Muhammed Abdullah al-Ahari | |
|---|---|
| Born | Ray Allen Rudder January 6, 1965 |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation(s) | Historian, teacher, essayist |
Muhammed Abdullah al-Ahari (born January 6, 1965, as Ray Allen Rudder) is an American essayist, historian, teacher, and writer on the topics of American Islam, Black Nationalist groups, heterodox Islamic groups, Bosniaks, and modern occultism.[citation needed] He has also taught at the Islamic Foundation School in Villa Park, Illinois.[1]
Al-Ahari attended both Charleston Southern University and Northeastern Illinois University. He then studied at the American Islamic College for three years. He observed the Sufi Orders of Bektashi, Naqshbandi, Mouride, Tijaniyyah, the Chishti, and Ni'matullāhī. These studies and his travels to mosques and Islamic schools around the country led al-Ahari to focus on the preservation of rare pieces of American Islamic literature and the documentation of the presence of Muslims in the United States and Canada. He briefly moved back to his home state of South Carolina before returning to Chicago in 1990. He attended the American Islamic College for an additional two years.
Al-Ahari began writing about the history of Islam in the United States in the 1980s and published several articles with the journals Minaret and Meditations. With Magribine Press, he then published a catalogue of Arabic Slave Narratives written in the United States. Upon his move to Chicago in 1990, he published edited editions of Muhammed Alexander Rusell Webb's Islam in America (1993) and Shaykh Daoud's al-Islam, the True Faith of Humanity (2003). He attended the first Alevi-Bektashi Conference in Isparta, Turkey in 2005, where he presented a paper on the links between the Freemasons and the Bektashi community.[2] He has reprinted over 20 texts of early American Muslim works with his own edits and annotations. He also sometimes translates.
Al-Ahari's writing has been included in anthologies such as Islam Outside the Arab World (1999). His works have also been quoted in (Dis)forming the American Canon: African-Arabic slave narratives (1993) and African Muslims in Antebellum America: Transatlantic Stories and Spiritual Struggles (1997). His work has also appeared in magazines and journals such as Message, Islamsko Misao, Islamic Horizons, Indian Times, Fountain,[3] al-Basheer, New Era, Muslim Journal, Amexem Times and Seasons, and Svijest, among others. He has been an editor for Moorish Science Monitor, The Islamic Cultural Center-Greater Chicago Newsletter, and Meditations. His original writings have been translated into Arabic, Bosnian, Albanian, and Turkish.
Within the Bosnian community, al-Ahari has worked as the principal of an Islamic weekend school, a librarian, a museum director, and an editor of the community newsletter, and has contributed to an edited volume of articles on the history of Bosnians in Canada and the United States. Ten of his articles appear in A Hundred Years of Bosnians in America (2006).
One issue of Svijest has a two-page interview with al-Ahari and documents his conversion to Islam and his work on the history of Islam in America.
Al-Ahari's annotated and edited reprints of early American Muslim texts have been used in Muslim book clubs and as supplementary texts and textbooks in several university-level classes on Islam in America. Al-Ahari's archives are housed at DePaul University.
