Recent press reports regarding the outrage at a convicted cop killer’s parole have all omitted one crucial fact about the subject Shuaib A. Raheem, a former New York State inmate. He was in fact a member of the Dar ul-Islam movement and the incident in which Police Officer Stephen Gilroy was killed was an attempted by radical Islamic members of the group to obtain weapons to fight in a holy war. That was in 1973 when little was known of the word “jihad” or the group.
Founded in the early 1960’s in a mosque in Brooklyn, Dar ul-Islam was an alliance between orthodox African American Muslim clergymen Yusef Abdul Mu’min and Yahya Abdul Karim and Middle Eastern clergyman Sheik Daoud Fasil. In 1968, Dar ul-Islam started a prison discipleship program with the goal of establishing a Sunni/Salafi mosque in each one of the state prisons.
In January 1973, four members of the movement stormed into John & Al’s Sporting Goods Store in New York City in an attempt to procure weapons for a radical Islamic uprising. The siege lasted two days before the hostages were released. During the gun battle, one NYPD officer, Stephen Gilroy was killed. All four of the members of the movement were arrested and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. At the time of the incident, NYPD Deputy Commissioner Benjamin Ward described the four as members of an orthodox Muslim sect whose motive in the armed robbery was not to obtain money but weapons for jihad.
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