Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was born Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Jr. in New York City on 16 April 1947, the only child of Cora Lillian and Ferdinand Lewis Alcindor Sr.¹² He attended Power Memorial Academy, where his team won 71 consecutive games, and then UCLA, where he won three consecutive NCAA championships and was three times the tournament's Most Outstanding Player.¹ Drafted first overall by the Milwaukee Bucks in 1969, he played for Milwaukee until 1975 and for the Los Angeles Lakers until 1989, winning six NBA championships and a record six Most Valuable Player awards.¹ His career total of 38,387 points was the NBA's scoring record until 2023, and his skyhook shot became his trademark.¹ He has also worked as an actor, coach and author, served as a United States global cultural ambassador in 2012, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016.¹

Alcindor converted to Islam in the summer of 1968 and adopted the name Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, which he began using publicly in 1971 after leading Milwaukee to its first NBA title.¹³ At UCLA he played under coach John Wooden in three consecutive national championship teams.³ He was named to the NBA's 35th, 50th and 75th anniversary teams, and retired in 1989 as the league's all-time leader in points, games and minutes played.³ He trained in Jeet Kune Do under Bruce Lee and appeared in Lee's film Game of Death.³

This section sets out different positions as reported in the sources. It is not a verdict by the museum. The English article states that in the summer of 1968 Abdul-Jabbar took the shahada twice and converted to Sunni Islam from the Catholicism of his upbringing.¹ The Urdu article likewise states that he entered Sunni Islam, describing a path from Christianity through the Nation of Islam.⁴ The Arabic article gives his religion as Islam without naming a school.³ On the basis of the two independent sources that name Sunni Islam for him personally, his school is recorded in the museum's data as sunni, documented.¹⁴ The English article records that his teacher Hamaas Abdul Khaalis, who gave him his name, led the Hanafi Movement, and that the two later parted ways over teachings; a teacher's school is not recorded as his own, and no legal school is attributed to him in the museum's data.¹

• Kareem Abdul-Jabbar — English Wikipedia¹
• Kareem Abdul-Jabbar — Arabic Wikipedia³
• Kareem Abdul-Jabbar — Urdu Wikipedia⁴
• Kareem Abdul-Jabbar — Wikidata Q179051²