Salahuddin Mustafa Muhammad

Salahuddin Mustafa Muhammad is an American imam .¹ He is the imam of the Masjid al-Ikhlas mosque in Newburgh, New York . He is also the Muslim chaplain of Bard College and has been a chaplain by the New York State Department of Corrections since 1985.² Muhammad holds the B.A. in the social sciences from SUNY New Paltz, and a Masters of Professional Studies degree in theology and counseling from the New York Theological Seminary. Muhammad told a journalist that he was attracted to Islam as a fatherless 13-year-old growing up in Harlem. He became a student of Clarence 13X , founder of the Nation of Gods and Earths . Muhammad is known for his work with prison inmates. Muhammad drew national attention when four ex-convicts who had been attending his mosque were arrested in the 2009 New York City bomb plot , a plan, stopped by the FBI, to shoot down military planes at an Air National Guard base in Newburgh and blow up two synagogues in the Riverdale neighborhood of New York City. The congregants had discussed the fact that a man who regularly attended the mosque appeared to be recruiting members for violent Jihad (this man turned out to be the FBI's planted informant.) However, no member of the large congregation made any attempt to report the man they believed to be a jihadi to the authorities. The imam, calling the failure on his part and the part of the congregation to report the suspicious talk of jihad by the man who turned out to be an informant a "mistake", justified the failure to report by saying “But how are we going to report the government agent to the government?” It is established that Muhammad did not know that the man was an informant until after the would-be terrorists were arrested.³