Islam In Prison

I tried to pitch to a friend of a friend who does documentaries, an idea to get some cameras in the prison.  The pitch would have only taken five minutes.  I missed the opportunity when I had the chance believing I would speak to him another time.  The brother was talking on his tablet in front of the chapel, and I didn’t want to take up his fifteen-minute phone call because it seemed like they were talking about something that was important.  The pitch was going to be about documenting the Muslims in prison.  Which probably doesn’t sound sexy at first, like maybe not Hollywood pure gold, but maybe the Sundance Festival.  Not as attractive as gangs in prison so probably not what the streets have been asking for.  It’s not something I hear all the You Tube, and social media ex-cons turned content creators, talking about.  We’ve had documentaries of all types of stuff so why not Muslims in prison?

Something like, “Islam in Prison is Anti-Terrorism”.  In a country looking for Islamic boogeymen the title is salacious and intriguing.  This is not the terrorism that most associate Islam with.  People present Islam as a disease when it really is the cure, the same with any organized religion that helps people change their lives.  The terrorism I speak of is home grown street crime.  I first heard this on a recording of Imam Zaid Shakir saying that Islam inside of the prison is stopping home grown terrorism from spreading throughout the United States.  Islam transforms gang members into devout Muslims.  As a black man the only terrorism I have known is from white supremacy and the condition it produced in the black community.  My pitch was going to start off with:

“Brother, we have several Malcom X’s in prison right now across the United States.  I have met about a handful in the state of California alone.  The Muslims are the only ones that have had a tradition in prison going back decades, of reforming young black men, even some Hispanics, and a white boy or two.  I mean anywhere in the United States we function differently than the rest of the prison population.  There is no group like this anywhere in America.  Amongst the blacks, you have the Bloods, Crips, Bay area, IE (Inland Empire), etc., and the Muslims.  There are no Christian or Jewish factions among the blacks, or any other ethnicity in prison, that functions like this.  Unfortunately, through ignorance, or because it is self-serving, we’ve been accused erroneously of being a gang.  However, this is not true.  We don’t allow drugs, or any intoxicant to be used, or sold per Qur’an, no gambling per Qur’an (Surah 5:90-91), and we aren’t making nobody take no fades, and we aren’t making nobody stab anybody.  We have all the war stories that people would hear about gangbanging and what the streets were like in the 70’s, 80’s, and 90‘s, and how these men in prison found Islam and became the most refined persons of character that anyone has ever see.  We have people like that across the United States right now just waiting to be revealed.  Even my cousin who did time in Texas said when he was locked up out there, when it came to the Muslims, they always knew something.”

This might not catch a buzz or be enough to kick off a firestorm on the net, but it’s interesting.  I’ve talked to some of my brothers about the documentary and they like the idea.  Maybe we’re a little bias.

I wanted people to know about the “YA babies” going back decades.  The brothers that been getting locked up since the 70’s and 80’s, Juvenile Hall delinquents, shooting, stabbing, and fighting before puberty.  Guys nobody have heard from because they’ve been locked up behind these walls for so long becoming local urban legends, mythical Loch Ness monsters, sasquatches, and big foots of the hood.  Especially the ones whose memory still lingers in the streets like some type of poltergeist.  The mention of their names makes an image appear of a ghosty figure, hovering over the story teller’s head, and disappearing when the tall tale ends.  Block solders “Jumping off the porch,” starting from ten to twelve years of age, initiated in gangbanging – when gang banging was really “gang banging” in the 80’s – something the OG’s say.

From Juvenile Hall they hit the Youth Authorities where these young men are forced to learn to be gladiators.  Once they get there, it’s do or die.  However, it’s not all by choice.  They didn’t choose to be redlined in the worst neighborhoods and schools, to live in concentrated poverty, and fight for scraps.  Under these conditions sanity escapes disadvantaged youth trying to find a way to have pride in the neighborhoods they were forced to live in.  Warring with some other same beatdown oppressed nobodies, with the same generational curse, who want to see who can be the toughest.  Because the poor man’s sport is beef and the winner gets the scraps. From YA they get out, do something that lands them in prison with a life sentence or several life sentences ranging anywhere from a string of robberies to murder.

I wanted to focus on these brothers.  Not to glorify the streets like most discussions about this lifestyle, but because they are walking miracles.  I have not seen the Hebrew Prophet Moses part the Red Sea, but I have seen true miracles in these brothers, and myself for that matter.  I have seen these men come out of gang violence, PTSD, self-hatred, anti-social delinquency that creates a couture that adds stripes and esteem for punching or shooting someone, former drunkards, fornicators, drug addicts, drug dealers, and pimps; say enough is enough.  When they live in a society where, minus the shooting, these things are not as condemned as they should be.  Where do you see a reformed gang member with hood tattoos of rivals, wacked out because of anti-black self-hatred, know how to read Arabic, know its grammar, and all its verb counts?  Knowing the Alif to the Yaa the 28 characters of the Arabic language (29 if you count the Hamzah).  Knowing its makhraj (articulation point) that ha comes from the halaqa, (the middle of the throat) – which many people tend to make fun of, as it they are clearing the mucus out of their throat to spit – is different from the softer ha that is like our h.  These self-taught men are able to read entire books of Arabic, as long as they have the haraka or the indication of the vowel (diacritical) marks, dhamma, Fattah, kisrah.  A convicted murderer, ex-gang member that knows Prophetic traditions of Al-Bukhari, Ibn Majah, and Muslim that he has memorized by heart, whose eyes fill with water and heart trembles with the mention of Allah.  Brothers who no longer wish to be the thugs they once were and despise their former lifestyle.  Men who don’t even curse.  Brothers whose look of disapproval would put a hardened convict to shame for not coming to Zuhr (Noon) prayer in the chapel.

These are the brothers who pray Salat at least five times a day: standing (qiyyam), reciting the Qur’an in Arabic, bowing (ruku), go back to standing (qiyyam), prostrate their head and nose on the ground (sajda), sitting on their left foot with the right foot erected (Jalsa) – up unto the point they have a dark spot on their forehead from years devoted to this regimen.  I heard of some brothers who just came into Islam rubbing stones on their foreheads just to get that mark.  I believe most people can’t picture a hardened convict, tattoos from head to toe, aspiring to be a devout worshipper to the extent they would mutilate their body for the appearance of piety.

Surah 25:70 says to “those who repent and believe and do righteous deeds, Allah will change their sins into good deeds, and Allah is Oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful”.  This is something the State is not offering.  Likewise, the unforgiving society we live in, when our personal information is one click away on Google, and people will bring up something that happened over twenty years ago, despite who the person is today, so that way they don’t have to focus on their own issues.  Or give Surah 41:30 to a poor soul which reads, “Verily, those who say: ‘Our Lord is Allah’, and then they stand firm, on them, the angels will descend (saying) ‘Fear not, nor grieve!  But receive the glad tidings of Paradise which you have been promised!’”  Words like that make a reformed thug like me teary-eyed.  Picture a man isolated, away from the soft touch of a woman, whose hardened body has been punched on, stabbed, shot, tasered, taken away from his family, with no redemption to be found, hearing these words.  Angels singing and asking forgiveness in a heavenly choir, all that good stuff.  There are no words that powerful to fix this broken human being.

Frequently when I talk to people who have seen one too many hood movies or listen to one too many trap songs, they assume that gang culture, street, and prison violence are all I want to talk about or hear.  Or they pretend that they know what goes on in here.  It reminds me of when I was a wannabe on the streets trying to play gangster, now I’m just listening to what I used to sound like.  Far too many people don’t want to say that they don’t know something; especially when they fancy themselves a gangster on the streets.  Most of them don’t know anything about an SNY yard or the darker side of the criminal justice system that is directly tied to the 13^th Amendment and slavery.  The irony in the misconceptions about what goes on in here is that Islam is eradicating American-made terrorists that this country’s own racism and poverty has created, by reforming one Infant killer Crip to Hakim, one soul at a time.  Islam in prison is the biggest anti-terrorist program in the United States.  Think deeply about the life of the average criminal; they are shut out of mainstream economic opportunities; they’re deprived of good education; they have no political power; so, they find power in the guns the country’s black market readily provided.  The gangs and cliques they join who were once supposed to protect the community, now behave as their oppressors.  The people in the community suffer from police terrorism so they can’t trust them.  And when they’re victimized by the gang members and the cliques are told “don’t snitch”.  People will soon recognize ISLAM IN PRISON IS ANTI-TERRORISM.  This country’s government cannot arrest its way out of this problem that they themselves fuel and they definitely don’t want to lessen these communities’ problems, that they benefit from, in a real way.

“We hated the color of our skin.”  The first time I saw Spike Lee’s X (1992), the words of Malcolm X when I was a pre-teen hit me.  Like when you’re too young to know what the blues and love is about but somehow something inside of you knows its familiarity.  My whole life I was being told I was an enigma, an aberration of society, a dark secret.  People treated me differently based on this superficial thing called color.  Needless to say, when I saw Denzel’s portrayal of Malcom it planted a seed in dark Earth.  “Jesus was not a pale face,” as he battled the white prison Chaplin who was telling him to worship at the feet of a white Jesus, a white man like himself.  “The Bible said he had hair like wool and feet like brass,” he jousted the Chaplin.  This resonated with me so deeply.  I had not the slightest clue of what it meant to be religious or to believe in God.  I did not grow up in a religious household, maybe just a bedtime prayer on our knees with mom, as a kid, but I swore right then and there that if I was going to be any religion, I was going to be Muslim.  Granted my gravitation to this religion, at least at first, was based on the trauma and the rejection I faced because of complexion.  When I was a kid, I don’t remember going to church except for funerals.  However, I distinctly remember seeing “Jesus is Lord” and pictures of white Jesus.  There were two things wrong with this image; first, I’m not a sucka, you can’t take an extremely dark young brother like I am, that had at least a little sense of self-dignity, and tell him this is who you worship, nah.  Second, I know man, seen man all my life, and man is not God.

The latter issue was closer to the true meaning of what it means to be Muslim.  Laa ilaha ill-allah (there is no other god but Allah).  Every time I see the scene where Malcolm arrives in Mecca for Hajj I am overcome with an emotional and transcendent experience as my sensory nerves become alive as if I’m there.  I had this same intense feeling when I read Malcolm’s autobiography.  I felt I was experiencing what he was feeling.  Another part of the film that gets me is when Malcolm is meeting Elijah Muhammad for the first time.  He calls Malcolm an ex-pimp and junkie, while Malcolm’s eyes fill with tears, as mine do too.  He tells him to show them your way is better, don’t condemn their dirty glass, show them your glass is clean.  His redemption was mine and I felt it.  When he prayed next to white Muslims in Mecca who he called brother, I looked at the white people I grew up around and the ones that were my friends.  They weren’t devils.  I could say I never believed that.

Let us put it in context though.  We know the history and we know what black folks were facing back then.  Malcolm, like me, went to a school that was predominantly white.  Malcolm was told by his teacher that since he was a nigger he shouldn’t aspire to be anything more than a carpenter.  This had a severely negative effect on him and me.  Because, like him, I had a negative experience going to school having to deal with racism.  I remember being in the 6^th grade in a predominantly white class and having to read Huckleberry Finn.  My teacher Ms. Richardson was a heavyset old white woman with glasses, a head full of white curls, and always had on a dress she looked like she slept in the night before.  She did not miss a chance to say nigger reading that book.  I didn’t know what to do.  I went home, told my mom, and she spoke to Ms. Richardson.  She had the nerve to tell my mother with an air of superiority, as if matter of fact, “This was part of our history.”  I don’t think I read a book again until I landed in prison.

After a while a person gets tired of being told lies about who they are.  I now know my history didn’t start with black, or in America, but in Africa, whatever Africa was called before Africa.  This is probably why I felt so much emotion when I saw Malcolm going abroad in the film.  It was like I was vicariously living through him.  It felt like we were returning home.  When Malcolm left America for Africa and the Middle East, seeing the film’s reenactment we merged as one.  We had the taint of racism purged from us while praying next to all those different ethnicities where wealth and poverty didn’t matter, and nobody’s color or features did either.

As I jog my memory I remember Joe.  In the 4^th grade I was walking out of class and this white kid I had never seen before, Joe, sticks his foot out to play like he was going to trip me.  I fired on him and punched him right in the mouth instantly, without a word.  Later at school, him and a few kids chased me but couldn’t catch me.  Joe and I lived in the same neighborhood.  His dad showed up at my house after school.  He told me to go over to his house where me and his son played video games.  Joe and I were cool after that.  I would go to his house for barbeques from time to time.  Growing up in a diverse community I have plenty of stories like this.

Malcolm returned from Mecca al-Hajj Malik Shabazz cleared from his resentment prompted by racism he endured since early childhood.  Many people forget that.  It was true Islam that had done that.  Racism does not play a part in true Islam.  There are no pictures of Prophet Muhammad like people have done with Jesus and other prophets.  And blacks are not excluded from being instrumental in the spread of Islam.  Most people do not know the first maudlin (caller of prayer) 1400 years ago was an Ethiopian named Bilal.  It was Islam that freed Malcolm from the trauma of American racism.  He was willing to work with anyone when he came back from overseas and that’s what made him dangerous.  The prospect of a man of color, a “black messiah”, same as King and Hampton, trying to bring the oppressed people of the world together in America and abroad.  When he held separatist ideas, he could be used to fit a narrative of black supremacy.  His call to take the United States to the UN to bring charges against them for the ill-treatment of the African American was monumental and a buried truth.  I believe that’s why he was assassinated.

In “Reviving the Islamic Spirit 4^th Convention:  What Would Malcolm Say?”  Imam Zaid Shakir said that from the time Malcolm was locked up, which was twelve years, until he passed, he was never with another woman but Betty Shabazz.  It was Islam that produced this type of man, mythical in today’s world but possible.  A reformed criminal, a former addict and user of women, gets out, stays chaste, gets married, and maintains his vows.

Before I came to prison, I believed the Nation of Islam was the same Islam I was seeing practiced around the world.  But it’s not.  Elijah Muhammad formerly Elijah Poole, born in America, is not the Muhammad, son of Abdullah, born over 1400 years ago in Arabia.  The Muhammad from 1400 years ago said Laa ilaha ill-allah.  In true Islam God was not black or white.  God was not man at all, contrary to what the Elijah Muhammad taught.  Albeit, if it was not for this reactionary movement to oppose white supremacy, I would not have found out about true Islam.  Tens of thousands of wretched souls like myself, going back to the 60’s and 70’s, up until this day have been reformed by these brothers on the fringes with the bowties, bean pies, and Final calls nevertheless.  Like Jojo who has been locked up for over 50 years.  I heard him giving a speech for the Toastmasters.  He said when he first came down in ’71, he was 18, maybe 20, years old when he arrived in San Quentin.  He said some Muslim came up to him and asked him did he have a job in the prison and a General Educational Development Diploma.  Jojo told him no.  The Muslim said he’d be right back and walked off.  He came back with two other Muslims.  They told him to come with them and that he was getting a job.  They got him a job and gave him a GED book and continuously checked on him to make sure he was studying.  He made it seem like they left him no choice.  This was in the 70’s.  The Nation of Islam may have been a reactionary movement, but it was the only medicine strong enough that could change these jaded convicts made bitter from a country that had taught them and their people to hate themselves.  They were our baby steps to true Islam. 

Prior to Islam I really did hate myself.  I bought into the lie of thinking I had to be either an athlete, thug, or a drug dealer.  I completely conformed to those ideas.  I championed tropes, I idolized people involved in the street life.  So much so, that even when I wasn’t around them, I reveled in the idea that I was being watched from the heavens from those in a make-believe thug mansion, looking down and smiling at me when I was acting like a fool.  I would think to myself this is real.  No matter how tore up I was, or strung out, or how bad my reality looked, it was a surreal experience living this lifestyle.  After a couple of brushes with death, I made a promise that if God got me out of all this, I would turn my life over the Him.

At the age of 20 I started saying I was Muslim.  It was already in me since I had seen that Malcolm X movie.  I remember when I got my first Qur’an.  I was in a half-way house called “Men of Valor” in East Oakland.  It was at this half-way house, that was connected to Acts Gospel Church, that this little 114-chapter book found me in the heart of the ghetto.  I was strung out coming back from a service.  I walked into the Kwik corner store.  Typically, it was run by southeast Asians, but today there was a brother, maybe as dark as me, behind the counter in a Jalabiya.  Somehow, he knew.  He knew I wanted to be a Muslim.  He knew what I needed.  He saw right through the glazed eyes and colorless pitch-black face that sought so desperately to maintain his promise to God.  He saw right through me like almost all my encounters with these elusive Muslim mystics I had met recently.  When I walked to the counter to buy whatever stoner paraphernalia I was trying to get, without judging me incorrectly, his gaze pierced through my wretched heart.  He tells me, “You look like you can use this”.  He pulls out a Qur’an.  He told me for 1400 years this book has not changed.  When he handed me the book, it seemed like it came straight from the sky with the brightest beam of light coming down from the heavens outlining its trim.  I thought not of a thug mansion or some urban legend’s approving gaze.  The same gaze and head nod I would get driving around with Kayla, the blonde in my passenger seat that OG’s felt was the black man’s redemption for our years of oppression.  I thought of nothing.  No drugs, no one’s approval.  I only saw the book.  I still see it all black with decorative gold vines.  The Holy Qur’an. 

I didn’t read the Qur’an or the Bible until I came to prison.  When I was arrested, I had a Gideon’s Bible, and that Qur’an I got from the Kwik on E14 left lying somewhere around in my Ford Fusion.  When I first got locked up, I was in the hole for over a year after being roughed up by the deputies.  I didn’t have an angle at the TV in our pod so I tried to grab any book I could read.  I saw the strangest behavior in the hole, a real insane asylum, so I really didn’t talk to anyone for a while.  I mostly talked to myself, having full conversations, like I was at my very own stand up and I was the only one in the audience.  So, it was okay for this comedian to pull up a chair and interact with his guest. The hole will do that to you.  With my 6^th grade reading comprehension I started with a couple urbans, which I wasn’t feeling because I was already locked up, so why did I need to hear about more gangsterism.  I remember being stuck on one page for like thirty minutes.  I had to read over and over again.  I couldn’t stay focused.  I picked up the Bible.  I would write these hieroglyphics on the walls thinking I was on a divine spiritual trip.

Me and this brother I knew from the streets, who once tried to rob me at gun point, got to talking for a little bit during pod time.  In the hole each inmate comes out by themselves on their pod time, while everyone else is locked in their single cell.  If they sign a paper to say it’s cool to program with someone else, then they can go out to pod time with another person.  He tried to get me to go out with him, but I didn’t trust him like that.  I actually did get set up to fight a white boy by a deputy who decided to pop my door when he was out of his cell. Something interesting happened again with this book.  I told the brother I knew from the streets, the one who tried to rob me, I was Muslim, and he told me he was too.  I don’t know if he was keeping it real, but he ended up giving me his Qur’an.  Sometimes I think about the miracle of the Qur’an.  I heard stories about Nation brothers almost having to go to war with the correctional officers and the institution over them not letting them keep one.  I was told they had to smuggle its pages around the prison.  I really feel as if it’s not supposed to be here.  In the ghetto, the suburbs, in rural towns, in the wilderness, in America, in the jailhouse, in a nation of Christian founders where most claim to be Christian.  But it found its way to me again and through the most unlikely person, in the most unlikely place.

I was an avid reader by now. I had read large parts of the Old Testament, Stephen King, James Patterson, and books up to 1000 pages long, which were the best ones.  I began to finally open up to a couple people.  I told this drop-out Northerner that I was Muslim too and he told me he was also Muslim.  In the hole general populati0n and protective custody are all in the same pod but in their cells safe from each other except when I had to squabble.  He wrote me the Surah Al-Fatihah (opening chapter) of the Qur’an in transliteration not the actual Arabic that I read now, but it worked.  Maliki yawmi deen iyyaki na’budu ws iyyaka nas’te’een ih dinas – siratal- mas’taqeem siratal-ladhina an amta alayheem ghayril maghdhubi alayheem wa la dhaaaaleen.  (In the Name of Allah, The Most Gracious, The Most Merciful.  All praises by to Allah, The Most Gracious, The Most Merciful, Master of the Day of Judgement.  You alone we worship, You alone we pray to for help, guide us towards the straight path, the straight path of those who you have blessed, not of those who deserve your wrath, nor of those who been led astray.)

This was mysticism.  Before I recited these words, in my heart I was certain God existed.  When I read the Surah Al-Fatihah in English it was just profound words, a supplication explaining who God is, and a prayer of guidance and protection.  When I recited it in the transliterated Arabic a wave washed over my heart.  The high of all highs.  It felt as if the coolest water of Zam Zam that I had sipped was working its way down my chest and into my heart.  This was not a mental thing, it was physical.  It started as a stream then it covered my whole chest. It opened me up.  Imam Abu Hanifa said about the experience of euphoria in Salat, that if the kings knew of this feeling, they would send their armies with their swords to take it away.  I was healed.  My sickness and pain went away.  Here I was in Martinez County Jail and my adversary, my captors, and my oppressors, had provided me with what I needed to be free from this cursed thugg’n and gangsterism.  The validation that I had been seeking in the streets I had found with this book washing over my heart.  It was a clean slate.  I had a new identity learning to read its Arabic.  Knowing its clear and allegorical revelations, it taught me the interpretation of events giving me rank.  Islam in prison is not built off prison politics, it is built off of the sincere belief and love for God, and not even the thugs and killers, who politic and vie for power, can fake that.

My first celly when I got to San Quentin was Ansar el-Muhammad a Nation of Islam brother.  Before I came to prison, I thought I just needed a Qur’an and a prayer rug to be Muslim, pray five times a day, and that was it.  I didn’t know I couldn’t drink or smoke or curse; or that I was supposed to lower my gaze and not look at any woman other than my wife, so on and so forth.  I remember I was on the BART with a Coogi button up shirt, jeans, some Jordans, prayer rug folded over my shoulder, and a black camo Atlanta Falcons hat cocked to the side, as high as a kite, and this woman asks me if I was a Muslim; and I said yea.  I didn’t think I had to actually read the Qur’an or that I had to pronounce my faith in front of Muslim witnesses and then be held accountable to God and my community.  I thought it was perfectly okay to just bow my head to the ground five times a day and talk to God no matter my condition.

In the cell with Ansar el-Muhammad I found out several new revelations.  One being, I was definitely not Nation of Islam; that it was only their brand of Islam that said black men were Gods, and that the white man was the devil.  Five Percenters say they are Gods, but they are not Muslim.  Another was I found out that some of the Nation brothers didn’t make Salat or do Wudu.  I say some not all because some of them conform to Orthodox Islam.  Wudu is the process of purification before Salat and a prerequisite.  It consists of washing the face, the arms up to the elbow, the top of the head, and the feet.  He didn’t do any of these things, but he at least taught me what he knew, and he was very well read.  Overall, he was a deceit brother.  He looked out for me.  He gave me my name, Musa, which means Moses in Arabic, or Moshe in Hebrew, meaning “he who was drawn from water”.  

I was learning how to really pray as Muslims do for the first time.  Standing, bowing, prostrating, just as any servant does in front of a king, I did for my Lord-the God of Abraham.  Falling on my face like he did, and those before him, and after him, all those thousands of years ago in an ancient brotherhood and sisterhood of believers.  Me, a convict, thrown away from society.  The Prophet Muhammad has said that which separates the Muslim from the people who do not believe is the Salat.  I never have been able to leave my Salat since I learned it.  I plan to take it with me for the rest of my life.

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore”.  This is a quote from a poem by Emma Lazarus titled The New Colossus, on the interior wall of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty.  Many immigrants are greeted with that quote when they come to America.  A Prophetic tradition in Islam states that those who emigrate from a land of ignorance are those who refrain from sin and misdeeds.  Those who emigrate from their former lives behind these walls are met with the same spirit of that quote.  They are tired of the lying and stealing, cheating, dealing, gang banging and shooting.  Best way I can give insight into these men’s minds prior to being rescued from self-destruction is in one of my favorite scenes from “Juice” when Bishop, played by Tupac, tells Q (Omar Epps) in a crude fashion his outlook on life.

“You know what, last time you said that I was kind of tripp’n right?  But now you’re right, I am crazy.  And you know what else, I don’t give a f***, I don’t give a f*** about you, I don’t give a f*** about Steel, I don’t give a f*** about Raheem either, I don’t give a f*** about myself.  Look I ain’t s***, and you less of a man than me, so as soon as I figure you ain’t gone be s*** (Pow!) so be it.”

The scene was powerful.  For me it sums up the young black youth that is tired of being stepped on, tired of having no power, no hope, self-esteem, and no future.  When you take a brother like that, a young Bishop, and he gets behind these walls he can get further implicated in the life, or at the least, meet a Muslim.  If he doesn’t become a Muslim, he may get just close enough to smell the fragrance.  It’s a mystic spirit in here that penetrates the mind and the heart acting as a solvent to the disease they have been infected with from their society and their local neighborhoods.  Tupac rapped about this when he said, “Oh you Muslim now no more dope game/heard you might be coming home just got bail/want to go to the mosque don’t want to chase tail/It seems I lost my little homey he is a changed man/hit the pen and now no sinning is the game plan.”

If these young black men did what the institution wanted them to, sure they might by the grace of God get rehabilitated and live a life of mediocracy, but will they call out the injustice done to them by this country?  Black people have suffered centuries of oppression and disenfranchisement, genocide – cultural and actual, have had their leaders killed off, have borne witness to the drugs being spread in their communities facilitated by the American Government, and at the same time been labeled criminals at birth.  Do people really believe the prison’s program of rehabilitation will allow for another Malcolm or King?  Do you think it will give the people what they need?  It is not going to create strong men but make them docile.  The institution wants submission, they want you to say, “Sorry, uh massa,” learn your causative factors, your triggers, the fact you got your butt whipped, made you prone to violence, admit to everything you are accused of in your transcripts whether you did it or not, and maybe they’ll let you go.  Then they release this same brother into a society that tells him to drink casually and it’s okay to smoke weed, and eye-gawk at women, in a place where people sleep around like it’s nothing, and it’s all legal.  This type of mediocracy is where I myself would have been if it was not for Islam and me coming to prison.  The worst thing an oppressor could do is send a society’s worst, “the poster child” they would use to make tough on crime policy, “Lock em up and throw away the key,” policy, and he comes in here and meets a Muslim;  “that will help him rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism”, as King says in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail, “to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood”.

I have seen former Crips and Bloods and others who use to set trip and kill one another become cellmates and pray shoulder to shoulder in Jumu’ah Friday Salat.  Nothing else has the power to do that.  Nothing else behind these walls that I’ve seen.  I have seen this formula many times.  High Desert was the toughest prison I had been to.  It was like ground zero for the toughest and meanest guys in the State of California.  I was in High Desert when Pelican Bay SHU kick-outs, the shot callers were coming there after being validated and spending decades in the SHU because the institution thought they were too dangerous to be in the general population. These guys had just got released from the SHU after a hunger strike to stop the cruel and unusual punishment of keeping someone in the hole indefinitely.  In this element, given all these “do or die” circumstances, this was also ground zero for mining souls of the broken.  Me and my celly Muhammad Yusuf Ali, whose real name was Brian, met a Christian brother still tied to the Diego Bloods.  At this time, I had been locked up for about three or four years and had been accustomed to fasting and doing more than my five obligatory Salats.  And Muhammad was a true ascetic.  He fasted every day.  He would eat and drink at night and refrain from drinking and eating until the following night, a 24 hour fast.  There is prohibition from doing this in Islam, but Muhammad was on some other stuff.  He didn’t watch TV and worked out every day.  He was chiseled, 5’11, and 220 lbs., with zero fat, and his only aspiration was to be a scholar.

Muhammad was well-versed in the English translation of the Qur’an and the Bible, so when he met this brother struggling with his Christian faith and being a Damu, he opened his eyes.  He was shocked to know we believed in Jesus and professed to believe in the same God.  He had never seen this type of commitment to God.  He had never been told about a religion outside of Christianity that worshipped the God of Abraham.  The praying and the fasting, the exhorting others to marry and be chaste; a religion in prison that didn’t allow brothers to straddle the fence between the streets and belief; and that could protect its own.  These men, the Muslims, from the same background as him did not curse or use intoxicants.  When we met him, he was “Boolin” (the “C” in coolin’ was replaced with a “B” which is a typical thing Crips and Bloods do with certain words) and he was now named Shahid (witness).

I met Shahid again four years later in Folsom State Prison.  We had made it through one of the toughest prisons in California.  Not because of our physical toughness but because of the discipline our religion provided.  I remember me and him were fasting in Ramadhan playing basketball in over 100-degree weather.  This discipline, first his Christian faith, with his Islam, and mine from Islam, prevented us from getting hooked on drugs to cope with the oppression, or spiraling into some other destructive behavior because of it.  It saved our lives.  It is very easy to get hooked on drugs in prison.  When the state is telling you 25 years to life some people just want to escape reality.  So, you smoke a little weed, do a little black (heroin), do a little crystal, get in debt and your homies are stabbing you or beating you half to death.  Far too many in prison meet terrible ends from dope and gambling debts.  But we made it.  Shahid was serious about his faith.  He was getting out soon and we would often discuss how we wanted to make a change in our communities.  How could we be activists and show people the beauty of Islam?  He had this funny analogy about Aladdin on his magic carpet, that as long as he could stay on his Salat everything would come together like magic.  

We kept in contact when he got out.  It wasn’t long before he told me that he was involved in a grassroots organization ran by Muslims called Pillars that were doing great things in the community and helping people in the criminal justice system.  He sent me a video of him marching to the capitol of California with his group and other protesters.  He sent me videos of him and his organization providing food for the immigrant brothers and sisters on the other side of the border.  The most beautiful thing of all is that he had met a woman.  She had begun working with the same organization. He said when they first met, he asked her where can he make this Salat.  She had never seen someone pray on time consistently and be so dedicated to something they believed in.  She had the same Christian background as a lot of African Americans, so it was a complete shock.  She ended up taking her shahada repeating the words, “La ilah ill-allah Muhammadar Rasulullah” (there is no other god but Allah and Muhammad is his messenger), and they got married.  Shahid told me that when he would see his former rivals, brothers he would have been shooting at and they shooting at him, they would come up to him greeting him as “Akh”, meaning brother in Arabic, telling him they have been seeing him around, and they like what he is doing for his community.  

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore”.  Christianity, NA, AA, and group therapies have changed many lives but who will save the thugs?  Behind these walls Islam has had a tradition of not only reforming black men but also black women in the United States dating back almost a century with Malcolm X, specifically al-Hajj Malik Shabazz.  I can only speak from my own experience as a Muslim man that is locked up, but we hear stories of the Muslim sisters holding it down in the women’s facilities.  Islam takes the brothers and sisters that have been counted out as irredeemable and polishes them up to be something.  These men and women coming out of prison have met judgement, have been purged and purified from their past sins, and have earned their freedom with grace. These are the men and women that will return to their communities and be making a real change.  As for the ones like me, that are left behind and are still locked up?  We’ll be here to continue the tradition.