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Welcome to Gapfest Reads. I'm David Plott, one of the host's Slates Political Gapfest.

In 1977, when I was a first grader in DC Public Schools, Lafayette Elementary,

the city was gripped for several days by an extraordinary event. And even today,

46 years later, the feeling of those days remains powerfully in my memory. So powerfully,

I literally think about it every time I drive up 16th Street. And now, Shahan Mufti has written

an absolutely brilliant and mesmerizing and page-turning account of an event that you probably

never heard of, but which was massively important in shaping America's relationship to Islam

and to terrorism. Mufti's book, American Colliff Chronicles, the 1977 Siege of Washington, DC,

when a small Muslim group based in DC, based out of a house on 16th Street,

took more than 150 hostages and three buildings, killed a young Howard University journalist,

nearly killed Marion Barrie, then a city council member, soon to be mayor, and brought the city

to a standstill. The Hanafi Muslim takeover of the Benebryth, the National Islamic Center,

and the district building was, and I think remains the largest hostage taking ever on American soil.

Shahan Mufti, your chair of the Department of Journalism at the University of Richmond,

congratulations on writing eight remarkable and magnificent book and welcome to Gap Festreads.

Thank you so much, David. It's great to be with you.

So there are so many threads in this book. It is a history of Islam in America. It's a history of

the nation of Islam. It's a tick-tock about a terrifying hostage situation. It's a story about the

most ambitious movie ever made about Islam. It's also incidentally a story about Karim Abdul Jibbar,

but it is most of all the story of Hamas Abdul Khalis, who is the American caliph of the title.

So Shahan start by telling us a little bit about Hamas Khalis, and who he was, and the group that he

...