Dawud Salahuddin

Dawud Salahuddin (also known as Hassan Abdulrahman or Hassan Tantai) is an African-American convert to Islam most famous for his 1980 killing of Ali Akbar Tabatabai, an Iranian dissident and critic of Ayatollah Khomeini, and his exile in the Islamic Republic of Iran., InformAction, The New Yorker, August 5, 2002

Biography and activities

Dawud Salahuddin was born David Theodore Belfield in Roanoke Rapids, NC on November 10, 1950 and grew up in Bay Shore, Long Island in a church-going Baptist family of four boys and one girl.

According to Salahuddin, as a child the "most damage done" to him was the feeling he had that it was "an indecency, an insufficiency, certainly a shame not to be white." In 1963 he describes himself as having become politicized while watching news footage from Birmingham, Alabama, showing a police chief turn back civil-rights marchers with fire hoses and dogs, which caused him to develop "an implacable hatred toward all symbols of American authority." After graduation from high school, he attended Howard University for one semester. He was attracted to Islam because it is "color-blind" and converted at the age of 18. He frequented an Iranian student center run by Bahram Nahidian. During the early 1970s he...
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