America’s Forgotten Muslims: The Untold Story of Professor Ezaldeen and the Hamitic-Arabs of America

By: Fathie Abdat

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Detroit, Michigan 1929. James Lomax-Bey, a leader of a Moorish Science religious cult with thousands of devotees, found himself marked by the self-styled Prophet for death. Confronted with Moorish-American messiahs and goon squads baying for blood, Ezaldeen fled to Turkey and Egypt in the early 1930s where his strange mind began concocting a unique brew of a black-centric, American Islam. Armed with religious zeal, Ezaldeen returned to America, and fashioned himself as Muhammed Ezaldeen- the “Professor”. A spiritual revolutionary, the Professor frenetically peddled his newfound faith to thousands of desperate African-Americans in search of salvation throughout various cities. Standing in his way were sneaky FBI agents, dubious Japanese agent provocateurs, rivaling Indian Ahmadi proselytizers and white racists.

How did the Professor’s followers assume new lives as Hamitic-Arabs during World War II and the decades after? And what eventually happened to the Professor’s two model Puritan black Islamic colonies in rural Ashford, New York, and Elm, New Jersey?

A gripping, swash-buckling narrative of black folk American Islam in the twentieth century, America’s Forgotten Muslims brings readers into the fascinating universe of Professor Muhammed Ezaldeen and his ranks of Hamitic-Arabs in the twentieth century and beyond.