As Ta-Ha Masjid mosque celebrates 50 years in Roosevelt, imam recalls how volunteer patrols chased drug dealers off streets

It was the height of the 1980s crack cocaine epidemic in neighborhoods throughout Long Island. One day in Roosevelt, a 10-year-old boy playing near a mosque was caught in the crossfire between drug dealers. A bullet grazed his head, and blood started gushing out.

For Imam Isa Abdul Kareem, the leader of the mosque, it was enough.

“I just pulled the brothers in the mosque and I said, ‘Look, man, we gotta run these guys off the corner, man. This stuff has gotta stop,’” Kareem recalled.

And so they did. Kareem helped organize mostly unarmed volunteer patrols that roamed the streets at night to pressure the dealers to give up their trade. Some police officials feared they would turn into vigilantes. But many residents welcomed them as they cleaned up drug-ridden neighborhoods.

The Ta-Ha Masjid mosque, which Kareem founded in 1973 and still leads, is marking its 50th anniversary. It is among the oldest mosques on Long Island.

The Ta-Ha Masjid mosque is also unusual because it is made up mainly of African Americans. Most mosques on Long Island are comprised mainly of immigrants or the children of immigrants from the Middle East, Southeast Asia and other regions with large Muslim populations.

Anti-drug dealer patrols 

Kareem and his mosque members attracted widespread publicity for their patrols. The campaign worked so well that he got calls from numerous communities, including Hempstead and Freeport, to help there too.

“It got so far out of control that it just forced us, it put us in a position where the police weren’t doing the job, so we had to go out there and we had to do it,” he said. “There were shootouts. You couldn’t step outside on the corner. You couldn’t let your kids go outside without ducking bullets.”

The work itself was dangerous. He attracted threats as well as attempted bribes from drug dealers. He recalled once receiving a fat envelope filled with cash that the dealers were offering if he would call off the patrols.

He sent the envelope back.

So the dealers tried another approach: they warned him that someone might "blow my turban off my head" if the patrols continued, he told Newsday in 1988.

The mosque is located in a modest house on Nassau Road in Roosevelt, but it has had an outsized impact.

Habeeb Ahmed, a leader of the Islamic Center of Long Island in Westbury, founded in the early 1980s, said Ta-Ha’s patrols were “a dangerous thing."

"In the middle of the night you are out there, so you have to be very smart also to do those things. You need to protect yourself," he said. But “it is a good idea because that improves the quality of the community who is living around there.”

Kareem grew up in New York City, where he was a high school basketball star. One year he played at legendary all-Black Laurinburg Institute in North Carolina. The private prep school was a hot destination for promising basketball players.

Converts to Islam

He grew up Catholic and considered becoming a priest, but after he returned to New York and moved to Long Island he converted to Islam. He was heavily influenced by Malcolm X and H. Rap Brown, a well-known civil rights militant in the 1960s who also became a Muslim.

Brown regularly visited the mosque in Roosevelt, Kareem said, and the two remain close.  Kareem said he played a role in Brown’s conversion to Islam.

Kareem said he was drawn to the leaders’ commitment to social justice. Brown was a one-time leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), while Malcolm X — who initially help found mosques for the Nation of Islam — later embraced racial unity after a pilgrimage to Mecca, Kareem said. 

Kareem’s brand of Islam was “orthodox,” meaning he and his followers did not drink alcohol, smoke, or swear.

So the drug dealing in their neighborhood was particularly offensive. “We were trying to do clean living, and we were surrounded by this drug den,” he recalled.  

Besides the threats he received, the campaign faced other challenges. Drug dealing was an attractive option for many young people in poor neighborhoods, officials said.

Billy McCall, then-deputy director of the Nassau County Economic Opportunity Commission, told Newsday in 1988 that drug dealers were role models for some Black youths who "see them riding in a BMW with a pocket full of money. They don't know that it is short-lived, that they are either arrested or end up dead."

The patrols remained mostly peaceful, though at times turned tense. A dealer once pointed a gun at the volunteers, and fired twice into the air as they restrained — and beat — him into submission until police arrived, according to authorities. Many of the mosque's volunteers were trained in the martial arts.

Mosque has other activities

The patrols were not the mosque's only activity. It also ran a small all-day school for children, and provided food, clothing and sometimes shelter for the needy. Some mosque members served on the local school board.

“This mosque has always been a refuge,” said Jamillah Abdul-Kareem, who heads community affairs for the mosque.

A chaplain, she also leads the mosque’s ministry in the Nassau County Jail, where hundreds of inmates have converted to Islam, she said.

One former gang member, Abdul Malik, 45, said he was a leader of the Bloods in Roosevelt, but the mosque — and Islam — transformed his life.

"It kept me off the streets," he said. "It kept me from gangbanging again."

Today, Isa Kareem is preparing to turn over leadership of the mosque and a licensed private security firm he runs to his two eldest sons. The firm grew out of the mosque’s patrol work, and gets hired by companies and schools. One of their main focuses now is responding to active shooters, he said.

“Active shooters is becoming like the same problem that the drugs did during our time going back into the 80s,” he said. “It’s becoming epidemic.”