Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin was born Hubert G. Brown in Baton Rouge, Louisiana in 1943. In the mid-1960s, under the name H. Rap Brown, he became a civil rights activist. While in prison, he studied the tenets of Islam, changed his name and embraced the new religion in 1971. Today, Imam Al-Amin leads an estimated thirty affiliated communities in the United States and the Caribbean. An officer in several organizations and popular speaker in local and national gatherings, he has published Revolution By the Book: The Rap is Live and Women in Islam.