Dawud Salahuddin

Dawud Salahuddin, sometimes spelled Daoud Salahuddin (also known as Hassan Abdulrahman or Hassan Tantai) is an African-American convert to Islam most famous for his 1980 killing of Ali Akbar Tabatabai, an Iranian dissident and critic of Ayatollah Khomeini, and his exile in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Dawud Salahuddin was born David Theodore Belfield in Roanoke Rapids, NC on November 10, 1950 and grew up in Bay Shore, New York, on Long Island, in a church-going Baptist family of four boys and one girl. According to Salahuddin, as a child the "most damage done" to him was the feeling he had that it was "an indecency, an insufficiency, certainly a shame not to be white." In 1963 he describes himself as having become politicized while...