(1948)
JAZZ IN A MUSLIM KEY
The Ahmadiyya Muslim movement, originally from India, drew many Americans of all nationalities to Islam in the early-mid twentieth century. Yasmine Flodin-Ali tells the story of Yusef Lateef and the movement's influence on other jazz musicians.
Phrases slink past and coil into one another—trumpet, then sax, then trumpet again. Other instruments play, the drum pulses steadily in the background, the piano floats in and out. But it is the trumpet and tenor sax that command attention: seeking, reaching, a pattern within a pattern, an unfolding that gives the impression of no end.
The year is 1946, and Bill Evans is on the road again, going where the gigs are, this time on the West Side of Chicago, playing saxophone. He likes the new trumpet player’s style, and after the set, they get to talking. The trumpeter is named Talib Dawud. The two men discuss music, gigs, and cities. The conversation, fluid and continuous, turns to spirituality. After a few minutes of Dawud describing his journey, he pauses for the first time (deliberate, itself a sound, a break in the beat).
Talib Dawud asks: “Would you like to learn about Islam? I can bring you by the Ahmadiyya mission some time.”
Twenty-six-year-old Bill Evans, soon to be Yusef Lateef, answers immediately: “Yes.”
The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community first emerged half a century and an ocean away from that fateful Chicago jazz club encounter. In 1891, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad received revelation in India, and the movement was born. Several of Ahmad’s claims, including that Jesus died in Kashmir, India, as well as his own spiritual elevation, were met with skepticism by other Muslims.
Yet Ahmad was not unique; many Islamic movements have been spearheaded by charismatic leaders. The Ahmadiyya emerged in the context of British colonial rule, in a time of anti-Muslim sentiment and aggressive Christian missionization. In a subversive reversal, Ahmad proclaimed that the Ahmadiyya would seek “the spiritual Colonization of the Western world.”
Mufti Muhammad Sadiq
The Moslem Sunrise (c. 1921)
Mufti Muhammad Sadiq was the first Ahmadi missionary to the United States. The movement was fresh off a string of missionary successes in Western Europe and Western Africa. In 1920, when Mufti Sadiq arrived in Philadelphia, he was detained by immigration officials who claimed that all Muslims were polygamous. During his two months in jail, Mufti Sadiq converted a diverse array of people. After his release, he traveled around the United States, giving lectures and seeking converts. In 1922, Mufti Sadiq established the first US Ahmadi mosque and mission center in Chicago. Mufti Sadiq intentionally courted Black American voters, honing his message that Islam would abolish racism, placing ads in local Black newspapers, and giving lectures at the meetings of the Universal Negro Improvement Association meetings, Marcus Garvey’s Black nationalist organization.
Ahmadi Mosque & Mission Center
The first US Ahmadi mosque and mission center in Chicago
The Moslem Sunrise 1, no. 6 (May 1923): 126.
The Ahmadiyya were unique in their missionary aims, but their integration into Black communities was typical for many Asian immigrants across religious backgrounds in the early twentieth century. Approximately sixty percent of the five-hundred-person Chicago congregation was comprised of Black Americans; the rest were white Americans and immigrants from South Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. Almost every journalist who covered the mosque emphasized the diversity of the congregation. For example, an article published in The Chicago Defender, a prominent Black newspaper, describes at length the physical features of the congregants:
Next to them is one of India’s finest looking young men, a former student at the university in Calcutta, who is now taking dentistry at the state university in Iowa. At his side is another Mr. Sadiq, young, strong, intelligent and sober looking. He is fair, has sandy or reddish hair and comes from Russia… There is the very dark Mr. Augustus, who used to belong to St. Mark church in this city, but who now sings a pretty Arabic prayer and acts rather sphinx-like. Half a dozen Garvey cohorts are counted, one in his resplendent uniform.
Overall, this article conveys a sense of wonder at a place which has assembled both a Russian man and a Garveyite. Across the United States, racially integrated houses of worship were highly unusual, so the Chicago congregation stood out and was read by many as a liberatory space.
The Ahmadiyya were among the most prominent Islamic movements in the early-twentieth-century United States. From roughly 1920 to 1952, there was no one majority Muslim sect. The three largest movements were the Ahmadiyya, the Moorish Science Temple of America (an Islamically-inspired group unique to the United States), and Sunni Islam.
In 1952, Malcolm X was released from prison, and many Black Americans left the Ahmadiyya and Moorish Science Temple of America to join the Nation of Islam (founded in 1930). The Nation remained the most popular expression of Islam in the United States until roughly 1965. The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which opened avenues for non-European immigration, both increased the number of Muslims in the United States and changed the community’s demographics.
Today there are still many different Islamic sects in the United States, including the Ahmadiyya, but the majority of Muslim Americans are Sunni, which is the global majority sect. The second largest sect, both globally and in the United States, are Shia. Today, Ahmadi contributions to Muslim American history are frequently downplayed by both scholars and Muslim Americans. Yet the Ahmadiyya were the first Islamic proselytizing movement in the United States, and the first multiracial Muslim American movement.
Early Converts
to the Ahmadiyya Muslim community in the United States
Courtesy of The Muslim Sunrise
After Mufti Sadiq’s establishment of the first Ahmadi American mosque in Chicago, the movement continued to expand, taking root in industrializing cities in the Midwest. These cities were at the intersection of two migrations. The first was the Great Migration—Black Americans leaving the American South fleeing violence and seeking opportunities. The second was immigration to the United States, including from Muslim communities abroad.
Discriminatory laws, from Jim Crow to naturalization and citizenship laws, shaped both these internal and external migratory flows. Joining the Ahmadiyya provided Muslim immigrants, both Ahmadi and otherwise, with a sense of community and familiarity. There were few Sunni institutions in the 1920s and early 1930s, and many immigrant Muslims found the Ahmadiyya movement more legible in terms of ritual observance than the Moorish Science Temple of America or Nation of Islam. Joining the Ahmadiyya provided Black Americans with a sense of continuity by fulfilling the same community support function as churches in the American South; a sense of change by expressing a cosmopolitan identity through membership in an international movement; and a sense of reclamation by connecting to potential African Muslim ancestors, a legacy that was violently ruptured by slavery.
Yusef Lateef at SESC Pompéia
São Paulo, Brazil (2011)
photograph by Paolo Borgia
licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
For Yusef Lateef and many other Black Muslim jazz musicians, their spiritual and musical journeys were intertwined. Lateef’s family was part of the Great Migration. He was born in 1920 in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and a few years later, his family moved to Detroit, Michigan. There was a thriving Ahmadiyya community in Detroit, but Lateef did not encounter the movement until that fateful night in 1946, when a job brought him to Chicago, the birthplace of the Ahmadi American movement. Lateef’s conversion was not entirely unexpected; he explains that he always had an interest in spirituality and learning about different religions. During the two years that Lateef lived in Chicago he regularly visited the Ahmadi mosque. He also attended religious study sessions at the home of Abdullah Ibn Buahina (formerly Art Blakey), another Ahmadi jazz musician. In 1948, Lateef officially converted to Ahmadi Islam.
1948 was also the year that Lateef joined the Dizzy Gillespie Orchestra, and his career began to rise. Lateef said of the experience: “Being a member of Dizzy’s band for two years was like attending a topflight musical academy.” Gillespie’s band was among the pioneers of bebop, a fast-paced genre of jazz. Not only was Gillespie’s band a site of musical innovation; it was also a hub of Islamic conversion. In addition to Talib Dawud and Yusef Lateef, saxophonist Lynn Hope, drummer Kenny Clarke, and trumpeter Oliver Mesheux all converted to Islam, although not all to the Ahmadi sect. Most Muslim jazz musician converts in the 1940s and 1950s became Ahmadi Muslims, but others joined Sunni Islam, or other Islamic movements.
Dizzy Gillespie
at the Concert Hall in Helsingborg, Sweden
(1959)
The association between jazz and Islam was undeniable in this period. Langston Hughes observed this trend in a poem published in 1951 entitled “Be-Bop Boys”: “Imploring Mecca/to achieve/six discs/with Decca,” referring to the Decca Record company. A 1953 article in Ebony Magazine titled “Moslem Musicians” stated that there were at least “200 Negro Moslem jazz musicians.” (The spelling “Moslem” was frequently used in anglophone contexts in the early twentieth century instead of “Muslim.”) Why did so many jazz musicians convert to Islam? Lateef wrote in his autobiography:
I’m often asked what might have been the motivation for so many musicians and others to adopt Islam at this time… I believe that the motivation for any human being to embrace Islam is that when almighty God turns a person’s heart towards Islam (peace) there is no other choice for the person.
From Lateef’s perspective, his conversion was divinely ordained. In addition to an ineffable sense of embrace, proximity and exposure also facilitate conversion. When Lateef learned about Islam from Talib Dawud, he joined a pre-existing network of communities and resources dedicated to religious practice and learning.
Muslim jazz musicians articulated three major reasons for their conversion. First, some musicians felt that Islam provided structure and safety from harmful aspects of the music industry, including heavy drug and alcohol use. Second, by identifying as Muslim, many Black American jazz musicians sought to reject the racial category “negro” assigned to them by the state, identifying instead on their own terms. Several Muslim jazz musicians were able to play in venues in the American South that excluded Black Americans, simply by donning fezzes and turbans. While wearing a fez is not a religious requirement, and Islam is not an inherently racial identity, wearing a fez associated these musicians with “the exotic East,” allowing them to temporarily claim a different racial category. This was an old strategy; Black Americans knew that they were more protected when they were perceived to be foreigners.
Dizzy Gillespie, who did not convert to Islam despite a large portion of his band doing so, voiced ambivalence about this strategy, implying that these conversions were not sincere, and that Black musicians were converting to Islam so that they could identify as white. Many Black Muslims took issue with this framing, arguing that they were not identifying as white or rejecting their African ancestry, rather they were rejecting their treatment and categorization by the United States. The 1953 Ebony Magazine article covered how Lynn Hope, a Sunni Muslim convert and the most famous Muslim jazz musician at the time, always wore a turban in the Jim Crow South, but also covered his commitment to his faith, including that he had memorized thirty-one chapters of the Qur’an. The article rejects the implication that Hope converted “strictly for commercial reasons,” revealing that he took a temporary break from music and worked as a hospital orderly to more fully pursue his Islamic education. Seeking a reprieve from the cruelties of Jim Crow was not mutually exclusive with sincere faith.
Even musicians who did not convert, like John Coltrane and Dizzy Gillespie, studied and were influenced by Islam. Conversion is not the only way that religions contribute to artists’ creation. A 1948 Life Magazine article depicted Gillespie bowing on the ground, in a position closely reminiscent of Muslim prostration during prayer. The photo was captioned: “Mohammed Leanings are shown by many bebop musicians, some of whom have actually turned Mohammedan, interrupt rehearsals at sunset to bow to the east.” Despite his critiques of recent converts, Gillespie also praised Islam, and was clearly open to Islamic influences, retorting to those that accused him of forsaking Christianity: “Christianity is forsaking me—or better, people who claim to be Christian just ain’t... In Islam, there is no color line.” Gillespie’s framing of Islam as inherently liberating and anti-racist is a matter of context and interpretation. Islam, like all religious traditions, has been used by different people for different, often contradictory, purposes. In some ways the small numbers of Muslims present in the United States in the early twentieth century made it easier for Islamic movements to define Islam in idealized, utopic terms.
As was the case for many Black Americans, leaving the American South or converting to Islam did not save or insulate Lateef from the horrors of American racism. After a show in Detroit, a police officer searched Lateef, accusing him of selling dope. Although he found nothing, the officer beat Lateef on the hands with a blackjack. Lateef believes that the real reason he was arrested is that a white woman was in the audience at his show, which enraged the officer. While converting to Islam did not upend structures of racism within the United States, jazz musicians did use Islam to foster community, and to provide psychic distance from oppression, moments where they self-identified on their own terms.
The third motivation for jazz musicians to convert to Islam was to articulate and facilitate their connection to a Black and Muslim international community. Richard Turner explains in Soundtrack to a Movement: African American Islam, Jazz, and Black Internationalism that as the 1950s approached, many Muslim bebop jazz musicians saw themselves both musically and politically as part of a larger global context. Black American jazz musicians connected issues of racial segregation in the United States to international issues facing the Third World.
Many jazz musicians were attracted to the Ahmadiyya movement in particular because of its transnational character and focus on racial equality. In his biography, Yusef Lateef noted that the Ahmadiyya movement at its very inception was a response to British colonialism. 1946, the year that Yusef Lateef met Talib Dawud, was the year after World War II ended. Frustration with segregation and racial inequality was heightened by the stark contrast between the treatment of returned Black and white veterans. The next year, 1947, the Partition of former British India, resulted in the founding of India and Pakistan, and the displacement of millions of people. 1948 to 1952 were also critical years for the development of pan-Arab and pan-African movements. The 1955 Bandung Conference of Third World nations in Indonesia, which several Black Americans attended, was a high point of third-world solidarity movements. Black Ahmadi jazz musicians connected to Asia and Africa through their musical sampling and understood the struggle for racial equity in the United States as linked to global anti-colonial struggles.
The internationalist outlook of Ahmadi jazz musicians such as Yusef Lateef, Art Blakey, and Kenny Clarke was apparent in their musical style. They were among the pioneers of a distinctive new sound that some musicologists refer to as “hard bop,” a subgenre of bebop jazz. Emerging in the 1950s, hard bop is characterized by funky, bluesy melodies, and an abundance of solos. Art Blakey led a band called the Seventeen Messengers, composed largely of Muslim jazz musicians. Later the band became the “Jazz Messengers,” and while this second iteration was more religiously diverse, a strong Islamic influence remained. These jazz musicians incorporated a wide variety of influences into their music, including Caribbean, South Asian, East and West African, and Middle Eastern sounds.
At the same time, hard bop retained an abundance of gospel (often via blues) influences, sounds, and rhythms. Lateef’s career perfectly encapsulates this range. As diverse and varied as his musical influences were, he continued to draw on gospel devotional traditions. This reflects Lateef’s own roots; his first exposure to music as a child was playing saxophone for local churches. As Norman Weinstein wrote: “There is a blues wail at the core of Lateef’s playing, whether he is facing his youthful musical Mecca of Detroit or the actual Mecca of his spiritual aspirations.” Lateef’s continual inspiration from gospel sources is a reminder that conversion does not mean forsaking one’s unique cultural background or personal history.
Lateef uniquely contributed to hard bop through his masterful research on different types of music and instruments. He drew inspiration from everywhere. When he returned to Detroit in 1950, he studied music theory at Wayne State University. He also describes learning about music through his visits to Eastern Market, a shopping district in Detroit:
I used to go to the Syrian spice store, and I discovered instruments such as the argol, a double reed, bamboo flute. Like the rabat, I eventually incorporated it into the upcoming albums of the late fifties. I also began making my own flutes, like the pneumatic bamboo flute, and the earth board, an instrument my son Rashid made, which was constructed on a board with bailing wire.
Lateef would go on to play a stunning array of instruments, including the shofar, shehnai, arghul, and koto, just to name a few. Ironically, Lateef himself did not care for the term hard bop, nor did he identify with the genre jazz, perhaps because his life’s work focused on blending genres and defying categories. Lateef also emphasized that all of what critics defined as jazz, in his view, was a continuation of the blues tradition.
From 1946 to 1955, Lateef’s dedication to the Ahmadiyya movement, and to his musical craft, laid the groundwork for his internationalist approach and aesthetic. His best-known category-defining, world-creating music would be released in the decades to come. As Lateef’s 1957 Jazz for the Thinker liner notes relate:
Attempting to bring his audience to a higher level of morality through his music, Yusef Lateef is a… consummate musician… [His] music combines elements of the current ‘hard bob’ approach with Afro-Asiatic tinges… Subtle, abstract touches… bring forth Indian effects, the rhythms pulse and force the listener to THINK.
As Richard Turner explains, these liner notes are meant to emphasize the spirituality and trans-national nature of his music. Lateef’s music was not meant to merely entertain, it was meant to inspire, bringing the listener in touch with their own nature, forging connections between peoples, and painting a sonic picture of a world pulsing with the beauty of creation at the hand of the creator. Although hints of Lateef’s genre-defying, world-music-sampling style were evident earlier, this expression fully arrived in his 1962 album, Eastern Sounds. Across this album, the sounds of the rich oboe reed meet the plaintive cry of the Arab arghul reed and the bright clash of the Turkish finger cymbals. Lateef’s brilliant use of instruments from around the world was the signature of his style and left a lasting imprint on jazz.
SOURCES & FURTHER READINGS
Chan-Malik, Sylvia. Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam. New York University Press, 2018. “Moslem Musicians.” Ebony Magazine. April, 1953. https://sapelosquare.com/2018/03/28/muslims-and-jazz-in-1953/. Khan, Aysha. “Ahmadi Muslims have a Storied American History—And a Legacy that is Often Overlooked.” Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera, October 20, 2018. Lateef, Yusef, and Herb Boyd. The Gentle Giant: The Autobiography of Yusef Lateef. Morton Books, Inc., 2012. Morgan, Alaina. Atlantic Crescent: Building Geographies of Black and Muslim Liberation in the African Diaspora. The University of North Carolina Press, 2025. Turner, Richard. Soundtrack to a Movement: African American Islam, Jazz, and Black Internationalism. New York University Press, 2021. Weinstein, Norman. A Night in Tunisia: Imaginings of Africa in Jazz. Limelight, 2004.