Siraj Wahhaj

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Siraj Wahhaj (English: Bright light; born as Jeffrey Kearse) is an African-American Muslim convert to Islam and public speaker in North America. He's the Imam of Al-Taqwa mosque in Brooklyn, New York.

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[edit] Biography

Born and raised in New York, he became a sunday school teacher as a teenager, then later went to Wilfrid Laurier University (WLU) where he studied Biology Education.

In the 1960s he became attracted to the Nation of Islam, then later left it for Sunni Islam. He changed his name to Wahhaj. He was chosen to study Islam at the Umm al-Qura university of Mecca in 1978. He also briefly taught a course in Islamic studies at Howard University. In 1981 he started his own mosque in a friend's apartment in Brooklyn. Although it originally started out with only 25 people, today it is a well-known mosque, Masijd ul-Taqwa, in New York City.

In 1988 he led his community in an anti-drug patrol in which they staked out drug houses in Bedford-Stuyvesant in the cold of winter for forty days and nights, forcing the closure of fifteen drug houses. This effort received high praise from the NYPD.

Siraj has been active in many Islamic organizations. He has been Vice President of the Islamic Society of North America since 1997 and has served on the Majlis Ash-Shura, a consultative council of Islamic scholars, since 1987. He is a member of the Board of Advisors for the American Muslim Council and has also served on the national board of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Siraj is a fairly prolific speaker in America. He makes many appearances at the major North American Muslim conventions, and numerous forums and lectures in New England. His English audio lectures are fairly popular among the Muslim community, with titles like "Allah's Word is Supreme," "Are You Ready To Die?" "Confusion of the Ummah," "Control Your Anger," "Easy Way To Paradise," and "Good or Bad Company: How to Judge."

He has also appeared on several national television talk shows and interviews in America.

In 1991 Siraj offered an invocation (opening prayer) to the United States House of Representatives. He was the first Muslim to do so.

[edit] Controversy

In 1991 in an address to the Islamic Association of North Texas, he referred to Operation Desert Storm as "one of the most diabolical plots ever in the annals of history."[1]

He is an unindicted co-conspirator in the plot to bomb the World Trade Center in 1993, named in 1995 by U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White as one of multiple "unindicted persons who may be alleged as co-conspirators in the attempt to blow up New York City monuments." He testified in defense of convicted terrorist Omar Abdel-Rahman.[2]

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  1. ^ "Islam's flawed spokesmen", Salon.com, 26 September 2001
  2. ^ Jonsson, David J. Islamic Economics And the Final Jihad: The Muslim Brotherhood to the Leftist/marxist - Islamist Alliance. Page 430.