I eat no pork / So why can’t I be as smooth as my man Dr. York.
—ZEV LOVE X, “PEACHFUZZ”
For channeling the persona of a giant flying reptile from outer space, DOOM gets the trophy for boldly daring to go where no other rapper had ventured before. Such a display of eccentric bravado, however, found precedent in another musical iconoclast—jazz avant-gardist Sun Ra, who always claimed to be from off-planet (specifically Saturn) and whose whole life embodied the concept of Afrofuturism. But, as a youth growing up, DOOM fell directly under the sway of someone closer to home—Dr. Malachi Z. York, a self-proclaimed spiritual leader, who in Brooklyn in the early seventies founded the Ansaaru Allah (“Helpers of Allah”) Community, to which the rapper belonged.
And why not? York cut a colorful character who assumed as many identities as his organization underwent complete makeovers during their thirty-year-plus history—claiming, once, to be Yaanuwn, a green-skinned reptilian from the planet Rizq. His syncretic teachings, drawn from the world’s three major religions, included such widely eclectic sources as Buddhism, Egyptology, Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism, Moorish Science, Kabbalah, the New Age movement, yoga, Black nationalism, apocalyptic prophecy, conspiracy theories, occult magick, and ancient alien theory. He is, therefore, responsible for introducing DOOM to an entire underground of esoteric knowledge and fringe philosophy that became an ongoing focus of interest and study throughout his life.
After his family joined the Nation of Islam, DOOM and his younger brother, Dingilizwe, gravitated to the Ansaars sometime during the eighties following their parent’s divorce. At the time, the community, based on Bushwick Avenue between Willoughby and Dekalb Avenues, promulgated a more orthodox version of Sunni Islam. As York presented himself as a gifted, knowledgeable speaker and charismatic personality, it did not take long for the brothers to become regular attendees at his Sunday lectures at the Bushwick masjid. They also served as street peddlers, selling incense, oils, and their leader’s self-published treatises in support of the cause.
At the height of their run in the late eighties, the Ansaars were an impressive sight to behold in their signature white robes and kufis (with full veils for women), providing a living example of Black unity, cooperation, and discipline. Not only did they establish a firm foothold in Brooklyn, offering an oasis of calm and tranquility in a neighborhood plagued by crime and drugs, but they exported their model of independence and self-sufficiency, opening satellites in Baltimore, Cleveland, Atlanta, Newport, Virginia, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC, as well as international chapters in Canada (Montreal and Toronto), the UK (London), Trinidad (Port of Spain), and Jamaica.
The proliferation of the Ansaars began with the opening of a chain of bookstores known as the Tents of Kedar. They used these sites to conduct classes in their esoteric philosophy, as well as Q&A meetings to recruit new converts. Unlike the Nation of Islam, the largest Black Muslim organization at the time, and its prominent offshoot, the Nation of Gods and Earths (also known as the Five Percenters), whose beliefs originated from the same source—a set of questions and answers known as the Supreme Wisdom Lessons—York debunked the notion of Black people as “Asiatic” peoples. Instead, his whole cosmology centered on Africa, but with a definite aim toward empowering African Americans. In the limited literature on him that exists, author and academic Susan J. Palmer writes:
York argues that his people originated from the Sudan region of Africa. His disciples today define themselves as “Nuwaubians” (as opposed to “Nubians”); a term that refers to the masses of African Americans still sleeping under the “Spell of Kingu” (a figure from Mesopotamian mythology, sometimes associated by York with the biblical Leviathan), not yet awakened to “Right Knowledge.” Starting with the ancient kingdom of Nubia in Sudan, York traces the lineage of his people back to the Sumerian and Egyptian civilisations, and even beyond that, to the stars. He finally expounds the “ancient astronaut” theory proposed by Zecharia Sitchin of the Anunnaki, angelic extraterrestrial astronauts who arrived from the planet Rizq, colonized our planet, and built the first great civilisations of Sumeria and Egypt.1
As fantastic as some of these claims may seem, the fluid nature of York’s beliefs and the way he constantly reinvented and sometimes contradicted himself make it virtually impossible to nail down a cohesive point of view, only adding to the air of mystery that surrounds him. As one observer noted, “One simplifies the Nuwaubian phenomenon only at the cost of accuracy.”2 But to Palmer’s point, pop culture and even the Pentagon may have finally caught up to York: the latter finally admitting the existence of UAPs (unidentified aerial phenomena), while the popular History Channel series Ancient Aliens introduces some of his controversial ideas to the mainstream. DOOM, however, saw more practical applications to his teachings, saying, “A lot of the things he speaks about is finding a better way—a way to improve us spiritually, mentally, physically. So, it’s almost like reaching that vacation place, where we’re all at total peace.”3
Though not much is known about his early life, York, whose given name was Dwight, was apparently born in Boston on June 26, 1945, and grew up in New Jersey. At age nineteen, according to a 1993 FBI report, he was incarcerated for the statutory rape of a thirteen-year-old, possession of a dangerous weapon, and resisting arrest, and ended up serving two years before being paroled. Upon his release, he started frequenting the State Street Mosque in Brooklyn, founded in 1928, which served all manner of Muslims, from Arab, African, and South Asian immigrants to African Americans whose introduction to the faith had come through Noble Drew Ali’s Moorish Science Temple or the Nation of Islam. It was in this heterogeneous setting that York first came across Sudanese immigrants from the Dongola region, who were to change the course of his life, introducing him to an indigenous African Islam with roots in mystical Sufism. “The Ansar,” according to the exiled Sudanese leader at the time, Sadiq al-Mahdi, “draw from all schools of thought and we are not bound by any school of law. We recognize the original texts and seek new formulation, conscious of changes in time and place.”4 Classical Islam, in contrast, centered the Sunnis and especially Saudia Arabia as the ultimate authority on Muslim thought.
Tensions between local and foreign-born Muslims provoked a rift at the State Street Mosque that York exploited to his advantage, striking off on his own in 1967 with an organization known as Ansaar Pure Sufi. A bookstore by the same name on Rockaway Boulevard in Brownsville served as its headquarters. In the years that followed, this organization would grow from a handful of followers to hundreds, undergoing several different transformations, beginning with the Nubian Islamic Hebrew Mission (1968), not to be confused with the Black Israelites. Following that incarnation came the Ansaaru Allah Community (1973–1992), Holy Tabernacle Ministries (1992), United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors (1993), and, finally, Yamassee Native American Moors of the Creek Nation (1994).
A major turning point for York came in the early seventies, when he visited Sudan, linking up with the powerful clan of Sudanese Al-Madhi, Muhammed Ahmad. The Al-Mahdi was recognized as a kind of millenarian leader who would restore Islam to glory before the end of the world—similar in concept to the second coming of Christ. When York returned to the US, he appropriated the title, appending it to his own name and claiming to be a direct descendant of Ahmad. Behind the name change, he dropped all previous Hebrew vestiges—except his logo of an upturned Islamic crescent below a six-pointed Star of David—and started building his Ansaar community in Brooklyn.
Over the course of the decade, it came to include a distribution center at 717 Bushwick Avenue, where the incense and oils his peddlers sold were made and packaged; a bookstore at 716 Bushwick, offering his many treatises; a “Children’s House,” where the younger members of the community were sequestered together, away from their parents, and schooled in Hebrew and Arabic; a masjid, or gathering place for prayer and question and answer sessions; and an office at 415 Hart Street, where an all-female (and unpaid) staff consisting mostly of his wives and concubines put together York’s numerous publications. Add to this a Nubian laundromat, two grocery stores, a recording studio, and a pizza shop selling a delicious wheat-crust pie made with a touch of honey, and York’s vision of an independent, disciplined, and righteous Black community bonded together by his teachings seemed a reality. It’s no wonder he gained hundreds of followers during this period, while exporting his model to other cities and countries.
Adding to his successes as a community organizer and spiritual leader, he also managed to maintain a career as an R&B recording artist, collaborating in several groups in the early eighties before going solo as “Dr. York” in 1985. To this end, he ran an independent production company and record label, releasing such quiet-storm material as “It’s Only a Dream” or “What Is He to You?,” which managed to receive some radio play. Perhaps his recording career might have taken off had he had access to the proper channels of distribution and promotion. Ironically, the “smooth” musical side of Dr. York was no secret to DOOM and other Ansaars, and actually enhanced his appeal as a spiritual leader. “We all rationalized the ‘Dr. York’ persona by assuming he was trying to reach all people by switching roles like he did, so no one considered his actions to be inappropriate. We considered it necessary,”5 according to Ruby Garnett, another AAC member, who eventually became one of York’s wives at age nineteen.
It was in this latter role of recording artist, producer, and independent studio/label owner that York crossed paths with several prominent rap artists of the era. Though not explicitly Ansaar, hip-hop pioneer Afrika Bambaataa, founder of the Universal Zulu Nation, considered himself a follower of Dr. York’s teachings, as did Doug E. Fresh and Posdnuos of De La Soul. Certainly, the Native Tongues crew, who enjoyed their height of popularity concurrently around the late eighties and early nineties, would have found the Ansaar’s Afrocentric ideology right up their alley. Meanwhile, Rakim and groups like Onyx, Force MDs, and Stetsasonic, who all had affiliations with the Five Percenters, rented time at York’s studio.
Before KMD immortalized the Ansaars in their video for “Peachfuzz,” which depicted the brothers Dumile in the trademark white robes and kufis, selling oils, incense, and literature on the streets, Jay-Z’s mentor, The Jaz (Jonathan Burks), was the first to include scenes of the Bushwick community in his video for “The Originators” (1990). It featured plenty of shots of brothers wearing white robes or red, black, and green leather jackets emblazoned with the logo of the Nubian Islamic Hebrews, and even a shot of a young Jigga rapping in an uncharacteristically fast style. Meanwhile, The Jaz holds a portrait of Imam Isa Al-Mahdi (York) himself, looking every bit the Sufi mystic with his prominent white turban and ancient stare. Though the Five Percenters exerted a formidable influence on hip-hop—even adding certain slang like “peace” and “word is bond” to the rap lexicon—the impact of the Ansaars could be seen as a little more understated.
From his foothold in Brooklyn, York continued to expand. In 1983, he purchased a lodge on an eighty-acre tract of land outside the village of Liberty in the Catskills—ostensibly as the community’s summer retreat. But Camp Jazzir Abba came to serve a much more important function beginning around 1992, when the entire Brooklyn community started pulling up stakes and boarding up buildings to relocate upstate. The unexpected move was accompanied by yet another name change—to Holy Tabernacle Ministries—as York seemingly made a dramatic swerve in ideology, suddenly denouncing Islam altogether. According to Palmer, “The HTM was characterized by a rampant eclecticism and syncretism, embracing Hebrew motifs blended with ancient Egyptian, Babylonian symbols, ufology and Masonic lore.”6 While such actions may have confounded outsiders, York had good reasons for doing so.
It may have had something to do with the fact that his provocative preaching and ideology were earning him enemies not only among Five Percenters and the Nation of Islam, but other traditional mosques as well. Chief among his critics was Bilal Philips, a Jamaican-born Sunni Muslim, who published The Ansar Cult in America (1988), a book that totally derided York as a charlatan, heretic, and huckster, who had built a cult of personality that bore no resemblance to true Islam. Following a close brush with El Sayyid Nosair—the assassin of Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League—who paid the Bushwick masjid a visit, York had good reason to believe that people within the Muslim community wanted him dead.
But to his followers, he presented a different story. According to Garnett, “He’d called a meeting and asked us all to come up with ideas on what kind of clothing we wanted to start wearing because he said we’d eventually end up being targeted if we didn’t start to appear more western. He told us that the world would eventually start to target Muslims and it would be imperative for us not to be associated with anything related to Islam.”7 On this last count, York was either extremely prophetic or lucky because the explosion that rocked the World Trade Center in Manhattan on February 26, 1993, unleashed the specter of “Islamic terrorism” on the world for the foreseeable future.
After initially garnering Mayor Ed Koch’s praise in the eighties for ridding their Bushwick neighborhood of drugs and crime, the Ansaars eventually found themselves the subject of an FBI investigation as a possible front for a criminal organization. By 1993, a Bureau report produced in association with the NYPD, Department of Welfare, IRS, INS, and orthodox Muslim mosques implicated the organization in welfare fraud, tax evasion, arson, vigilantism, and intimidation. The first murmurs of sexual abuse also started to leak out from former members of the community.
York’s retreat upstate, then, had everything to do with self-preservation as he circled the wagons, making the community even more insular. But if he thought a simple change of address could rid him of his problems, he could not have been more wrong, as the allegations followed him. In the rural, often racist environs of Sullivan County, the community faced constant harassment for improper permitting of the buildings they erected. They were also viewed suspiciously by neighbors for maintaining an active shooting range and arsenal of weapons. As a result, they didn’t last too long there either.
York’s response was to purchase 475 acres of farmland in the heart of Georgia’s dairy country, near Eatonton, where he moved the group, once again, after changing their name to the United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors. The UNNM, according to Palmer, “had become a self-contained ‘spiritual super-market’ offering access to an eclectic range of doctrines, myths, theories, and rituals that had been appropriated from other groups.”8 They set about building a sovereign nation called Tama-Re, an Egypt of the west, complete with two pyramids and other Egyptian-inspired statutes. Perhaps, to blend in with their rural surroundings, they initially wore cowboy boots and hats. But coinciding with yet another name change—this time to the Yamassee Native American Moors of the Creek Nation—they also adopted the attire of Plains Indians and York started calling himself Chief Black Eagle.
After a brief honeymoon, during which their Putnam County neighbors viewed them as somewhat of a harmless curiosity, troubles resumed over the issue of building permits. At first, county commissioners were turned away from the property by armed guards. After the local sheriff intervened, they were allowed to perform their inspection. But when York disregarded orders to bring several new constructions up to code—including a huge warehouse that doubled as a nightclub—authorities padlocked the buildings in question. So began a full-scale war between the county and its new transplants, who went aggressively on the attack, even playing the race card. They circulated fliers calling county officials racist while referring to Black council members who opposed them as “house niggers.” They attempted to infiltrate the local chapter of the NAACP and even hosted a visit by the activist Rev. Al Sharpton in 1999, while pushing the narrative that Putnam County wanted them out. The conflict moved into higher gear, however, when they issued threats of violence against Sheriff Howard Sills and other officials.
With the disastrous 1993 government siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, still fresh on everybody’s mind, both sides became increasingly paranoid. Sills started getting tips from former Nuwaubians about alleged sexual abuse that was going on in “The Land,” as they called it, which he referred to the FBI. By the spring of 2002, they received even more conclusive evidence of such crimes after having interviewed more than thirty-five of York’s victims and determining that he may have fathered as many as three hundred children. They also learned of a weapons stockpile at the compound. In an effort to stave off another Waco, Sills and the FBI concocted a plot to raid Tama-Re when York was off-site, so he’d be unable to issue the order to retaliate.
On May 8, 2002, York and his main wife were picked up after leaving the compound in a black SUV. Then a combined task force of some three hundred federal and state law enforcement officers descended upon Tama-Re, securing it in under five minutes after receiving no resistance from the one hundred or so Nuwaubians present. After securing weapons, cash, and other evidence, the authorities encountered about two hundred more members as they left later that evening, but by that time the game was up. Bloodshed had been successfully averted.
Subsequently, following a 2004 conviction, the man once known as Al Imam Isa Al Haadi Al Mahdi, Rabboni Y’Shua Bar El Haady, the Lamb, Ammunnubi Raakhptaah, Chief Black Eagle, Dr. Malachi Z. York, Dr. York, or just plain Doc, assumed his current alias—inmate #17911-054. He is currently serving 135 years at the US Penitentiary supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, for more than one hundred counts of child molestation and multiple RICO violations. The organization he started remains mired in controversy and largely in tatters. Its few remaining apologists can only claim racist intervention by the US government bent on extinguishing any semblance of Black power.
Following the passing of his brother and the organization’s move down south, DOOM had not been active with the Nuwaubians since the early nineties. While living in Atlanta, however, he attended the Saviours’ Day festivities in the summer of 1999 and even managed to catch Dr. York’s last lecture prior to his arrest (which he attended with friend and collaborator, Stahhr the Femcee). In 2000, when asked about his opinions of the group, he replied, “What I think, that’s just a projected guess. I try to look at the facts about it. The vibe is good—unlike I’ve ever felt anywhere else. It’s one of the first places I ever seen where there’s more than 100 people and nobody smoking a cigarette. As far as how it’s been going, and what he’s [York’s] been saying, and raising the children, keeping people together on some real property? Well, I’m looking at it like it’s working.”9 DOOM was not alone in his praise. Jesse Jackson, who visited Tama-Re in 2002, prior to the raid, applauded it as an example of “The American Dream.”
Even as the criminal case against his spiritual mentor was proceeding in the courts in 2003, DOOM thought enough about the man to name his second son, Sean Malachi, after him, perhaps as a sign of solidarity or act of defiance. After all, as York had provided such a positive role model, it would have been a bitter pill to swallow to learn that someone who commanded so much respect and gave so much to his followers hid a secret life as a pedophile. But as Garnett, a former wife of York’s, wrote in her memoir, “Imam Isa the teacher is different from Imam Isa the man.”10 It was a revelation to which only certain female members of the community would have been privy, as well as the cause for much cognitive dissonance among the “true believers.” DOOM, however, appeared nonplussed. While he never publicly mentioned his mentor again, he still followed the “right knowledge” that York spoke about, and his interest in esoteric subjects never waned, but, in fact, grew even stronger.