The Black Muslim Lecture Series | Lecture 1: Historical Perspectives on the Black Muslim Experience in New York City | Dr. Rasul Miller and Dr. Kamal Hassan Ali | 9.30.2022

Dr. Rasul Miller is an Assistant Professor of History at the School of Humanities in the University of California, Irvine. Prior to that, Dr. Miller was at Yale University's Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, where he served as a postdoctoral associate in the study of the radicalization of Islam during the 2019-2020 academic year. His research interests include Black Muslim communities in the Atlantic world, Black radicalism and its impact on social and cultural movements in the twentieth century U.S., Black internationalism, and West African intellectual history. Miller's current book project, Black Muslim Cosmopolitanism: The Global Character of New York City's Black Muslim Movements, examines the Black internationalist origins of early twentieth-century Black Sunni Muslim congregations in and around New York City, and the cultural and political orientations that characterized subsequent communities of Black Muslims in the U.S. who built robust, transnational networks as they actively engaged traditions and communities of Muslims on the African continent.

Dr. Kamal Hassan Ali was born in Springfield, Illinois is married and has three children and eleven grandchildren.

“Sent home” from Howard University for his Black Panther rants, Kamal Ali then moved to New York, where he hooked up with the wrong crowd and was headed for big trouble. Then he learned of the Dar-ul-Islam community and quickly became a contributing member of the Movement.

He was an early proselytizer of the faith to angry young African Americans, helping to direct their hatred toward the Dar-al-Harb, or “house of war” and the eternal enemies of Allah and his Apostle.

From 1970 until 1977 he served on the Muslim Prison Committee, assigned to The Bronx House of Detention, Riker’s Island, and Green Haven Correctional Facility, a maximum security facility in Stormville, New York, helping to redirect the energies of dangerous criminals and sociopaths toward a constructive jihad in the way of Al’lah.

Dr. Ali is the Imam of the Ludlow Correctional Center and a professor at Westfield State University.

This seminal work, Dar-ul-Islam: Principle, Praxis, Movement, by Dr. Kamal Hassan Ali is rooted in his personal involvement with the largest indigenous effort to promote the religious and social remedies of Islam in America.