Abdullah Malik Ka’bah

Abdullah Malik Ka’bah, born Jeff Fort in Aberdeen, Mississippi in 1947, founded the Black P. Stones street organization in Chicagos Woodlawn neighborhood in the early 1960s and converted it during the 1970s into a Moorish Science Temple-aligned formation he renamed El Rukn (the cornerstone). His public political profile included receiving — controversially — a federal anti-poverty grant in 1968 from the Office of Economic Opportunity for community development in Woodlawn, for which he was later prosecuted on embezzlement charges and served five years in federal prison.

In 1986, federal prosecutors charged Ka’bah and four other El Rukn members with conspiring to commit acts of terrorism in the United States in exchange for $2.5 million from the government of Libya, on the basis of FBI undercover recordings of meetings in which Ka’bah and others discussed the offer with an undercover agent posing as a Libyan intelligence officer. The defense argued the entire scheme was an FBI sting and that El Rukn never had the means or intent to carry out attacks. Convicted in 1987 in U.S. District Court in Chicago, Ka’bah was sentenced to 80 years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine. He has been held at the United States Penitentiary, Administrative Maximum Facility (ADX Florence) in Colorado since the late 1990s under the most restrictive Special Administrative Measures imposed on any U.S. federal prisoner. The Jericho Movement lists him as a Muslim political prisoner.

Jeff Fort (Abdullah Malik Ka'bah) founded the Chicago street organization the Black P. Stone Nation, later the El Rukn. In 1987 he was convicted of conspiring with the Libyan government to carry out terrorist acts in the U.S. in exchange for payment, and of ordering a murder; he has been held under extreme isolation at ADX Florence.