The Ansaaru Allah Community

Abstract

The Ansaaru Allah Community (also known as the Ansarullah Community) was one of the African American Muslim movements to emerge out of the new, indigenous forms of Islam in America in the 1960s. This movement might best be understood within the context of America’s twentieth century Black ‘cultic milieu’; the esoteric ‘underground’ of spiritual/philosophical concepts, debating circles and private practitioners that was percolating in the rebellious salons of the major American cities (Campbell 1972). Within this eclectic milieu, various Black messianic spiritual movements took root and evolved into successful NRMs, such as the Moorish Science Temple, the Nation of Islam, and the Five Percent Nation of Gods and Earths (McCloud 1995). Marcus Garvey’s “Blackosophy” of the early 1900s (Moses 1987; Simpson 1978), and the Black Nationalist and Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s also contributed to the formation of these African-American NRMs. The Ansaaru Allah Community (AAC) was an African-American communal society that flourished in Brooklyn, NY from 1973 to 1992. ‘Ansaaru Allah’ refers to the ‘helpers of Allāh’, and the daily life of the members was centered on their mosque on Bushwick Avenue. This intentional community, which might be described as utopian, millenarian and messianic, dominated the neighborhood around Brooklyn’s Bushwick Avenue for over nineteen years. The Ansaars published a newsletter, The Nuwaubian Village Bulletin, and hundreds of ‘scrolls’ (small booklets) co-authored by their messianic founder with his plural wives. These scrolls were sold in the bookstore on Bushwick Avenue and distributed in the streets of New York and other major cities by the Ansaar missionaries, known as Propagators. On the surface the AAC appeared to be an expatriate community of African fundamental Muslims. The men wore Sudanese robes and turbans, and the women wore long white gowns and burkas. But a reading of the AAC literature indicates that the Qurʾānic verses and aḥadīth are intertwined with ufology, theosophy and New Age racialist creation myths. A study of the forty-year history of this movement reveals that the founder, Dwight D. York (b. 1945), has founded not just one, but an elaborate series of at least seven spiritual