Siraj Wahhaj

Siraj Wahhaj is an African-American imam, born Jeffrey Kearse in Brooklyn, New York, on 11 March 1950, and raised in a Baptist family. He joined the Nation of Islam in 1969, taking the name Jeffrey12x, and after Elijah Muhammad's death in 1975 he became a Sunni Muslim as Warith Deen Mohammed reorganised the movement towards orthodox Islam; he was chosen to study at Umm al-Qura University in Mecca in 1978. ¹

In 1981 he founded the community that became Masjid At-Taqwa in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and remains its imam; in 1988 he led anti-drug patrols that were praised by the media and the New York Police Department. In 1991 he became the first Muslim to deliver an opening prayer in the United States House of Representatives. He is a former vice-president of the Islamic Society of North America and the leader of the Muslim Alliance in North America (MANA). ^{1 2}

Read this section as the report of the sources, not as a museum ruling.

Two sources describe his own move to Sunni Islam: the English Wikipedia article states in its text, with a citation, that after 1975 he became a Sunni Muslim, and InfluenceWatch's profile independently states that he became an orthodox Sunni Muslim. ^{1 2} No consulted source names a legal school for him, so only the generic Sunni value is recorded, and the data record flags the segment: if the two attestations are read as one source family, the doubt rule would return it to unknown.

• The sources named by identifier above, recorded under data/source/.
• Later translations and amendments of this article to be reviewed periodically with explicit dates.