On Wednesday, I posted about the death of Luqman Abdullah, the imam of Detroit's Masjid al-Haqq and a Detroit representative to al-Ummah, who was killed in Dearborn, Mich., in a shootout with FBI agents and police from the Joint Terrorism Task Force. The new issue of CTR Vantage is themed around this incident, and provides more information on the movement of which he was a part.

Madeleine Gruen and I dub this movement "cause célèbre Islam" for its fusion of Sunni Islam with black nationalist themes. Abdullah himself used rhetoric that wove references to the Qur'an and ahadith together with the language of militant jihadism and allegations of injustice perpetrated against African-American Muslims by the US government. As we note in this article:

For Abdullah and his followers, this doctrine provided justification for criminal behavior. In other cases, cause célèbre Islam prepares adherents for an inevitable violent revolution against the U.S. government: this revolutionary vision is at least as indebted to the ideas of men like Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, and Malcolm X as it is to more typical advocates of Islamic revolution like Sayyid Qutb. Those who share this view tend to be suspicious of outsiders, and outside influences.

Madeleine and I also examine the life of Jamil al-Amin, the former H. Rap Brown, who is one of this movement's icons as well as a continuing ideological force. As we note:

Al-Amin ... made the transition from black nationalist firebrand to nationally prominent Sunni imam. In the 1960s, he issued scathing indictments of America and called for violent revolution. After his conversion to Islam, al-Amin adopted a more measured tone in his societal criticism, but remained attached to the idea of revolution. Though he focused on a more inward-looking revolution, one that would transform his community morally, al-Amin continued to believe that the system writ large was sick and broken. Some analysts have questioned how far al-Amin truly progressed from the violent ideals that he once openly proclaimed.

Now serving a life sentence at the Supermax prison in Florence, Colo., al-Amin himself has become one of the causes célèbres that is a rallying point within the movement.

And CTR analyst Laura Grossman provides a historical account of the Darul Islam movement in the US, which gave birth to al-Ummah (as well as the Syed Gilani-led Muslims of the Americas).

A .pdf of the complete issue can be downloaded here.