The Community: Jamiyla Chisholm’s Memoir of a Brooklyn Islamic Commune

A Little Bit Culty

Sarah Edmondson & Anthony “Nippy” Ames

Education, Society & Culture

4.6 • 3K Ratings

🗓️ 23 January 2023

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This episode is sponsored by Better Help. Hold onto your seatbelt, cuz we’re blasting back to the ‘70s for this one. Here’s the scene: we’re in Brooklyn, New York, at a time when all five boroughs were spiraling into ungovernable anarchy, with crime, violence, and widespread racism leaving the deteriorating metropolis totally ungovernable. If you were Black, you were particularly ostracized and lived in constant danger as a second class citizen (if only this weren’t still true today). And so it’s no real surprise that when people like Jamiyla Chisholm’s father heard about a religious community that would, as Jamiyla put it, protect them from the hellish world and teach them how “they should live as Black people,” they were drawn like moths to a flame.

While we’ve seen time and time again that cults prey on the vulnerable, this often takes advantage of an individual’s current mental, financial, or even physical state. In this particular case, one leader took advantage of nation-wide racial tensions in order to seduce hundreds of people into his community, which merged practices from Islam, Judaism, and various political ideologies.

Who was this leader? Well, we don’t want to give it all away…but here’s a hint: the supreme douchebag is serving 135 years in prison for what’s been reported as the largest prosecution of child molestation ever directed at an individual in the history of the USA.

To find out who we’re talking about, tune in to hear author, journalist, storyteller and educator Jamiyla Chisholm discuss her own experience as a member of this cult, as detailed in her memoir, The Community.

Jamiyla’s Website

Jamiyla’s Instagram

Jamiyla’s Twitter

Buy The Community: A Memoir

Also…

Hear Ye, Hear Ye:

The views and opinions expressed on A Little Bit Culty do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the podcast. Any content provided by our guests, bloggers, sponsors or authors are of their opinion and are not intended to malign any religion, group, club, organization, business individual, anyone or anything. Nobody’s mad at you, just don’t be a culty fuckwad.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The views and opinions expressed by a little bit culty are those of the hosts,
0:03.6	and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the podcast.
0:07.8	That's true.
0:08.5	Any of the fire content provided by our guest bloggers, sponsors, or authors are of their opinion,
0:13.6	and are not intended to malign any religion group, club, organization, business individual,
0:18.2	anyone, or anything.
0:19.3	Unless you're abusing people, then I have a problem aligning you.
0:22.6	Also, we're not doctors, psychologists, or wizards.
0:25.8	We're just two non-experts trying to make you a friendly, informative podcast that helps you understand culty shit.
0:40.8	Hey everybody, Sarah Edmondson here.
0:43.2	And I'm Anthony Ames, aka Nippy, Sarah's husband, and you're listening to a little bit culty.
0:49.5	aka aLBC.
0:51.2	A podcast about what happens when devotion goes to the dark side.
0:54.6	We've been there, and back again, a little about us.
0:57.3	True Story, we met and fell in love in a cult, and then we woke up and got the hell out of dodge.
1:03.1	And the whole thing was captured in the HBO documentary series The Vow, now in its second season.
1:08.4	I also wrote about our experience in my memoir, SCART,
1:11.4	the true story of how I escaped Naxiom, the cult that bound my life.
1:15.2	Look at us, couple of married podcasters who just happened to have a weekly date night.
1:19.8	Where we interview experts and advocates and things like cult awareness and mind control.
1:24.0	Wait, wait, wait, this does not count toward date night bait.
1:26.8	We gotta schedule that that's separate.
	...

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