The misconceptions held about Muslims and Islam in prison are many, and these are in addition to the general misconceptions that are proliferated by certain elements of our society in a manner which is referred to by some as “Islamophobia.” Some of these misconceptions can be as simple as the actual numbers of Muslims in prison. Yet even that simple misconception can feed into a larger and more dangerous misconception which is that prisons are breeding grounds for terrorism and radicalization.
One particular area of focus is that is used a scare tactic is the number of incarcerated Muslims and the rates of conversion to Islam. Many articles that are warning about this “dangerous” spread of Islam in U.S. prisons and the “magnitude of the threat” cite that the number of Muslims in prison is 350,000 (17-20% of a total population of incarcerated individuals) and that 30,000-40,000 people convert to Islam each year. Many of these articles cite the 2003 testimony of Dr. Michael Waller before the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Technology and Homeland Security Senate Committee. A reading of that transcript shows that Dr. Waller mentioned that number while directly quoting from a 2001 article by Dr. Siraj Islam Mufti, Islam in American Prisons. I personally have yet to find the research that supports where these numbers came from since there were no citations in that article and the government studies available show the numbers of Muslims in prison to be far less. The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) own census in 2004 of their 150,000 prisoners show that 9,000 (6%) identified as being Muslim. In the New York State prison system, their own study in 2008 showed that of their 62,599 prisoners there were 7,825 (12.5%) who identified as being Muslim. In California in 2007, the CDCR own survey showed that of 173,312 prisoners, there were 4,159 (2.4%). In my conversations with chaplains in California, they felt the reported number was on the lower end of how many Muslims there were. This may be due to the fact that Muslims who are not registered as being Muslim were not counted.
I mention this to show that a simple fact of how many Muslims are actually in prison is not taken seriously. Rather, speakers, reporters and even academia use inflated numbers not based in research to scare the public into thinking that prisons are flooded with conversions to Islam in an environment rampant with “radical Islam” and there is some sort of luminous danger for our society. Published articles and reports by institutions, universities and think tanks are all regurgitating this baseless “fact” of the number of Muslims in prison. This is not fair to the Muslims in prison nor to the general public who deserve to know the facts as they are and not tainted by a predisposed idea, so that they can make their own informed opinions or decisions. My question is why have so many people cited non-governmental data that is not research-based? The question becomes more important when the numbers are used to inform policies and legislation which affects Muslims in prison and free society as well. The reality is that Islam is growing in prisons and for the majority, it is a factor that actually helps them become better people.
Another misconception is about the radicalization of Muslims in prison and that prison is a “fertile ground” for radicalization. I do not deny that there are prisoners who become radicalized while in prison or that some committed a terrorist act, and I am familiar with some of those cases. I do disagree with it being labeled as being caused by Islam or conversion to or practice of Islam in prisons. In his research on the subject of radicalization in prisons, Dr. Mark S. Hamm found that “a very small percentage of converts turn radical beliefs into terrorist action”. Radicalization is a very complex societal ill that makes itself manifest in all sectors of society, prison included, but Muslims in prison should not be singled out and made to seem as if it is an epidemic (which is what many article do and cite the dubious rates of Muslims in prison). I once asked one of our students in the Federal prison system if he ever heard a prisoner speak out committing terrorist acts and he said, “I have been Muslim in prison over 20 years and I never heard one person make such comments.”
One thing I note about some of the studies on Muslims who are accused of being radicalized in prison is that some of those inmates come to prison with already having a preconceived notion and misinformation about Islam. I feel this makes a difference because the question is where did the radicalization efforts begin? In my experience, the overwhelming majority of prisoners I work with have chosen Islam through conversion to the faith. Of our total student population in Tayba Foundation, only 10% were born Muslims. The majority of our students (70%) have converted while in prison and 20% converted in free society. I find this significant because the majority of our students are coming to Islam and do not have any previous instruction or culture dictating to them what the “true Islam” is. Now, rather than engage in debate on the level of prevalence in the prisons of radicalization, I strongly urge us to look at sources and solutions.
One of the greatest sources of the process of radicalization and misuse of the religion will be a sound Islamic education. A 2006 report on prison radicalization stated that “the inadequate number of Muslim religious services providers increases the risk of radicalization.” In my work educating prisoners on Islam for the last 14 years, I have found time and time again that there is a great deal of lack of access that prisoners have to religious material, particularly a set curriculum of studies, and more importantly, lack of teachers to clarify what they are reading. The Tayba Foundation conducted a survey and found that the number one religious need of Muslims in prison was access to curriculum and teachers. It is for this reason that Tayba Foundation began its program for Islamic education by distance and correspondence and is committed to maintaining this service to Muslim prisoners.
Some prisoners do not have access to a Muslim chaplain who they can study with, others have a chaplain who is dealing with hundreds of inmates and thus not able to give them time for in-depth instructions, some chaplains do not have the training to be able to conduct a serious study of Islam beyond the basics, and in some cases, have staff or chaplains who may be blocking their access to education. A number of times I have had to replace books sent to inmates because chaplains returned the material to us or staff had thrown the student’s books in the garbage. In those cases we do not get involved in the civil rights violations and rather refer them to other organizations who specialize in that area. We merely facilitate religious education by providing the material and instruction and, when needed, replace those materials for our students. One chaplain who returned our material to us and told me that he could shut our distance learning program down if he wanted to. I responded politely that he had no authority to do so and that the inmates’ access to religious education was guaranteed by the Constitution by the First Amendment and further at the state and federal levels, such as the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (“RLUIPA”) passed by Congress in 2000. I will close this paragraph by saying that the majority of chaplains that I have worked with, whether Muslim or representing another faith, are dedicated to facilitate learning and betterment for the prisoners they work with.
Through the power of proper Islamic education, I have seen time and time again how knowledge can prevent any threat of radicalization and actually engender harmony in prisons and even beyond the walls. One of our students who studied Islam seriously even before joining our distance learning program, recounted to me an example of this. He said that when the terrorist attacks of 9/11 occurred, five of six prison yards in one institutions had Muslims who were showing signs of joy and shouting. One of the guards asked this student why that was and he responded that the one yard who did not react in that way had group of Muslims who were studying Islam seriously and teaching others the correct religion of Islam.
In another instance related to me by one of our students, a Jewish prisoner came to the Muslims to seek protection from the White Supremacists. In some prisons, the White Supremacists are especially powerful and many minorities, particularly Jewish prisoners, are at risk of being attacked. I have heard accounts of Jewish inmates tattooing swastikas on themselves to prevent attacks from the White Supremacists. One of my students in prison was approached by a Palestinian inmate who brought the Jewish inmate to the Muslim community for protection. That in and of itself is a story of peace, but it goes further. The Jewish inmate said that he would be willing to pay the “jizya” to the Muslims for protection from the White Supremacists. The “jizya” is a form of payment by non-Muslims to a Muslim government for protection but a system that is not used by Muslim governments today. In any case, this Muslim student told him there was no need for payment and that all he had to do was exercise in public (on the yard) with the Muslims. This would cause the White Supremacists to believe that the Jewish inmate was Muslim and therefore would not attack him for fear of instigated a “war” with Muslims. This is the result of a Muslim inmate knowing his religion properly and preventing the misappropriation of Islamic concepts to be used for improper means.
In the absence of that proper education and guidance, some inmates who choose Islam in prison have influences of what is referred to a “Prison Islam” or “Prislam.” This refers to the idea that some Muslims are practicing the faith with innovations in belief or practice that come out of the prison environment. One major influence that causes “Prislam” is the gang culture which pervades the prisons in the United States. Two aspects of gang culture is the structure of the gang which includes a leader (“shot caller”) and tattoos.
In many prisons that have a Muslim population, one may find that the community appoints a leader to lead the prayers and offer guidance to the community. While some prison institutions do not allow an inmate to act as the official religious leader for other inmates, one survey found that over half do. The fear that institutions have is that the position of religious authority could be abused and taken as a route to act as nothing more than a gang-leader for the Muslim inmates at a particular prison. This is a valid concern that I recognize as I had one of our students complain that their community chose a former gang-leader to be their “amir” only one month after he became Muslim. The fear in this situation is clear. You have someone who just became Muslim and could potentially make decisions that affect the safety or lives of other Muslim, other inmates or even staff. The Muslims who support this “amir” system will then take verses of the Qur’an and Hadith out of context to justify the need for a leader and the obligation of the entire community to pledge allegiance to him (bay’ah) and then obey his every command. Part of our work through Tayba is to shed light on how the religious texts are being misused and abused to perpetuate a false system which sometimes included the implementations of the Islamic penal code (hudud) in a vigilante-type method, which is completely unacceptable. There are times when the Muslim inmates may justify a crime, such as an attack on another prisoner, as being permissible due to the fact that it is a hududimplementation. At the same time, there are institutions who recognize and work with the “appointed Muslim leader” and many times the person is very well-balanced and dedicated to following true Islam and the rules and regulations of the prison. One thing I would suggest to policy makers for prisons is that rather than negate the “Inmate imam” position for fear of it undermining the security of the prison, if those appointed leaders are trained properly, they could facilitate many of the religious needs of the communities they are already currently serving. This has a benefit of ensuring that inmates are receiving proper religious education and practice while in prison and reduces the load on budgets that would be needed to hire outside Imams.
Another example is the prevalence of Muslims getting tattoos while in prison and having those tattoos sometimes incorporate Islamic themes or Arabic calligraphy. While some Muslims simply disregard the Islamic prohibition of tattoos, others justify the practice citing that the Hadith forbidding the practice only spoke of “women who tattoo” and thus men who tattoo are exempt. This interpretation can only be perpetuated when there is a lack of proper Islamic scholarship available to the Muslims in prison. I must stress though, that these examples are to show what happens in isolated incidents due to a lack of knowledge and it is by no means the status quo of Muslims in prison. There are many stories of prisoners being upstanding members of their communities, both inside the prisons and out.
Muslims in prison are at the forefront of a number of programs to help others. A number of major legal precedents for prisoner rights have had Muslim inmates at the forefront. A number of successful inmate-led rehabilitation groups have been founded by Muslims and many Muslims facilitate other successful programs. One of these such programs was co-founded by two Tayba students who then went on to establish it as a non-profit organization after their release and now have a contract for a transitional house with the State of California, an office building given to them rent free by the city the organization is run in, and one of the former prisoners sits on the Human Relations committee of that city. I have heard stories of our students resolving conflicts in the prison that would otherwise turn into full-blown prison “wars.”
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Some of our students, upon release, have gone into starting their own businesses, teaching, non-profit work, and graduate school. They have established families and work with the communities they live in, both the Muslims and non-Muslim communities. The potential that is there is endless and it is a constant reminder to me of the saying of the Prophet Muhammad ṣallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam (peace and blessings of Allāh be upon him) that, “People are like ores, like the ores of gold and silver, the best of them before Islam (jahiliyya) are the best of them in Islam if they gain understanding (fiqh).” Yes, there are people who have lived an age of ignorance, but does that mean we give up on them? Is that the approach that the Prophet Muhammad ṣallallāhu ‘alayhi wa sallam (peace and blessings of Allāh be upon him) took when he made a prayer for the guidance of ‘Umar, a man who worshipped idols, buried his own daughter alive and wanted to kill the Prophet? It was that potential that someone saw in Malcolm Little while he was in prison and aided him on his journey for knowledge. He would later become El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, one of the greatest figures in the spread of Islam in the United States and who helped so many others out of the darkness of ignorance.
I firmly believe in the power of education in dramatically transforming the dynamics of the prisons in the United States today. There are men and women who find themselves with the time and space to learn, and with the proper tools, can achieve great things. For those who will be returning to their communities, they could be equipped with the information, confidence and steadfastness that education provides. Islamic education should also be viewed as a springboard to other forms of education, which we at Tayba always encourage and, when able, support financially. One amazing story is that of Ahmed, which I will close with.
Ahmad called me once to relate his story of learning the prayer times he studied in our FIQH 101 course. It is based on learning the movement of the sun and how to measure the shadows and look at the celestial signs to know when the prayer times of the five daily prayers. He said he never even recognized or thought about the movement of the sun and it’s effect on the shadows. He said after he listened to the lectures on the CD we provided, he went out to measure the shadow at noon for Dhuhr prayer. He said the measurements did not work for him. He went back and listened to the lecture four or five times and then went out the next day to measure the shadow. He said he got the measurement process right and was able to see Dhuhr time entered as the sun passed the meridian. I asked him how it felt to witness that. He said, “I have been Muslim 17 years and it felt to me like the first day I became Muslim.” But the change doesn’t stop there. He said after measuring the shadows and journaling their times, he began looking around at the flora and fauna on the yard and documenting that.
From there he began studying physics, subscribing to astronomy journals and is now assisting Tayba in developing our Introduction to Astronomy course designed for inmates. I told Ahmad that one of the visions I had for the Astronomy course was that the students would move from looking at the confines of their prison and look up to the heavens above them and seek freedom in understanding them. Even before making it a course, Ahmad had come upon that realization just from the initial lessons about the prayer times. I also told him that his track of learning mimicked the track of the Muslim scientists of the past who began studying science to learn their religious obligations such as the prayer times, the Qibla (direction of the Ka’bah), and laws of inheritance which led to advancements in astronomy, spherical trigonometry, algebra among other sciences. Ahmed went from learning the prayer times, to observing nature to learning physics and now teaching others in prison.
