Christopher Muhammad | |
|---|---|
 Muhammad at March 2016 protest against police violence in San Francisco | |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Minister • activist |
Christopher Muhammad is an American minister and activist, and serves as the San Francisco Bay Area minister of the Nation of Islam. He is known for his campaign against the Lennar Corporation, which he believes has released asbestos dust into the local community.
Muhammad converted to the Nation of Islam after developing a distrust of local authorities and businesses. His father contracted esophageal cancer after many years as a bus mechanic, which he believed had been caused by his working conditions. According to Muhammad, "the bus company drew out the lawsuit until after he died so it wouldn't have to pay a cent". [1]
Muhammad has received media attention for numerous community activities. Most prominently, Muhammad has been an outspoken critic of the Lennar Corporation, and has charged them with harming children in the neighborhood of Bayview-Hunters Point, San Francisco. Muhammad claims that children at the Muhammad University of Islam, the local NOI school, have been suffering from respiratory problems because of dust created during demolition and building work carried out by Lennar at a nearby site. Specifically, he charges that dangerous amounts of asbestos dust have been released. [1] Lennar Corporation, as well as city officials, say that the claims are unfounded. [2]
The Nation of Islam (NOI) is a religious organization founded in the United States by Wallace Fard Muhammad in 1930. A centralized and hierarchical organization, the NOI is committed to black nationalism and focuses its attention on the African diaspora, especially on African Americans. While describing itself as Islamic and using Islamic terminologies, its religious tenets differ substantially from orthodox Islamic traditions. Scholars of religion characterize it as a new religious movement.
Louis Farrakhan is an American religious leader who heads the Nation of Islam (NOI), a black nationalist organization. Farrakhan is notable for his leadership of the 1995 Million Man March in Washington, D.C., and for his rhetoric that has been widely denounced as antisemitic and racist.
Wallace Fard Muhammad, also known as W. F. Muhammad, W. D. Fard, Wallace D. Fard, or Master Fard Muhammad, among other names, was the founder of the Nation of Islam. He arrived in Detroit in 1930 with an ambiguous background and several aliases and proselytized syncretic Islamic teachings to the city's black population. In 1934, he disappeared, and Elijah Muhammad succeeded him as leader of the Nation of Islam.
Barry Jay Minkow is a former American businessman, pastor, and convicted felon. While still in high school, Minkow founded ZZZZ Best, which appeared to be an immensely successful carpet-cleaning and restoration company. However, it was actually a front to attract investment for a massive Ponzi scheme. ZZZZ Best collapsed in 1987, costing investors and lenders $100 million in one of the largest investment frauds ever perpetrated by a single person, as well as one of the largest accounting frauds in history. The scheme is often used as a case study of accounting fraud.
Elijah Muhammad was an American religious leader, black separatist, and self-proclaimed Messenger of Allah who led the Nation of Islam (NOI) from 1933 until his death in 1975. Elijah Muhammad was also the teacher and mentor of Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan, Muhammad Ali, and his son, Warith Deen Mohammed.
Bayview–Hunters Point is the San Francisco, California, neighborhood combining the Bayview and Hunters Point neighborhoods in the southeastern corner of the city. The decommissioned Hunters Point Naval Shipyard is located within its boundaries and Candlestick Park, which was demolished in 2015, was on the southern edge. Due to the South East location, the two neighborhoods are often merged. Bayview–Hunter's Point has been labeled as San Francisco's "Most Isolated Neighborhood".
The Companions of the Prophet were the disciples and followers of Muhammad who saw or met him during his lifetime, while being a Muslim and were physically in his presence.
The Hunters Point Naval Shipyard was a United States Navy shipyard in San Francisco, California, located on 638 acres (258 ha) of waterfront at Hunters Point in the southeast corner of the city.
Khalid Abdul Muhammad was an African-American Muslim minister and activist who became a prominent figure in the Nation of Islam and later the New Black Panther Party. After a racially inflammatory 1993 speech at Kean College, Muhammad was condemned and removed from his position in the Nation of Islam by Louis Farrakhan. He was also censured by both Houses of the United States Congress.
Yusuf Bey was an American Black Muslim activist and leader who was a member of the Lost-Found Nation of Islam, an offshoot of Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam (NOI).
Muhammad Speaks was a Black Muslim newspaper published in the United States. It was one of the most widely read newspapers ever produced by an African American organization. It was the official newspaper of the Nation of Islam from 1960 to 1975, founded by a group of Elijah Muhammad's ministers, including Malcolm X.
Lennar Corporation (Lennar) is a home construction company based in Miami-Dade County, Florida. As of 2023, it is the second-largest home construction company in the United States based on the number of homes sold. Lennar has investments in multifamily and single family residential rental properties, luxury development, property technology with LenX, and mortgage lending from Lennar Mortgage.
Michael Muhammad Knight is a white American novelist, essayist, journalist, and convert to Islam. His writings are popular among American Muslim youth. The San Francisco Chronicle described him as "one of the most necessary and, paradoxically enough, hopeful writers of Barack Obama's America," while The Guardian has described him as "the Hunter S. Thompson of Islamic literature," and his non-fiction work exemplifies the principles of gonzo journalism. Publishers Weekly describes him as "Islam's gonzo experimentalist." Within the American Muslim community, he has earned a reputation as an ostentatious cultural provocateur.
Kofi S. Bonner is an American architect and planner widely known for the heading the redevelopment of the city of Emeryville, California. In 1995, Bonner was the deputy executive director of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency before resigning to become the director of community & economic development for the city of Oakland, California. In 1997, he was selected as the interim city manager for the city of Oakland, California and subsequently was the chief economic policy advisor to San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. In 1998, Bonner became executive vice president and chief administrative officer for the Cleveland Browns football organization of the National Football League. In 2004, Bonner was hired by MBNA and then in 2006 became director of urban land for Lennar. He worked as regional president at FivePoint, a position he assumed when his previous role as president in Lennar's Bay Area Urban division transitioned into FivePoint in July 2016. In this role, Bonner oversaw all land acquisition and urban development activities for FivePoint in northern California, including The San Francisco Shipyard and Candlestick Point, Treasure Island, and the Concord Naval Weapons Station.
The Armley asbestos disaster is a public health problem originating in Armley, a suburb of Leeds, West Yorkshire, England. Described by Dr. Geoffrey Tweedale as a "social disaster", it involved the contamination with asbestos dust of an area consisting of around 1,000 houses in the Armley Lodge area of the city.
On 28 February 2012, approximately 12 militants who were dressed in military uniforms stopped multiple buses on their routes through the Kohistan District in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. 18 passengers were subsequently taken out of the buses and executed by the militants; 17 of the 18 victims were identified as Shia Muslim residents of Gilgit–Baltistan who were travelling to the city of Gilgit from Rawalpindi, Punjab, while the remaining non-Shia victim was a Sunni Muslim who failed to convince the militants that he was not Shia. The victims were killed on the basis of their religious affiliation with the Shia sect of Islam after identification. Among the dead in the massacre were three children.
Warm Springs/South Fremont station is a Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) station located in the Warm Springs district of Fremont, California. The station is served by the Orange and Green lines. It was the southern terminus of both lines from its opening on March 25, 2017 until June 13, 2020, when Milpitas and Berryessa/North San José stations opened as part of the Silicon Valley BART extension.
Quasi-state-level jihadist groups, including Boko Haram and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, have captured and enslaved women and children, often for sexual slavery. In 2014 in particular, both groups organised mass kidnappings of large numbers of girls and younger women.
On 13 May 2015, eight gunmen attacked a bus travelling in Safoora Goth, Karachi, Sindh in Pakistan. The shooting left at least 46 people dead. All of the victims were of the Ismaili Shia Muslim minority, suggesting the attack was a targeted killing of sectarian nature.
Muhammad Ali was initially raised as a Baptist before his high-profile conversion to Islam. In the early 1960s, he began attending Nation of Islam Meetings. There, he met Malcolm X, who encouraged his involvement and became a highly influential mentor to Ali. Ali, who was named Cassius Clay after his father, first changed his name briefly to Cassius X and then finally to Muhammad Ali in 1964.