Wahhaj. Many have probably heard the charismatic African-American imam speak—perhaps at a Muslim Students Association conference or a fundraiser at a well appointed suburban mosque. But I’d guess that few Muslim Wakeup fans have encountered Wahhaj on his home turf in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a struggling neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., where his threadbare Masjid At-Taqwa occupies a heavily trafficked corner.
As a part of the reporting for my newly published book, American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), I attended prayer services at Taqwa, had long conversations with Wahhaj in his cramped, cluttered masjid office, and interviewed a number of worshipers there. In the book I present Wahhaj’s life and career as a window into African-American Islam, a segment of the faith in this country with a distinct narrative comprehensible only when viewed in the larger, often-painful context of American black history.

Wahhaj’s spiritual migration has taken him from the Baptist church of his youth, where he was known as Jeffrey Kearse, through the racially separatist Nation of Islam, where he was known as Jeffrey 12X, to an understanding of the religion influenced by Sunni authorities in the Middle East. Today he represents two crucial components of African-American Islam: a constructive do-for-self philosophy and a conspiratorial antagonism toward government and the white establishment. He has dined as an honored guest at the U.S. State Department and has given talks at some of the country’s most prestigious universities. But he refuses to condemn Osama bin Laden for the September 11, 2001, attacks on Washington and New York.

American Islam is a collection of detailed portraits exploring the variety and conflict within the religion as Muslims sort out what it means to lead an American life. In a chapter entitled, “The Imam,” I look at whether Wahhaj embodies black Islam’s arrival and acceptance in mainstream America, or its lingering attachment to radicalism—or, somehow, both.

There may be no better place to take the measure of African-American Islam today than at Masjid At-Taqwa in Brooklyn, N.Y. Formerly a clothing store, then a junkies’ shooting gallery, Taqwa sits at the busy intersection of Fulton Street and Bedford Avenue. In the mid-nineteenth century, free blacks had helped settle the area, now known as Bedford-Stuyvesant. In the 1930s, a new subway line from Manhattan encouraged African-Americans to move to the neighborhood from a crowded and deteriorating Harlem. As the number of blacks in Bedford-Stuyvesant tripled over the next three decades, most whites fled for the suburbs. Housing projects and crime went up; businesses disappeared. Today some blocks are starting to gentrify, but much of the area remains bleak.

At one o’clock one summer Friday afternoon, the jostling to get into the mosque and find a space to sit was getting intense. The imam was in town and would be delivering the khutbah. Some 500 men crowded into the windowless main hall. Among them were cab drivers and security guards, ex-convicts in do-rag stocking caps and merchants wearing embroidered West African robes of crimson and gold. There were school teachers, municipal clerks, and mobile-phone salesmen. Most were American-born blacks, the rest immigrants from Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East. Their shoes were stored in green plastic bags set on long shelves near the door. They sat on dingy gray-striped carpeting laid to indicate the qibla, or direction of prayer toward Mecca. The walls, painted mustard yellow and green, were bare except for a torn poster of the holy city. Invisible from the main hall, a small group of women in headscarves and ankle-length dresses entered through a side door. They sat in a separate room connected via closed-circuit TV.

A wiry black man with a henna-tinged beard picked up a microphone and repeated the plaintive invitation to prayer, beginning, “Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar/ Ashahadu an la ilaha ill Allah.” From a rear door, two burly men emerged to clear a path for Siraj Wahhaj, the imam. Over his white tunic-and-trouser ensemble, he wore a long chocolate-colored robe. He carried a stack of religious texts under one arm. Seated worshipers swiveled to follow his progress, several reaching to touch him as he passed. Wahhaj is a tall, handsome man in his mid-50s with a full beard tending toward gray. He carries himself like someone who knows he is the pride of the neighborhood and one of the most popular Muslim preachers in the country. On many Fridays, he is off speaking in another state, in Canada, or in Europe. He routinely attracts audiences of hundreds of people and annually raises hundreds of thousands of dollars for Muslim causes. Today, he was preaching at home.

The crowd fell silent as Wahhaj reached the minbar, a small wooden platform with a carved roof. He picked up the microphone and solemnly offered prayers in Arabic and English. When he had finished, he paused, looked down for a moment, and then smiled confidently. He began his homily: As a result of embracing Islam, he declared, “I’m a better husband, a better father, a better son to my parents.” He extolled the religion’s power to reform individuals and entire communities. He acknowledged the “long line of brothers who came out of prison” having converted behind bars. Twenty-five years earlier, drugs and crime poisoned the blocks around the mosque, he said. Then Muslims chased away the dealers and their clientele. Islam became the dominant presence on the corner of Fulton and Bedford. Five times a day, the call to prayer, chanted in Arabic and amplified through loudspeakers, competes with the traffic noise. Vendors sell Islamic audiotapes from rickety folding tables on the sidewalk. Previously neglected buildings have been repaired, legitimate businesses have returned. “When Islam came, it became a better area,” Wahhaj exulted. “I want this area to be an oasis in the midst of a desert.”

As with the health of the neighborhood, he said, so it should be with the individual. Life-expectancy tables showed a huge gap between white and black. “Can we change it? Yes, we can.” Muslims must avoid alcohol and drugs, but there was more: “Take your medication, get checkups. I’m telling you, brothers, go to the dentist. Fix your teeth. You wonder why you’re not married, look at your teeth.” Laughter rippled through the hall.

He shifted to the issue of earning a living. “Some brothers here used to sell drugs,” he said. “It’s better to be a poor man!” Drive a taxi, he commanded, hoist a suitcase at the airport, or pick up garbage. His cadence echoed the Baptist preachers of his youth. “This is honorable money!” he proclaimed. “It’s honorable to sweep the streets of New York!”

Then, without warning, the mantra of self-improvement ceased. The imam glowered. “The more we grow in this area,” he warned, “the more pressure we’re going to get from some segments of the community who don’t want us to be successful.” He named no names (but on other occasions referred to the media, backers of Israel, and the FBI). “I believe there’s going to come a time when the authorities will come after me,” he said. “They will find a way.” The imam’s change of direction was abrupt but not surprising to anyone who had heard him preach before, either in person or on inexpensive audiotapes sold on the Internet. Wahhaj frequently turns sharp rhetorical corners, moving from optimistic exhortation to darker subjects and back again.

He told his audience that his popularity—which attracts throngs to Masjid At-Taqwa and earns him all those out-of-town speaking invitations—was viewed as a threat by certain unidentified forces. “They have to get me like they got Malcolm, like they got Martin Luther King, like they got everybody else,” he said. “That’s what they do. I’m warning you. Already, I’ve seen signs that they have laid the foundation.” The signs he was referring to were press reports that mentioned his testimony for the defense in a 1995 terrorism trial, which concluded with the conviction of eleven Muslims for conspiring to blow up the headquarters of the United Nations and other New York landmarks. Prosecutors, he said, had demonized him. All these years later, the media were still reporting that he has been “linked” to the conspiracy.“How am I linked?” he thundered. “How am I linked? Tell me!” Reaching a crescendo, he said, “They’re going to come after me, I’m telling you!” There were murmurs of affirmation. The imam said he would welcome death in the service of Allah. “If they kill me,” he said, “don’t be crying.”

Adapted from American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion, by Paul M. Barrett, published on Jan. 2, 2007, by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2007 by Paul M. Barrett

Paul Barrett will be touring the country, reading and discussing his new book, American Islam. On Sunday, Feb. 4, he will be in New York at the 92nd Street Y at 7:30 p.m., where he will moderate a discussion about Muslim life in America. The other participants will be writer/activist Asra Nomani, journalist and MWU contributor Mona Eltahawy and Altaf Husain, a former national president of the Muslim Students Association.