3 The Faith of Universal Brotherhood: The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community’s Popularity among Bebop Musicians

Abdul Hameed, the Indian Ahmadi missionary in Boston, introduced Shorty Jarvis and Malcolm X to Islam in Roxbury, although they took another route in prison. Hameed’s mentorship of Shorty and Malcolm did, however, exemplify the growing influence that the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community would have on the spirituality and internationalism of bebop musicians outside prison in the postwar era. Malcolm acknowledged this influence in 1950, after he converted to the Nation of Islam, when he talked about the “many who belong to the Ahmadiyya movement.”¹Close A large number of the Ahmadiyya converts were beboppers, who were attracted by the movement’s emphasis on universal brotherhood (the Islamic value of racial and ethnic equality) as well as the worldwide Muslim community’s belief in the oneness of God. Unlike Malcolm and Shorty, they accepted the prophethood of Ghulam Ahmad and rejected the divinity of the Nation of Islam’s founder, W. D. Fard Muhammad, and the doctrine that Elijah Muhammad was a messenger of God.

Chapter 3 looks at the forces of internationalism, resistance, masculinity, black affirmation, freedom, and self-determination that encouraged black jazz musicians to convert to the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in the 1940s and 1950s, forces that made it the most popular Islamic community among bebop artists during this period. The chapter explores the transnational experience of the Ahmadi missionaries who migrated from their homeland in India and established their American religious networks in the urban centers where jazz thrived, as well as the transnational journeys of their African American converts. It analyzes the Ahmadi links to the Marcus Garvey movement and Pan-Africanism, and the parallel values found in the jazz community and in the Ahmadiyya presentation of Islam.

As the 1950s approached, many bebop jazz musicians (especially those who converted to Islam) began to see themselves in a larger global context, as part of the international liberation struggles of blacks in the African diaspora and Africa, and also, sometimes, in solidarity with the oppositional struggles of people of color who were not black. Ahmadiyya missionaries attracted the attention of the bebop artists because they were exemplars of a universal Islamic brotherhood advocating racial equality, Pan-Africanism, and transnationalism: they circulated their religious message widely across a breadth of countries, including India, Pakistan, England, Nigeria, Ghana, Denmark, Sweden, and the United States, and their mission to blacks transformed the meaning of conversion among African American musicians. Communities like these relied on the global networks created by international migrants whose spiritual and political identities were shaped by their travel and their religious connections to both their countries of origin and their communities in their new host countries.

In 1920 the Ahmadis sent Mufti Muhammad Sadiq from England to work as the first missionary of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in the United States. Sadiq, who was a philologist and a graduate of the University of London, started out in New Jersey, where he was incarcerated in a detention facility for two months by US immigration officials until he convinced them that he would not preach polygamy in America. During his incarceration, he made his first convert in the United States, R. J. H. Rochford: “Watching me praying and reciting the Holy Book, Mr. Rochford inquired of my religion, which I explained to him and I gave him some books to study. Very soon he was convinced of the truth of our religion and being converted was named Hamid.”²Close The Indian missionary converted nineteen additional men to Islam while he was confined in New Jersey; they were immigrants from British Guyana, Jamaica, France, Italy, Russia, Poland, Portugal, Belgium, and Germany.³Close

Sadiq was a victim of America’s virulent racism against Asians that created the climate for the Immigration Act of 1917, excluding workers from the “Asiatic Barred Zone” (Afghanistan, India, Saudi Arabia, and other Asian countries). The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Geary Act of 1902 had already barred most Chinese laborers from immigrating to the United States. A federal law, the Immigration Act of 1924 excluded the majority of non-European immigrants by constructing racist origin quotas that closed the door to Asians and Africans and funded the legal deportation of barred migrants in the United States. Finally, the Immigration and Naturalization Bureau revoked the citizenship of numerous Indian Americans from 1923 to 1926 because a 1923 Supreme Court decision, United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, decided that Indians were not eligible for naturalized citizenship because they were not white.⁴Close

Upon his release, Sadiq moved to Highland Park, Michigan, opened the Ahmadiyya mission house on the South Side of Chicago, converted Americans to Islam, and established the Moslem Sunrise, the first Muslim newspaper in the United States.⁵Close Before long, the newspaper began to criticize the racial deficiencies of Christianity: “What sad news we came across … about the conflict between the Blacks and the Whites in this country. It is a pity that no preaching of equality has so far been able to do away with this evil.”⁶Close

In 1920 Mufti Muhammad Sadiq wrote twenty articles on the Muslim religion that appeared in American newspapers and periodicals, and he presented fifty public talks in US cities.⁷Close Ultimately, his missionary work in Chicago was successful from 1921 to 1925 and he persuaded 1,025 Americans to embrace Islam with his convincing religious message:

There is but one God…. All others are mere prophets, including Jesus. Muhammad was the last and the equal of the others. None is to be worshiped, not even Jesus or Muhammad. The Trinity is an illusion—the word is not found in the Christian Bible and its principle cannot be sustained. God created all races, all colors. Islam makes no difference between race and class.⁸Close

The Moslem Sunrise urged African Americans to abandon Christianity and embrace Islam’s universal brotherhood: “Christian profiteers brought you out of … Africa … and made you forget the religion and language of your forefathers—which were Islam and Arabic…. Christianity cannot bring real brotherhood…. Now leave it alone. And join Islam, the real faith of Universal Brotherhood.”⁹Close In 1922 Ahmad Din (P. Nathaniel Johnson), a convert and missionary in St. Louis who wore a fez in his photo, was one of several African American missionaries whose stories and photos appeared in the Moslem Sunrise.¹⁰Close The St. Louis Post Dispatch featured an article about the one hundred converts that he influenced to join the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in the first months of his work.¹¹Close Brother Omar (William M. Patton) was another new African American Muslim mentioned in the former newspaper for his missionary work in St. Louis, and Sister Noor (Ophelia Avant) was cited as a notable black woman who embraced Islam in the city. Brother Hakim (Dr. J. H. Humphries) was an African convert discussed in the pages of the Moslem Sunrise. Born in the Congo Free State (Belgian Congo), he immigrated to the United States as a teenager, studied for several years at Tuskegee Institute, and became a Protestant minister and missionary. When he heard Ahmad Din’s lectures, he decided to leave Christianity and became a Muslim and an Ahmadiyya missionary. Brother Hakim’s Islamic mentor commended him as a “magnetic healer of extraordinary ability” and “great spiritual powers.”¹²Close

A photo of four African American female converts—Mrs. Thomas (Sister Khairat), Mrs. Watts (Sister Zeineb), Mrs. Robinson (Sister Ahmadia), and Mrs. Clark (Sister Ayesha)—in the Moslem Sunrise in 1922 is the first group photograph of Muslim women in the United States. These “four American Moslem ladies” were modestly dressed, wearing hats and shawls that covered their heads, mouths, necks, and shoulders. An important aspect of Mufti Muhammad Sadiq’s work as a new missionary in America is the way he presented Islam as a religion that opposed both sexism and racism. The majority of women converts to the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in the 1920s were black southern migrants. As Sylvia Chan-Malik writes,

Islam offered [them] … a religious and political ethos that rejected the dehumanization of Black working-class women by white society and the Black bourgeoisie and presented expansive and productive concepts of citizenship, belonging, and racial and gendered selfhood in a religious framework that was at once politically empowering and adaptable to their existing knowledge of Christianity. Further, the clear organizational structure of the … [Ahmadiyya], along with its emphasis on religious education and moral development, constituted a stabilizing force in women’s lives—a framework that provided safety and sustained them against the harsh and unforgiving environments of Bronzeville and beyond.¹³Close

In the black Atlantic world of jazz, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community was known for its racial equality and its Afro-Indian Islamic identity, which was performed through missionary work and political interactions with Pan-Africanists and musicians in African American urban communities. According to Moustafa Bayoumi’s understanding of these parallel connections between Asians and black Americans, Ahmadi Islam “is where blacks become Asians and Asians black under color of divine law.”¹⁴Close Its success in the United States would not have been possible without an early group of black converts in the 1920s, members of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association in Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, and Gary, Indiana, who asked African Americans to consider more deeply their links to Africans and the darker races of the world.¹⁵Close These Pan-Africanists exemplified the values of black social justice and dignity by promoting the global unification, liberation, and empowerment of people of African descent. Their goals were the decolonization and freedom of Africa through means as seemingly diverse as the recrafting of African culture and identity in the African diaspora and the emigration of diasporic peoples back to Africa.

The Ahmadi missionaries were familiar with the global movements of Pan-Africanism that ultimately impressed black musicians because of their branch in Lagos, Nigeria, established in 1916, and their association during the World War I period with Duse Mohamed Ali, the Egyptian Muslim editor of the African Times and Orient Review and a mentor of Marcus Garvey in London.¹⁶Close Ali introduced Garvey to Islam and African politics and history during his time in England from 1912 to 1914. The African Times and Orient Review was circulated in Europe, the United States, the Caribbean, West and East Africa, Egypt, India, Turkey, Japan, and Ceylon from 1912 to 1920 and focused on the links between Pan-Islamic and Pan-Africanist discourses, anticolonialism, and resistance to the European and white American domination of the world. The journal opened up the international framework of Pan-Africanism to discuss the cases of Moroccans, Egyptians, and additional African and Asian Muslim groups. It featured essays on Islam in India, book reviews, advertisements from Asian and African sources, and for a brief time a section written in the Arabic language.¹⁷Close It was owned by Pan-Africanists in Sierra Leone, Lagos (Nigeria), and the Gold Coast.¹⁸Close John H. Hanson writes, “Duse Mohamed Ali’s influence on the Ahmadiyya extended to the United States, where Mufti Muhammad Sadiq, the first Ahmadi missionary in the United States, concentrated his efforts on African Americans in several northern cities, most likely through Ali’s contacts.”¹⁹Close

In Chicago, Mufti Muhammad Sadiq resisted Western imperialism and supported Pan-Africanism, Pan-Islamic coalitions, and anticolonial movements for black and brown liberation and self-determination. He encouraged Garvey to revise the UNIA motto “One God, One Aim, One Destiny” to connect to “one language which would be Arabic,” so that black Americans could find supporters among millions of Muslims in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.²⁰Close The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community circulated Muhammad Ali’s first English translation of the Qur’an among African American Muslim communities, including Sheikh Daoud Ahmed Faisal’s Islamic Mission of America and Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, and converted several thousand black Americans by 1940 in its mission houses in midwestern and northeastern cities.²¹Close

The 1930s and 1940s brought a significant shift in the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community’s missionary work, with the successful new programs of a new Indian missionary, Sufi Mutiur Rahman Bengalee, and popularity among jazz musicians in the United States.²²Close Black Ahmadi leaders like Omar Cleveland wrote about the “democracy of Islam” in the Moslem Sunrise: “Across the threshold of the mosque, in the fold of Islam, all are held to be equal. No distinction is made between men, regardless of race, class, or position. The prince and pauper meet on common ground…. The inequality of wealth and opportunity, which makes life so cruel ceases. All are children of Allah.”²³Close The Ahmadi missionary Bengalee criticized the systemic racism of Christianity and, in his lectures and publications, engaged in a jihad of words, using spiritual and political arguments about the struggle for faith and democracy to promote racial equality:

Treat the colored people in a truly democratic spirit. Do not shut the doors of your churches, hotels, schools, and homes against them. Let them enjoy all the privileges which you possess. If they are poor, help them. If they are backward, uplift them, but for heaven’s sake, do not despise them.²⁴Close

The Moslem Sunrise condemned racism as the cause of the Detroit race riots in 1943:

The Detroit riots have smeared a dark blot on this country’s good name…. Now the news goes all over the world, to North Africa, among the dark-skinned people in India and the South Pacific Islands, among the yellow-skinned peoples of Malaya, Indochina, Thailand, China, and Korea, that black-skinned people are killing and being killed by white-skinned people in free America.²⁵Close

In the early 1940s, the Ahmadiyya’s global population was close to two million adherents in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Their most important missions in the United States were in Chicago, Kansas City (Missouri), Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Washington, DC. The community’s twenty years of American missionary work were successful in terms of its converts’ faithful practice of the Five Pillars of Islam and their adherence to studying the Qur’an and Arabic. Although the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in the United States included Asians and whites, most of its converts were black, some were jazz musicians, and it was one of the oldest and most significant Islamic groups among African Americans in the World War II period.

The late 1940s were a period of shifting strategies among some segments of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, because the political turmoil in Pakistan forced the Ahmadis to use some of their resources there. When the British government left India and the country became independent, it was partitioned according to religious identities, with Hindus and Sikhs in the new India and Muslims in the new Islamic Republic of Pakistan. These dramatic shifts brought on the persecution and relocation of the Ahmadiyya community in the Punjab. Two months after the partition plan was publicized, 100,000 Muslims were massacred in August 1947 in Patiala, a Sikh state in the Punjab. The violence escalated later in the summer and resulted in 650,000 Muslims reported missing in East Punjab and 5 million Muslims compelled to migrate to Pakistan. Three-quarters of Pakistan’s 70 million people were Muslims in 1948. Rabwah in Pakistan became the new international headquarters of the Ahmadiyya. Yet the Sunni Muslim majority in Pakistan branded the Ahmadiyya community heretical because it believed that prophecy continued with its founder, Ghulam Ahmad. The persecution of the Ahmadis escalated in 1953, when the government of Pakistan declared them “a non-Muslim minority.”²⁶Close

Black jazz musicians performed all over the United States in the postwar period, and they were appalled by what they sensed was a growing explosion of white Christian attacks on black Americans. Headlines and newspaper descriptions of such events told only part of the story: “Ex-Marine slain for moving Jim Crow sign” in Alabama; “Cops gouge out Negro vet’s eyes” in South Carolina; “Black veteran … blow torched until his ‘eyes popped out of his head and his light skin was seared dark’” in Louisiana; “Planned lynching of a black veteran who defended his mother from a beating” in Columbia, Tennessee; and “Bound and surrounded, two sisters and their husbands were defenseless against the truckload of firepower brought to the killing fields at Moore’s Ford” in Monroe, Georgia.²⁷Close During this era of Jim Crow atrocities, southern politicians and the State Department worked together to prevent the United Nations from investigating lynchings and enforcing human rights in the United States.²⁸Close These racially motivated crimes added fuel to Bengalee’s fiery critique of systemic racism in American Christianity and influenced some musicians to consider conversion to the Ahmadiyya, not only to resist racism and to protect their endangered black male bodies in the Jim Crow era, but also to leave the United States and to reject a Negro/colored identity by embracing universal Islamic values of racial equality.

The 1950s began with reinvigorated political perspectives on self-determination and liberation in the Muslim world, perspectives that attracted the attention of African American jazz musicians who were disgusted with racial segregation in America, attracted to the Ahmadiyya, and interested in the international issues that the global Islamic community and the Third World faced. In 1952 Gamal Abdel Nasser became the Muslim president of Egypt and constructed a postcolonial identity for Egyptians that emphasized pan-Arab Islamic unity, socialism, and solidarity with the Third World.²⁹Close Nasser articulated his political and religious perspectives in his 1955 book Egypt’s Liberation: The Philosophy of the Revolution, which discussed his country’s identity encompassed and expressed in three circles of power: “the Arab, the African, and the Islamic.”³⁰Close As a result, African American Islamic leaders began to develop religious and political contacts with Egypt. Nasser supported Egypt’s participation in the 1955 Bandung conference of Third World nations in Indonesia, and later on, he curried favor with African American leaders again, when he convened an international summit in Cairo, the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Conference.³¹Close Then, from 1956 to 1957, Nasser impressed African American Muslims by challenging Western imperialism: forcing Britain to leave the Suez Canal Zone as he nationalized it; overcoming British, Israeli, and French military attacks; opposing American control of Egypt; and affirming Afro-Asian political power.³²Close

On the American Islamic front, black musicians in the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community created their own cool language forms that blended Arabic and bebop slang.³³Close The black Atlantic coolness of the Ahmadi jazz musicians and fans incorporated Afro-Islamic internationalist styles of political, artistic, and religious consciousness, impressing the hep cats in the working-class youth cultures after World War II. In this period, coolness came to be defined as a profound lived expression of experimentation with Islam—the style, struggle, consciousness, and peace of being a black Muslim in the United States.

The Ahmadi sense of African American religious internationalism differed from the Nation of Islam’s vision of a black Asiatic identity. The first wave of Ahmadiyya missionaries were South Asians who supported jazz’s values of black affirmation, freedom, and self-determination but also emphasized reading the Qur’an, studying Arabic, practicing the Five Pillars of Islam, and embracing the religious values of the global Muslim community as the pathway to peace and liberation for black musicians. They viewed the struggle for black liberation in a global context, and promoted solidarity with people of color in the Muslim world who were not black.

These ideas were powerfully compelling to post–World War II bebop jazz musicians and fans, who felt stuck in a culture that offered very few pathways to freedom and equality. They were fascinated by the Ahmadis’ rejection of systemic racism, as well as their ideas about Muslim identity and masculinities. Although African American converts did not adopt the Nation of Islam’s X to replace their slave surnames and to signify an oppositional masculinity that demonized whiteness, the Ahmadi converts changed their Christian names to Arabic names and embraced their own communal masculinity to signal their blackness as well as their religious solidarity with the transnational values and universal brotherhood of the worldwide Muslim community. And as we will see, there were various degrees of spiritual rigor among the jazz musicians who practiced the Ahmadi presentation of Islam.

The Ahmadiyya mission in the United States sent forth South Asian as well as African American male proselytizers to work among prospective bebop converts, whereas the Nation of Islam relied solely on black male missionaries, who canvassed the urban street corners in Boston, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and other big cities for new members in the jazz community. Moreover, Ahmadi innovations involving the style of clothing and the presentation of the black male body differed from the Nation of Islam’s sartorial style for black men, which emphasized Western styles of formal dress such as dark suits and clean-shaven faces for its male members. The black male musicians who joined the Ahmadiyya might mark their new religious identity by wearing Islamic skullcaps such as the kufi or taqiyah, Middle Eastern head scarfs such as the kuffiya, or Islamic robes or tunics, or by growing beards like the Indian missionaries, although some of the converts continued to wear modest Western styles of men’s clothing and remained clean-shaven.

In the following sections of the chapter, we will see how the themes of transnationalism, resistance to systemic racism, African American religious internationalism, and masculinity played out among the black jazz musicians who converted to the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in Boston, New York, Chicago, and Detroit in the 1940s and 1950s. We will look at the spiritual awakening of jazz artists such as Ahmed Abdul-Malik and Yusef Lateef, Kenny Clarke’s migration to Paris, the Muslim musicians in Dizzy Gillespie’s band, the missionary work of Art Blakey in New York City, his sojourn in West Africa, and the Jazz Messengers and hard bop. As we will see, the Ahmadiyya was a wealthy religious group with worldwide networks and resources to support its African American jazz artists who decided to leave the United States to escape violent racism and to expand their sense of freedom, black internationalism, and global musical collaborations.

Two jazz artists who had studied music at the Boston Conservatory and the New England Conservatory of Music led the way in Roxbury and the South End, converting to the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community just as active missionaries began work there. These musicians expressed the values of black affirmation, liberation, and self-determination not only by accepting Islam, but also by adopting transnational strategies in their musical careers. In 1945 or 1946, the bebop saxophonist and flutist Eddie Gregory, who was a migrant from Georgia and a former student at the Boston Conservatory, embraced the religion and changed his name to Sahib Shihab.³⁴Close He played with Fletcher Henderson, Thelonius Monk, Tad Dameron, Dizzy Gillespie, Illinois Jacquet, Oscar Pettiford, Quincy Jones, and Kenny Clarke in the 1940s and 1950s.³⁵Close Shihab was interviewed in 1953 for an Ebony magazine article on Muslim jazz musicians, who were the leaders in the conversion of African Americans to Islam, and the article reported that he changed his religion “because Islam seemed to offer all that Christianity had failed to give him.”³⁶Close Tired of the systemic racism he experienced in the New York jazz scene, Sahib Shihab expressed his freedom and resistance as a proud black Muslim man by leaving the United States in 1959. South Asian missionaries had just arrived in the Scandinavian countries in 1956 to recruit new converts for the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, and Shihab joined them, migrating and performing jazz in Sweden and Denmark until the early 1970s.³⁷Close

In the 1940s tenor saxophonist and World War II veteran Gladstone Scott converted to the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in Boston and took the Muslim name Ghulam Sadiq, although jazz performance venues in the United States and Canada continued to bill him as Gladstone Scott. He had received a scholarship to study at the New England Conservatory of Music when he was eight years old and played with the tenor saxophone star Coleman Hawkins when he was twelve. His best friend during the 1940s and 1950s was the Nation of Islam member and trumpeter Malcolm “Shorty” Jarvis. Their friendship illustrates that a black Islamic brotherhood was fostering a communal masculinity among Boston jazz musicians, a brotherhood that sometimes crossed the boundaries of the various Muslim communities in the city. Sadiq played the saxophone in USO shows in Japan during World War II, and in 1952 he created his own transnational path by migrating to Montreal and performing with Al Cowan’s band the Tramps, although he sometimes came back to Boston to visit his wife and children. Shorty Jarvis was with Ghulam Sadiq in Montreal in 1957, the year he died from cancer. The jazz musicians around Sadiq’s hospital bed reported that he was reciting Arabic prayers just before he died.³⁸Close

Bashir Ahmad, an Ahmadi missionary who was born in Philadelphia, proselytized in Boston’s black community for new converts during the 1940s and 1950s.³⁹Close Attracted by the transnational Islamic style of Ahmad’s South Asian clothing, Stephen Peters, a young professional jazz pianist, came under his sway and converted to the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in 1945. Using his family’s Cambridge home for religious meetings in the 1940s, Peters adopted the new name Khalil Mahmoud. He cultivated his jazz connections in the South End and used his vision of freedom and global black religious consciousness to introduce the Ahmadi message to bebop musicians in Boston.⁴⁰Close Later on, Mahmoud would abandon his musical career and embark on a transnational religious and educational journey: graduating from Boston University and McGill University in Canada, teaching religion at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, and working for the Ahmadiyya in West Africa and London.⁴¹Close However, from 1947 to 1952, he competed with the Nation of Islam for new converts to Islam among Boston’s jazz musicians. Khalil Mahmoud persuaded Jack Byat (Jahmid Ahmad Bashir) and Wilbur Lucas (Waji Lateef) to join the Ahmadiyya and to change their names during this period.⁴²Close Bostonian Eleanor Jumper, a nightclub bartender, was fascinated by the Ahmadi jazz musicians performing at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem. She converted to the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community along with black musicians in New York City, but she traced the roots of her conversion to the Islamic influences she first encountered in Boston’s black jazz world.⁴³Close

Khalil Mahmoud’s sense of communal masculinity and Islamic brotherhood, along with his program to propagate Islam among black beboppers, encouraged him to interact with the small community of Syrian and Lebanese Sunni Muslims who eventually built their own mosque in Quincy, a Boston suburb.⁴⁴Close However, Mahmoud’s relationship with the Arab Muslims in Quincy did not help to advance his Ahmadiyya missionary work in Roxbury and the South End in the 1940s and 1950s, and ultimately the Nation of Islam won the competition for black converts to Islam in Boston, when Malcolm X returned to the city in 1953.

On another religious front, in New York City, the Ahmadiyya missionaries were very successful in their work among the bebop musicians who were drawn to the values of racial affirmation, liberation, and social justice that jazz musicians and Islamic missionaries shared, as well as to African American religious internationalism and the Ahmadi sense of transnationalism and universal brotherhood. In the 1940s, the teenage jazz bassist and violinist Jonathan Tim Jr., whose Afro-Caribbean parents immigrated to Brooklyn from St. Vincent, converted to the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community through the jazz-inflected Muslim Brotherhood in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and changed his name to Ahmed Hussein Abdul-Malik.⁴⁵Close Abdul-Malik spoke Arabic, played Middle Eastern instruments such as the kanoon and oud, and interacted with Arab musicians on Atlantic Avenue. Among his close friends were pianist Randy Weston, whose Caribbean father was a Garveyite in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and alto saxophonist Bilal Abdurahman, who was also an Ahmadiyya convert.⁴⁶Close Abdul-Malik’s black Atlantic cool vision of modern jazz led him to recreate his musical and religious identities through Islam and to resist the anti-black racism of an American Negro identity. He reached out to Africa by reimagining his West Indian heritage as Sudanese; played with Art Blakey in the 1940s before playing a fusion of jazz, Middle Eastern, and North African musical forms in his own group in Brooklyn and Manhattan; and also played with John Coltrane at the Five Spot Café in New York and with Thelonius Monk’s quartet.⁴⁷Close

Abdul-Malik’s contribution to the wave of African American religious internationalism culminated in 1958 and 1959, when he recorded two albums, Jazz Sahara: Ahmed Abdul-Malik’s Middle Eastern Music and East Meets West: The Musique of Ahmed Abdul-Malik, albums that created a new genre of black Islamic music by infusing jazz with Middle Eastern and North African music.⁴⁸Close In East Meets West, Abdul-Malik wrote his own original compositions combining bebop with Arab musical sounds. The “East meets West” idea was also evident in the titles of his compositions: he presented Arabic titles in phonetic English (with English translations in parentheses) on the album’s track list: “El-Lail (The Night),” “La Ibky (Don’t Cry),” “Takseem (Solo),” “Isma’a (Listen),” “Rooh (The Soul),” “Mahawara (The Fugue),” and “El Ghada (The Jungle).”⁴⁹Close  East Meets West illustrated how the study of Arabic in the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community shaped the spiritual and musical experimentation and the increasingly international interests of African American and Afro-Caribbean Ahmadi jazz musicians.

Kenny Clarke, a jazz drummer from Pittsburgh who contributed to the creation of bebop at Minton’s Playhouse during the early 1940s in New York City, converted to Ahmadiyya in 1946 and adopted the name Liaquat Ali Salaam. In the story of his resistance to systemic racism and his transnational journey he is much like other jazz musicians who sought liberation, independence, and racial affirmation through religious conversion. Clarke was in the army during World War II and was shocked by the racism he encountered in the South as well as the violent racism against returning black soldiers after the war, in 1946. He had performed music in England, Belgium, Germany, and Paris during the war and returned to France to play jazz with Dizzy Gillespie in 1948. By then, Kenny Clarke was experiencing the brotherhood and racial equality of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, but his resistance values and his plans for migration to Paris were shaped by Gillespie’s musical perspectives about self-determination and freedom in bebop. According to Gillespie, “beboppers … refused to accept racism, poverty, or economic exploitation, nor would we live out uncreative humdrum lives merely for the sake of survival…. If America wouldn’t honor its Constitution and respect us as men, we couldn’t give a shit about the American way.”⁵⁰Close

Dizzy Gillespie explained that black bebop musicians like Clarke, who had converted to Islam, did so to erase the stigma of their colored Jim Crow identity and to have “‘W’ for white” printed on their identification cards, to protect them from racial violence.⁵¹Close However, Gillespie also admitted in a 1948 Life magazine article that although he was not a Muslim, he was studying the Qur’an, and “in Islam, there is no color line. Everybody is treated like equals.”⁵²Close Indeed, African American musicians identifying themselves as the people they wanted to be, through their embracing of Islam and new names, could reject Negro and colored inferiority, and declare themselves to be black international people—Muslims in the global Islamic community.

Then Gillespie added, “As time went on, I kept considering converting to Islam but mostly for social reasons. I didn’t know very much about the religion, but I could dig the idea that Muhammad was a prophet. I believed that and, there were very few Christians who believed that Muhammad had the word of God with him.”⁵³Close Impressed by the piety of some of the Ahmadi converts in his band, he reported, “Although I hadn’t converted yet, I knew one couldn’t drink alcohol or eat pork as a Muslim…. I felt quite intrigued by the beautiful sound of the word ‘Quran,’ and found it ‘out of this world,’ ‘way out’…. Most of the Muslim guys who were sincere in the beginning went on believing and practicing the faith.”⁵⁴Close

Kenny Clarke went on to record albums with the Modern Jazz Quartet; pianists John Lewis, Mary Lou Williams, Hank Jones, and Horace Silver; trumpeters Miles Davis and Donald Byrd; bassist Paul Chambers; cornetist Nat Adderley; saxophonists Charlie Parker, Jerome Richardson, Julian Cannonball Adderley, and Sonny Rollins; and vibraphonist Milt Jackson in the United States in the 1950s. Clarke finally migrated to Paris, the city of his teenage dreams, in 1956, a “refugee from racism,” escaping white Americans’ discrimination against black people and black jazz musicians.⁵⁵Close He lived there for the rest of his life, with brief visits to America.⁵⁶Close During the postwar period, Paris was home to a community of African American jazz musicians that included Sidney Bechet, Inez Cavanaugh, Don Byas, and Johnny Griffin, and its neighborhood included jazz-inflected streets such as Rue Armstrong and Rue Bechet.⁵⁷Close Although Clarke escaped violent racism by migrating to France and merged his religious and musical goals and values in Paris by practicing Islam in peace and forming his own jazz group, the Kenny Clarke/Fancy Boland Big Band, his evaluation of his journey as a black man in Europe exemplifies the complexities of transnationalism and the limits of Muslim universal brotherhood for some bebop artists who converted to Islam in this era: “I am way out of the European society. I am not accepted. I just stay on the outskirts. In a sense no white society is going to accept a black man. The sooner black people figure that out, the better off they will be.”⁵⁸Close

Jazz musician Maneer Hamid’s story involves military sojourns in Muslim-majority countries and may serve as a meditation for thinking about why and how some black Philadelphians decided to convert to the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community instead of Sunni Islam:

My first introduction was around 1954 or 1955. My sister was in a singing group called the Capris. She met Len Hope, and he was a Sunni Muslim and saxophone player who was very well known and had several albums out. He would wear a turban and say “as salaam alaikam.” He had some moral qualities the other musicians didn’t have. I became interested and started to read as much literature as I could. I was fifteen years old. I met a friend. Instead of hustling money, he gave me a book to read, Our Promised Messiah. He was having a meeting in his house in West Philadelphia on Hobart Avenue. The Ahmadi missionaries Nur Haq-Anwar and Muhammad Sadiq were teaching a bunch of brothers in Philadelphia. The rituals made an impression on me so that when I went home I decided to become Muslim. But I hesitated.

In Washington, DC, I was stationed on Andrews Air Force Base. Khalil Nasir, the Ahmadi missionary, invited me to come out for Friday Jumah, 1955. I was sixteen. I converted then. When I got to the mosque in Washington, DC, Islam in America was dominated by African Americans—thirty people in DC were Ahmadiyya, twenty-five were black. I was fortunate to hook up with some brothers. Dr. Bashiruddin Usma, he was going to Howard University at that time studying to be a dentist. He introduced me to E. Franklin Frazier. At that time the Sunni mosque was about to open up.

I was still attached to the US service and really wasn’t practicing Islam as it was taught in the Qur’an. One of my friends who was Sunni in the service and a black African, Ali, discouraged me from the Ahmadiyya. I hesitated to sign the Baiyat. But the more I read the literature I saw that what he was saying wasn’t true. But our group was the only group that wasn’t saying negative things about the other groups in its literature. I was raised Baptist. I didn’t pursue being a Sunni anymore.

In 1956 I got an assignment to go overseas to Japan. My roommate in the service had gotten his orders the next day to go to Turkey. We switched. So I went to Turkey to experience a Muslim country. I was stationed in Turkey for three years in the southern part, a small town, about three thousand people. I was able to blend in and practice my Islam. When my time in the service was up, they sent me to Greece for a while—six months; North Africa, Libya—six months.

They let me out in 1960. I went back to the DC mosque on 2141 Leroy Place. I was going to be a missionary, but I was an amateur musician. I was caught sneaking out of the mosque to gig in the bar. The rigidity didn’t work out. In 1961 I went back to Philadelphia…. A lot of jazz musicians were Muslims. Charlie Parker, they said was Muslim

—Abdul Karim.⁵⁹Close

Dizzy Gillespie’s trumpeter from Antigua, Alfonso Nelson Rainey, who was a former Julliard School of Music student, converted to Islam, changed his name to Talib Dawud, and stopped performing jazz to focus completely on his new religion. He married Sayida Faisal, a second-generation black Ahmadiyya woman in Cleveland. By the early 1950s, he founded and led the Muslim Brotherhood USA, a new group that was affiliated with the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community. Dawud and his wife moved to Philadelphia, where he collaborated with the Egyptian-Muslim immigrant Mahmoud Alwan and the Jamaican American journalist and historian J. A. Rogers to establish the Islamic and African Institute. The three men taught Islam, Arabic, and African history to the black community at the institute. Its parades in New York and Philadelphia honored African leaders like Sékou Touré and Kwame Nkrumah when they attended meetings at the United Nations. The organization also supported the Algerian National Liberation Front in the Algerian war of independence from France.⁶⁰Close

Eventually, the former jazz musician linked the Muslim Brotherhood USA with mosques in Providence, Boston, and Washington, DC, and connected the Philadelphia mosque to Sheik Nasir Ahmad’s and Imam Abdul Raheem’s International Muslim Brotherhood in Harlem. The organization faced a violent, racist police crackdown in Philadelphia when its members like Sulaiman al-Hadi began using posters and pamphlets to enhance their public missionary work in 1958. Then, theological tensions with the Nation of Islam emerged when Dawud attempted to set up the Muslim Brotherhood in Detroit.⁶¹Close According to Robert Dannin, “He claimed the true path to salvation for the American Muslim led toward international solidarity, not racial exclusivity.”⁶²Close In 1959 the Muslim leader, who had recently performed the pilgrimage to Mecca, revealed his opposition to Elijah Muhammad’s community in a New York Amsterdam News article:

Mr. Muhammad’s followers do not make prayer properly; they do not face the East and say their prayers five times a day, as all true Muslims do; their houses of worship are called “temples,” while the houses of worship of the true Muslims are called Mosques…. All true Muslims believe that the Koran will be here until the day of Judgement, but Mr. Muhammad tells his followers that the Koran will be superseded by a book written for black people.

Another basic difference [is that] … the Muslim faith does not teach hatred of any particular group, but on the contrary, welcomes people of all races and colors so long as they abide by and live up to the teachings of Islam…. The true Muslims worship Allah, but Mr. Muhammad and his followers claim that Allah is a man named W. Fard Muhammad.⁶³Close

Talib Dawud married the jazz vocalist Dakota Staton in 1959. He met Staton in 1958 and introduced her to Islam; she joined the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community and changed her name to Aliyah Rabia in that year.⁶⁴Close Born in Pittsburgh, she was one of the leading jazz singers in the United States. Her first album, The Late, Late Show (Capitol Records, 1958), which featured her beautiful renditions of jazz standards like “My Funny Valentine,” “Misty,” and “The Late, Late Show,” was one of the best-selling jazz albums in 1958. It was followed by other Capitol Record albums in the 1950s: Dynamic! (1958), In the Night (1958), Time to Swing (1959), More Than the Most (1959), and Crazy He Calls Me (1959). Although Dakota Staton was a gifted vocalist with her own successful career and money, when she converted to Islam, she viewed her religious experience and marriage as “fundamentally intertwined.”⁶⁵Close She enjoyed preparing meals for her husband and supporting his work as welcome and protective relief from the sexism and drinking that dominated the nightclubs in which she performed.⁶⁶Close As Sylvia Chan-Malik explains, “For Staton, being Muslim was expressed in negotiations between her career … and her self-presentation as a deferential and devoted Muslim wife.”⁶⁷Close However, as the “only non-NOI affiliated woman to publicly identify as Muslim during this period,” she followed Dawud’s patriarchal lead and joined him in his theological attacks on the Nation of Islam that culminated in an unsuccessful lawsuit against Elijah Muhammad.⁶⁸Close In a Pittsburgh Courier interview, the jazz woman pointed out that “since 1959, we have both vigorously pursued a campaign to make the public aware of the differences between what Elijah Poole preaches and teaches and the actual tenets of that faith in which we believe.”⁶⁹Close Staton emphasized that “my career as a singer has suffered irreparable harm as a result of the fact that the press has linked us with Elijah’s organization.”⁷⁰Close

She and her husband signaled their transnational Islamic identities when they took the lead in a 1959 Harlem luncheon for Sékou Touré, the Pan-African, Muslim president of Guinea, an anticolonial nation which became independent from France in 1958. ⁷¹Close Staton and Dawud used this occasion to verbally attack Elijah Muhammad’s followers, who were not invited to the event. Unfortunately, Dawud was “attacked by acid throwers who apparently were members of the Nation,” according to Louis A. DeCaro Jr.⁷²Close Later on, in 1962, they filed a legal suit in the Philadelphia US District Court to stop the Nation’s leader “from claiming to be Muslim and to prevent him from further use of the terms Islam and Muslim in connection with the sect he heads.”⁷³Close Ultimately, their case, which was dismissed, did not help Dakota Staton’s jazz career, especially when Malcolm X attacked her: “Ever since she changed her ‘tunes’ and started singing against Mr. Muhammad, her popularity has been on the downturn.”⁷⁴Close Although she continued to record albums, Capitol Records cut ties with Staton in the early 1960s. She and Dawud relocated to London in 1965 but divorced a few years later, and the jazz vocalist cut all ties with Islam.⁷⁵Close Dakota Staton’s story shows us how Islamic men in the jazz world sometimes shaped “women’s constructions of Muslim-ness in both private (e.g., marriage) and public (e.g., the press) relationships, in both positive and … negative ways.”⁷⁶Close

Talib Dawud also advanced the religious style of transnationalism and his vision of the “true Islam” by influencing black musicians such as tenor saxophone player Yusef Lateef (William Emmanuel Huddleston) to join the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community in Chicago.⁷⁷Close The saxophonist remembered his first encounter with the religion:

My embrace of Islam came about in 1946 while I was working with the Willy Hayes Band in a club on the west side of Chicago. One night a trumpet player named Talib Dawud sat-in with us. He told me that he was an itinerant musician and that he was a practicing member of the Ahmadiyya movement. I expressed interest in learning more about Islam. He said he would give me some literature about Islam…. Islam taught that you could realize paradise in this life as well as in the next. The primary belief was in one God, the Creator of the heavens and earth. All this was very appealing to my rationality.⁷⁸Close

Yusef Lateef, who was born in Tennessee and raised in Detroit, studied Islam with the Indian Ahmadi missionaries in their Chicago mission house.⁷⁹Close He attended Ahmadiyya meetings in Art Blakey’s apartment when he came to New York with Dizzy Gillespie’s band.⁸⁰Close Yusef Lateef became a devout Muslim in 1948 and noted the universal benefits of Islam in his account of his jazz journey to the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community: “I studied the religion and finally decided to embrace it because” Islam emphasized submission to the will of God, peace, justice, kindness, and compassion and respect for the poor.⁸¹Close

Lateef was happy to contribute to the urban musical creativity of bebop, but his religious discipline led to his condemnation of drug addiction in the jazz community. He saw it as a pathological form of black masculinity that destroyed artistic freedom and self-determination.⁸²Close Ultimately, Lateef’s spiritual consciousness shaped his music. His respect for the spiritual qualities of bebop sounds fed his resistance to the marginalization of the music: he commented that the music “deserves better venues” than nightclubs that serve alcohol.⁸³Close

His spiritual development as a Muslim was shaped among a network of dynamic black American Ahmadi leaders emerging in the 1950s, such as Mursil Shafeek, who was fluent in Arabic and president of the Dayton community; Muhammad Sadiq, a jazz trombonist who became president of the New Jersey and New York City communities; Bashir Afzal, a New York City leader; and Rashid Ahmed, who studied in Pakistan to get ready for missionary work in New York, Chicago, St. Louis, and Milwaukee.⁸⁴Close

In the mid-1950s, Lateef studied music at Wayne State University in Detroit and discovered Arab and Middle Eastern reed instruments during his visits to the Syrian store in the city’s Eastern Market.⁸⁵Close Lateef learned to play instruments from all over the world—his works blended the sounds of the tenor saxophone, flute, oboe, shenai, bamboo flute, sarewa, argol, shofar, Taiwan koto, and tambourine. He soon formed his first band, and by 1957, his quintet traveled to New Jersey and New York to record two albums: Other Sounds and Jazz for the Thinker, which expressed his growing sense of the irrelevance of national boundaries when it came to both music and religion. Other Sounds featured Lateef (tenor sax, argol, flute), Wilbur Harden (flugelhorn), Hugh Lawson (Turkish finger cymbals, piano), Ernie Farrow (rebob, bass), and Oliver Jackson (earth-board, drums). Yusef Lateef signaled his Muslim masculinity by wearing a kufi in his photograph, on the album’s cover.⁸⁶Close The liner notes for Jazz for the Thinker commented on Lateef’s spirituality and his transnational musical forms: “Attempting to bring his audience to a higher level of morality through his music, Yusef Lateef is a … consummate musician…. [His] music combines elements of the current ‘hard bop’ approach with Afro-Asiatic tinges…. Subtle, abstract touches … bring forth Indian effects, the rhythms pulse and force the listener to THINK.”⁸⁷Close

By the late 1950s, Yusef was discouraged by the shortage of jobs for musicians and by a “racial situation” in Detroit in which he was stopped and searched by the police on his way to a performance and was beaten on his hands with a blackjack in the back of a police car.⁸⁸Close Ultimately he moved to New York City, where he played with jazz men like Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy, Max Roach, Rashaan Roland Kirk, Randy Weston, and Grant Green, to name a few. He also performed with the Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji’s band:

Playing with Babatunde was an interesting experience, mostly because for the first time I had to perform without a pianist or bassist in the group. It provided me with a lot of harmonic space and freedom. Olatunji’s music also provided a wider appreciation for world music. To this extent, he was a pioneer of what is termed today “world music.”⁸⁹Close

In the early 1940s, bebop drummer Art Blakey had played at Kelley’s Stable in New York City and the Tic Tock Club in Boston, and with Mary Lou Williams, Billy Eckstine, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Thelonius Monk.⁹⁰Close Blakey, who was born in Pittsburgh, had begun to question Christianity and protest systemic racism after he was severely beaten by white men while touring with the Fletcher Henderson band in the South in 1943. The beating resulted in a head injury requiring surgery to put a steel plate in his head.⁹¹Close By 1947, Blakey had converted to Islam. He took the name Abdullah Ibn Buhaina, and along with Talib Dawud, held Ahmadiyya meetings for jazz musicians in his New York City apartment.⁹²Close When he converted to the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community and experienced Islamic brotherhood, he said, “Islam has made me feel more like a man, really free.”⁹³Close Then, in 1947, Blakey decided to travel to West Africa, spending many months on pilgrimage of sorts, traveling to Nigeria and Ghana, where the Ahmadiyya had branches, to study African religions and Arabic languages.⁹⁴Close When he returned to the United States in 1948, his drumming and his jazz were infused with African rhythms and musical inflections and a sophisticated sense of blackness that influenced a new genre of bebop.

Ahmadiyya jazz musicians like Art Blakey, Kenny Clarke, and Yusef Lateef were among the early leaders in hard bop, a new style of bebop that Samuel A. Floyd described as having “a bluesy, funky delivery, with lots of forceful interaction between trumpet and drums, employing elements from gospel and R&B, … characterized by off-beat accents, … riffs, call-response vocal inflections, simple melodies, and … ostinatos [repetitive melodic or rhythmic phrases].”⁹⁵Close These musicians often combined emotions from black American, Caribbean, African, and Eastern musical forms with innovative harmonies and compositions.⁹⁶Close Hard bop musicians played soulful, aggressive, urban sounds that resonated with black Atlantic cool and that expressed communal masculinity, with its concern for black American and African liberation and black notions of self-determination and affirmation. Their music was part of the trend for black men to seek out musical and spiritual inspiration in traditions developed outside the United States. Hard bop quickly became popular in black urban communities from the mid-1950s to the 1960s. Art Blakey’s loud and hard-driving drumming and the Islamic, African, and African diasporic musical motifs exemplified by his band the Jazz Messengers led the way in shaping the rhythms and sounds of hard bop in the African American bars and clubs of the northern cities.

The origins of the Jazz Messengers can be traced to 1948, when Blakey established a new band, the Seventeen Messengers, an Islamic brotherhood of bebop artists, which initially included African American artists who had converted to the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community: Sahib Shihab (alto saxophone), Musa Kaleem and Yusef Lateef (tenor saxophone), Haleen Rasheed (trombone), Abdul Hamid (trumpet), and Ibrahim Ibn Ismail (piano); as well as the following non-Muslim musicians: Sonny Rollins (tenor saxophone), Little Benny Harris and Ray Copeland (trumpet), Bud Powell and Kenny Drew (piano), Gary Mapp (bass), and Cecil Payne (baritone saxophone), among others.⁹⁷Close In the Islamic world, “Messenger” referred to Muhammad (570–632 CE), the Messenger of God, the Prophet of Islam, and the exemplary Muslim man who expressed Muslim religious goals and values. From Blakey’s black perspective, the Messengers incorporated Pan-African motifs into their music that connected the African diasporic, African, and African American sounds of modern jazz, motifs that reminded Blakey of his religious experiences during his sojourn in West Africa.

By the mid-1950s, Blakey was framing hard bop in a larger black global context, incorporating African and Afro-Cuban musical forms, and reshaping his group periodically by including new jazz musicians like Horace Silver, Clifford Brown, Lou Donaldson, Gigi Gryce, Kenny Dorham (Abdul Hamid), Joe Gordon, and Walter Bishop Jr. Many of his musicians were not Muslim during this period, yet the influences of his transnational journey in African American Islam were evident in the Jazz Messengers’ spiritual and musical experimentation. For example, in 1956, a newly configured Jazz Messengers recorded an album for Columbia. Drum Suite exemplified Art Blakey’s new style of African American religious internationalism in hard bop that sometimes used instruments, rhythms, and musicians of diverse religious sensibilities from all over the African and African diasporic world.⁹⁸Close The atmosphere of the album’s first track, “The Sacrifice,” was African, featuring West African drumming and a Swahili chant that conguero Sabu Martinez used to recreate the musical spirit of an African religious ceremony.⁹⁹Close Pianist Ray Bryant’s composition “Cubano Chant” featured Afro-Cuban rhythms, Spanish lyrics in a call-and-response chorus, and the Cuban musician Cándido Camero on the bass and congas.¹⁰⁰Close The Jazz Messengers recorded Drum Suite and another African/African-diasporic-theme album, Ritual, just before Ghana’s independence celebration on March 6, 1957, and in the first track of Ritual, Blakey described the impact of his West African sojourn and the influence of African drum rhythms on his own jazz performances: “I wanted to live among the people and find out … about the drums especially. We were in the interior of Nigeria. And I met … the Ijaw people…. Anything … that day that is good, they play about it that night. This particular thing caught my ear for the different rhythms.”¹⁰¹Close In these two albums, and in the hard bop musicians’ solidarity with Art Blakey, a Muslim bandleader who was a missionary for his faith, we can see how jazz contributed to a growing sense that many blacks in the United States were beginning to see themselves as part of a culture that was increasingly transnational.

But the music would do something else, as well. The African independence and Islamic identities that Blakey and his Messengers celebrated in their albums would come to inform a growing sense of militancy and resistance to white supremacy in the jazz world as the 1950s gave way to the 1960s. As Blakey summed it up, “Islam brought the black man what he was looking for, an escape like some found in drugs or drinking: a way of living and thinking he could choose in complete freedom. This is the reason we adopted this new religion in such numbers. It was for us, above all, a way of rebelling.”¹⁰²Close

In 1961 Blakey and the Jazz Messengers (Jymie Merritt on double bass, Lee Morgan on trumpet, Wayne Shorter on tenor saxophone, and Bobby Timmons on piano) went on to identify with the struggles of the freedom riders who were incarcerated in Jackson, Mississippi, for trying to desegregate interstate public transportation. The liner notes for his album The Freedom Rider explained the Muslim bandleader’s passionate and militant support of civil rights activism:

At the time of this recording … the battle of the bus terminals had not been won, and there was a feeling of impregnable determination among civil rights actionists to send Freedom Riders into the South until all the jails were filled—if that were necessary to end segregation of interstate travelers. In his absorbing, deeply personal solo, Art Blakey conjures up the whirlpool of emotions at that time—the winds of change sweeping the country, the resistance to that change, and the pervasive conviction of the Freedom Riders that “We Shall Not Be Moved.”¹⁰³Close

From Art Blakey to John Coltrane, through the music, spirituality, and international diversity of black Islamic musicians who were also activists, the urban soundtrack of hard bop as well as free jazz evolved side by side with the global consciousness of the African American Muslim movements during the Cold War, the civil rights struggles, and the Black Power era. As we will see in chapter 4, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, the Nation of Islam, and Sunni Islam influenced the religious, artistic, and political identities of jazz artists in this culminating period of the golden age of African American Islam and jazz, from the late 1950s to the 1960s, when the values of the revolutionary times infused spirituality, music, and new interactions with the Third World, all over black America.