Roughly half of the content creators on social media platform TikTok are under the age of 28. It’s just one reason why the popularity of Army Colonel Khallid Shabazz, who has some 43,000 followers on the social media platform, is so surprising.
Most TikTok users hadn’t even been born when Shabazz joined the military 28 years ago and are of a generation with few ties to military service — some 71 percent of young Americans between 17 and 24 are thought to be ineligible to serve due to health or other issues, according to a recent report.
Shabazz’s TikTok account includes a mix of his weightlifting exploits peppered with Quranic and biblical messages. Aphorisms abound. “If your ship doesn’t come in, swim out to meet it” appears to be one of his favorites. As a chaplain, Shabazz is used to handing out nuggets of advice and wisdom to troubled soldiers — the sort of counsel a younger, more troubled Shabazz could have benefitted from.
Not long after converting to Islam — facing discrimination from other soldiers, disappointment from his Lutheran family and with more than one citation for insubordination on his record — Shabazz was ready to quit the military.
But a chance encounter with a Christian army chaplain not only convinced him to stay in the military but to pursue chaplaincy himself.
“Honestly, it was like a revelation from God,” Shabazz told the Army News Service. “When it hit my ears, I knew that was what I was going to do in life. It was incredible.”
Nearly three decades later, with his 2018 promotion to colonel, Shabazz is the highest-ranking Muslim chaplain in the U.S. Military. He serves as command chaplain for U.S. Army Central, the three-star command responsible for land operations in the Middle East, according to Army Times.
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As a child, Shabazz was molested by a family friend — an experience, he said, that put him in an emotional tailspin and left him an angry young man. He spent 8th grade in special education. He failed 9th grade and 12th grade.
After completing summer school, he enrolled at Jarvis Christian College in Texas, a historically Black school affiliated with the Disciples of Christ. There he played on the basketball team and studied with the goal of becoming a minister. But he fell in with the wrong crowd, he has said, began drinking and partying and often found himself in violent altercations. It was during one of these drunken brawls that he was assaulted, beaten with a shovel and shot in the back.
He survived thanks to a medical evacuation but decided to table his studies. He went back to Louisiana, his home state. The only job he could find was as a janitor at K-mart. With few options, like many young men before him, Shabazz joined the military.
It was there he first read “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” also absorbing the movie starring Denzel Washington when it was released in 1992.
“I never considered myself a smart person, and I found a lot to inspire me in his story; Malcolm X had an eighth-grade education but educated himself by reading the dictionary,” said Shabazz, “I hadn’t seen a strong African-American male like that in my community. I wanted to be educated and to stand for something bigger than myself. So I decided to become like Malcolm and even took the last name Shabazz in imitation of him.”
But his conversion made him the focus of discrimination in the military. It was a lot to handle for a young soldier in the 1990s, and he fell into old habits. He faced disciplinary action for insubordination. He contemplated suicide.
It then he met the Christian chaplain.
“I was getting ready to deploy, possibly to war, and I was crying, and I saw the chaplain, and I said to myself, ‘If there is a God, please don’t have the chaplain come over and talk to me,’” Shabazz recalled. “But God had other plans.”
