“Being one of his children, of course you were born on the property,” Ms. Ummkhayr Abdula Muhammad Mabry tells me on the phone. Her voice is steady and matter of fact about this, almost business-like. Then she says: “These people tried to kill me over the property.”  

Ummkhayr Abdula Muhammad Mabry, goes by Uma York for short, and had gotten in touch following reports that the operators of her father’s compound at 717 Bushwick Avenue were entertaining ideas of selling the property. A story in the New York Post in late August had indicated that the building had fielded a $6 million offer, shortly after posting “For Sale” signs behind and in front of the gates. A more recent headline in trade magazine The Real Deal indicated they were asking for $15 million. 

As far back as 1977, the corner of the street had been registered to Isa Muhammad, one of the many sobriquets taken up by Dwight York, leader of a restlessly enigmatic cult, which goes by a number of names, one of the more prominent of which is “Nuwaubian,” and that once maintained a small real estate empire centered in what was then a far away part of the city and is now modern Bushwick. York had come to the neighborhood by way of Harlem in the late 1960s. Freshly out of serving a three prison sentence related to a charge of statutory raping a thirteen-year-old girl, York had begun “peddling incense, African perfumes, and body oils,” as the Canadian sociologist Susan Palmer puts it. Palmer’s writings on the group, which expands into the monograph The Nuwaubian Nation: Black Spirituality and State Control, are imminently recommendable and detail her attempts to track down the history of a group that appears to alludes definition, slip in and out of history, telling with it the larger story of Brooklyn’s transformation through the late 20th and early 21st century. That York’s teachings largely revolve around what she describes as a “racialist myth of the ‘Canaanites’ whose pale skin was the result of the Curse of Ham,” does not seem to bother Palmer very much. 

“In fact the Nuwaubians were friendly and impeccably courteous. They addressed me as respectfully as ‘sister’ and seemed to regard my presence as a bit of a joke. They evidently found something inappropriate-even silly-in having a white researcher sitting in on their meetings taking notes,” writes Palmer about her journey of writing an account of the group. Some years earlier, she had once told the Montreal Gazette that her own “great grandparents [were] members of a polygamist group of Mormons [who] moved to Canada rather than obey the US. law against polygamy,” something she admits “may be partly responsible for her interest in new religions.” 

Palmer also writes positively of York’s time in Brooklyn: “They managed to rid Bushwick Avenue of drug dealers.” In their years there, somewhat interchangeably, she refers to them as the “Ansaaru Allah” community, another of York’s creations, names that are as diffusive and varied as York’s varying changing monikers, tracing a rough path through the various movements in late 20th century Black spirituality. York had first called them the “Ansaaru Pure Sufis” and then, briefly, just the “Nubians” and then the “Nubian Islamic Hebrews” a year later, per the 1993 Encyclopedia of African American Religions, whose editors attest that “each name change has been accompanied by a modification of the community’s dress and further clarification of its mission and goals.” The Encyclopedia itself bestows York with one of the longest names I’ve seen yet: As Sayyid Al Imaan Isa Al Haahi Al Madhi. 

The history, if seemingly jambled, is nonetheless magnetic. Parts of it, even seemingly abandoned, can be picked up whenever. Uma York, one of York’s many daughters — “my dad has over 100 children,” she tells me in the same straight, matter-of-fact voice —  describes herself, on Instagram, as “100% Nubian.” Her emails to me end with the word “royalty” in the signature line. She has an extensive legacy to pick from; Palmer writes her father had “founded not just one, but an elaborate series of at least seven spiritual movements.” Jacob York, another one of York’s children, had left the group in 1990 and relayed to Palmer a particularly colorful anecdote of York’s work as a generator of post-Malcolm X islamic thought: “He would give books and ideas to his all-girl research team, and they would cobble it all together. He would then look it over, edit it—and it would come out in the next publication.” While most outside observers of York’s work jump to his eventual pivot to belief in aliens and his newfound belief in his own intergalactic origins, I find myself soothed by the way Palmer situates this as the only logical direction his faith could take him, “on a winding journey backwards in time, unpeeling layer after layer of false or incomplete identity, towards…origins as godlike beings, utterly alien and inaccessible to the laws and limitations of the paleman.”

York’s departure from Bushwick was sudden. “They boarded up their mosque, their stores, their school and nine apartment buildings they owned, and moved away,” reads a story in the New York Times headlined “Muslims Leave Bushwick; The Neighbors Ask Why.” While admitting that some were calling York’s ethos a “cult,” the paper largely bemoaned the group’s departure. “They worked hard, they had their morals, they were clean,” a concerned neighbor tells the newspaper. A black and white photograph of what appears to be the main Bushwick Avenue compound, sporting immense minarets behind titanic walls, appears in the paper. Connecting the group’s movement to the real estate market, an Israeli plumber tells the paper that he has already “purchased two buildings along Bushwick Avenue that had been owned by sect members.” 

York had maintained ownership only of the two buildings in the neighborhood, which remain in the group’s possession. In her book, Palmer recounts visiting the “mosque on 717 Bushwick Avenue,” which she calls “a fantasy world, surrounded by black and gold symbols, Arabic script and Egyptian statues…The walls were painted with scenes of muscular black angels flying past planets and alighting on UFOs. Statues of Egyptian gods and man-beasts of gilded paper mache guarded [a] raised platform.” These days, the building remains a dizzying Disneyland of Egyptian imagery. As Palmer puts it, York had traced “the lineage of his people back to the Sumerian and Egyptian civilisations, and even beyond that, to the stars.” 

The move out of Brooklyn, had, more or less, worked to sever the group’s ties to islamic architecture while moving operations to the Georgia countryside. There, York’s group built enormous pyramids and had stylized the group as “the United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors,” an era brilliantly captured by the photographer Anderson Scott in the Oxford American, who writes that “reports surfaced that York was preying on the group’s children.” The photos are haunting, frozen in time in the years after an F.B.I. raid led to York’s arrest, confiscating the land and selling it to a developer. The writer Asher Elbein writes an even lengthier account of York’s time there for the magazine that makes for a withering read. “It is not the sort of thing that’s easily forgotten,” he warns. As does a press release from the Department of Justice following the delivery of a guilty verdict after a three week trial in county court over allegations prosecutors brought that “York molested and sexually abused countless minor aged children within his organization, fourteen of whom testified…at trial.” Following a three-week trial in front of a heavily sequestered jury,  York had been found guilty of six child molestation-related charges, brought through a racketeering charge of running a criminal organization. 

Above the colorful Bushwick Avenue compound a mural reads: “The Republic of Liberia must repatriate counsel general and diplomatic agent Dr. Malakai Z. York Back to Librera !!” Donning a Santa-white beard is a photo of York himself where he appears wearing a fez hat. Both Uma and the current occupants of the compound on Bushwick Avenue are in agreement that her father is being unjustly imprisoned in maximum security prison. 

“My father didn’t have a fair trial, he basically was railroaded and thrown in prison while these people just literally dissected all of our assets and just started stealing all of our assets right in front of our face,” she tells me. The allure of York’s charismatic appeal haunts even Palmer, the Canadian academic who, writing in the faraway year of 2010, decides that “unfortunately, I cannot judge whether Dr. York is guilty or innocent of the charges of child molestation” and that was “however, quite convinced he did not receive a fair trial.” Palmer had authored an even more sympathetic take when she wrote about the trial for a now-defunct periodical put out by Trinity College called Religion In the News, when she had called his conviction “the latest example of official suppression of an unconventional religious group in America.” She describes the case’s key witness as “a diminutive eighteen-year-old known to the Nuwaubians as ‘Habiba the Dwarf’ who had borne two children to York in her early teens.” Palmer writes that she flipped on York after being shown “films on Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate.”

Palmer has less misgivings about allusively ascribing other crimes to York and his various groups over the years; “It is common knowledge that many buildings in the areas in Brooklyn … had mysteriously burned [and] York would subsequently purchase these properties at city auctions,” reads an FBI file she confidently quotes from. York had also been suspected of involvement in the murder of Horace Green, a local small businessman who was shot in broad daylight one morning, on the way to a daycare he operated in Brooklyn after becoming a public opponent of York’s “takeover” of the neighbourhood. Police had investigated one of the members of the security force York’s group operated, who went by the name “Hasim the Warrior,” though never brought charges. 

As is perhaps often the case, the criminal case followed York’s brief era as a figure adjacent to the larger cultural zeitgeist. In Bushwick, he owned a music studio and operated a disco band called Passion, signed to a prominent record label, managed at the time by François Kevorkian, the French DJ, who would make a dancefloor remix of York’s minor hit “Don’t Bring Back Memories.” In a publicity photo, York’s unmistakable face, decades younger, appears in the center, arms folded. He later managed a different band, a girl group called Petite, and released their uncomfortably-named debut Teens in 1986 on his own York’s Records, once headquartered up on Hart Street, a building York operated that he called the “Islamic Hall of Knowledge,” a studio where he held question-and-answer sessions that were open to the public and recorded for his True Light cassette series.“The female version of ‘New Edition,’” reads an ad York bought in Billboard. It is hard not to think of this version of York as a lost, cross-generational symbol of the counterculture ‘60s, part-Berry Gordy, part Charles Manson. Charles Ahearn, director of the popular hip-hop dance movie Wild-Style, would later call York “the dopest disco impresario since Barry White” in Spin magazine. Wearing an ill-fitting white tuxedo, York can be found making an appearance on British television in 1985, singing his solo record “It’s On Me,” his hips gyrating backwards and forwards in front of three female backup singers.  

Much is made, by people distantly following York’s story, of his appearance in a photograph held in a 1990 music video starring a young Jay-Z. It’s a single shot, footage of York’s colorfully-clad followers holding an illustration of York’s piercingly evocative eyes, in a video shot in Bushwick, made in the Brooklyn rapper’s wilderness years before he would emerge, fully-formed, five years later with Reasonable Doubt. It’s a feature with a different Brooklyn rapper, the Jaz, alternately known as Jaz-O, one of Jay’s early mentors and who had come out of the same housing project in Bed-Stuy; the pair had appeared together in another music video, a year earlier, the infamously silly “Hawaiian Sophie.” Jaz had seemingly deeper connections to York’s group, the back of his 1990 album To Your Soul would read: “Thanks to the Ansaarullah Community, Bushwick Avenue, Brooklyn, New York. Peace to all persecuted Nubians, past and present.” Jay himself was partial to the message, as well, rapping “Exciting the mic much to the delight of millions of nubians, and amorites just can’t understand the groove we’re in,” references some would read as coded in York’s overall lingua franca, like the notable Islamic convert Michael Muhammad Knight, who would eventually research York’s group at length in his 2020 academic tome Metaphysical Africa: Truth and Blackness in the Ansaru Allah Community, which also digs lyrics out of an unreleased Nas record where he raps: “I talk like Dr. Malachi York played the sidewalk.”

As Uma York tells it, her father had been prolific. 

“My dad has over 100 children,” she tells me, something that has caused people to make “assumptions.” Jacob York, her father’s “estranged” son who left the church had been the one to report York to local police in Georgia about other ex-cult members he had organized who were interested in bringing the charges against York that would lead to his father’s conviction. He is also said to have a low opinion of his father’s faith. Before turning the elder York in, he says his father had told him “I don’t believe in any of this shit. If I had to dress up like a nun, if I had to be a Jew, I’d do it for this type of money,” a quote circulated by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks York’s history as a “hate group” leader. 

Yet another of York’s sons can be found managing the building on Bushwick Avenue, the 37-year-old Senab York. He had talked to the Post about the group’s efforts to sell the building. “It’s about everything, from extraterrestrials to ancient civilizations to DNA to dark matter… it’s a lot to unpack,” he says about his father’s faith. On the phone, and in court, Uma York repeatedly calls Senab an imposter. “Defendants are not the heir apparent to Isa Muhammad,” her lawsuit charges. It has yet to be answered in court. 

With York’s departure, the group’s leadership has become diffusive, though it remains present on the margins of modern society, persisting cynically and sincerely casting doubt on the official narrative wherever it shows up. In the last decade, they have aggressively painted the compound on Bushwick Avenue to go along with York’s move from Islamic to Egyptian iconography and maintain a bookstore next door, called “All Eyes on Egipt.” In June, the group celebrated the opening of another bookstore in the corner of a strip mall in South Carolina. “Get a book or two and stay for class, there’s so much for you to learn!” reads a post on Instagram. For her own part, Uma York has her own business selling drop-shipped hieroglyphics on a variety of shirts, pants, bucket hats and bikinis online.  

“The reality of it is that the people who are still squatting on the property are the cult members and they don’t belong there,” she says.