Friday, April 11, 2014

New Article on Abdul Hamid Suleiman




My new article on Abdul Hamid Suleiman has just been published under the title:


*NOTE* Unfortunately, very few libraries carry this journal--in either hard-copy or electronic form. However, it is available through some library subscriptions of the EBSCO Publishing. If your library does not have it, you can obtain a copy through your library's Interlibrary Loan department. Or, if you belong to a college that has a Religious Studies department that is a member of Theta Alpha Kappa, they may have a copy.

In this article I discuss new evidence I have found on Suleiman's activities between 1905 and 1922, the years he was verifiably in the US prior to the confirmed existence of his "Caananites" Temple.

I also discuss evidence concerning his birth and immigration years, and his likely ties Georgia in the late 1800s--information obtained from Suleiman's various court and prison records

Perhaps the most important aspect of this article, however, is my discussion of Suleiman's meeting with leading Garveyites--including DUSE MOHAMED ALI--in April 1922. The evidence of this meeting has been staring all of us in the face for years. Richard Brent Turner, in his seminal work on African-American Islam, "Islam in the African-American Experience" (1997), discussed this meeting. However, at the time, he had no idea whom "Dr. Abdul Hamid" was, plus he had a few errors in his transcription of the 1922 article he was citing, which made it difficult to recognize all of that article's important clues. After I wrote my 2011 article on Abdul Hamid Suleiman,  I was re-reading Turner's book to see if I could see things I had missed before. That's when I stumbled onto this story, which got me interested in digging deeper into Suleiman's past.

Now, I actually originally wrote this newest article in late 2012, so there are some claims and conclusions in it that I no longer adhere to. These will be cleared up in my forthcoming "A History of Conversion to Islam in the United States, Vol. 2: The African-American Islamic Renaissance" (Brill 2015)

Below is the article that Turner discussed and which inspired this new investigation (click to enlarge):