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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