Muhammed Abdullah al-Ahari is an Americanessayist, 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 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.
Periodical publications
Muhammad al-Ahari is a widely published writer. He has published more than sixty 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 AmexemTimes and Seasons. Muhammed served as the editor for the following publications: Meditations from the Bilali Muhammad Research Society, the Moorish Science Monitor from the Moorish Orthodox Church, and the ICCGC Newsletter at the Islamic Cultural Center in Northbrook, Illinois.
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, 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, an edited edition of Shaykh Daoud's al-Islam, the True Faith of Humanity, 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, and the collected writings of Shaykh Kamil Avdich -- A Heritage of East and West. 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.
