Nationality American Name Muhammed al-Ahari | Role Essayist | |
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Full Name Ray Allen Rudder Born January 6, 1965 (age 59) ( 1965-01-06 ) Occupation essayist public school educator Education Northeastern Illinois University | ||
Muhammed Abdullah al-Ahari (born January 6, 1965, as Ray Allen Rudder) is an American essayist, scholar and writer on the topics of American Islam, Black Nationalist groups, heterodox Islamic groups and modern occultism. Al-Ahari has been published in American, Nigerian, Bosnian, and Turkish Islamic periodicals. He has also studied at the American Islamic College in Chicago for three years and with Bektashi, Naqshibandi, Muridi, Tijani, the Chistiyyah (under Shaykh Rafi Sharif) and Nimatillahi Sufi Orders. These studies and his travels to mosques and Islamic schools around the country led to Muhammed al-Ahari to focus on the preservation of rare pieces of American Islamic Literature and the documenting of the presence of Muslims in the United States and Canada.
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Periodical publications
Muhammad al-Ahari is a widely published writer. He has published more than60sixty articles in Muslim American magazines and journals including the Message, the Minaret, Islamsko Misao, Islamic Horizons, Indian Times, Fountain Magazine, al-Basheer, New Era, Svijest, Muslim Journal, Muslim Prison Brotherhood Newsletter, al-Talib, The Light, Moorish Science Monitor, and Amexem Times and Seasons. Muhammed served as the editor for the following publications: Meditations from the Bilali Muhammad Research Society (Charleston, S.C., 1988), the Moorish Science Monitor from the Moorish Orthodox Church (two issues -- the Poetry Issue 2004 and the Circle Seven Commentary issue 2005), and the ICCGC Newsletter at the Islamic Cultural Center in Northbrook, Illinois (two issues in 2011 and still editor).
University press publications
Al-Ahari was also published by University Presses and these can be found in Islam Outside the Arab World, by David Westerlund; Ingvar Svanberg Publisher: New York : St. Martin's Press, 1999. ISBN 0-312-22691-8 OCLC: 41355839, where he has a chapter on Islam in Latin America; a Symposium paper presented in Sarajevo, Bosnia on the life and teaching of Imam Kamil Avdich in the book Život i djelo Ćamila Avdića; and a paper in the Symposium papers from the Alevi-Bektashi Conference in Isparta, Turkey. During September 2005 he attended the First Alevi-Bektashi Conference in Isparta, Turkey, where he presented a paper on links between Freemasonry and the Bektashi community. The proceedings have been published as a scholarly volume and contains a biographic sketch of Muhammed al-Ahari.
With the Bosnian community in America Muhammed has served as a principal for the Islamic weekend school, librarian, museum director, editor of the community newsleter, and a contributor to an edited volume of articles on the history of Bosnians in Canada and the United States. Muhammed wrote ten of the articles in the coffee table book "A Hundred Years of Bosnians in America"("100 Godina Bošnjaka u Americi"). Chicago: Bosnian American Cultural Association, ©2006. The Bosnians were the first Muslims in the United States to incorporate an Islamic Association in 1906 in Chicago, Illinois.
Other publications
Al-Ahari has published more than twenty books on Islam and American Muslim history through the Chicago-based Magribine Press. Most of these texts are reprints of early American Muslim texts rather than his original writings. His work through Magribine press is important due to the preservation of scholarly editions of early American Mslim texts. His works on Muhammad Alexander Russell Webb and Five Classic Muslim Slave Narratives have been used in Muslim book clubs (at the Light of Islam Bookstore in Houston, Texas, and other places), and as supplementary texts and textbooks in several university-level classes on Islam in America. DePaul University's archives in Chicago house his papers. His original writings have been translated into Arabic, Bosnian, Albanian, and Turkish.
In the 1980s Muhammed started to write about the history of Islam in America, with several articles in the California-based Muslim periodical Minaret. In the late 1980s while in South Carolina he started Magribine Press, which published a catalogue of Arabic Slave Narratives written in America and the single-issue periodical Meditations from the Bilali Muhammad Research Society. When Muhammed returned to Chicago in 1990, he attended the American Islamic College for two additional years and restarted his Magribine Press with an edited edition of Muhammed Alexander Rusell Webb's Islam in America (1993), an edited edition of Shaykh Daoud's al-Islam, the True Faith of Humanity (2003), and his translation of the Fiqh text called the Ben Ali Diary or the Bilali Document, written by Bilali Muhammad of Sapelo Island, Georgia.
In 2005 Muhammed continued his work of reprinting edited, annotated editions of early American Muslim texts with the 100 Seeds of Beirut — The Neglected Poetic Utterances of Warren Tartaglia (Walid al-Taha), and the collected writings of Shaykh Kamil Avdich -- A Heritage of East and West (2006). Since then Muhammed has reprinted over 20 texts of early America Muslim writers and has published his own original works that includes a study of Bosnian American and other Ottoman Diaspora newspapers, a study of Freemasonry and Islam, and a forthcoming history of Islam in America.