American Prisons Become Political, Religious Battleground Over Islam

It's Friday on Rikers Island, time for weekly worship for nearly a quarter of the city jail's 14,000 inmates. The men, Muslims, file quietly into a classroom of white cinderblock that serves as their mosque. Incense burns to chase away a sour smell from the hall, as the inmates sit quietly on sheets stamped "Department of Corrections" covering the linoleum floor.

Imam Menelik Muhammad is delivering the day's sermon. As he stands beneath a Quranic prayer on the wall facing Mecca, he urges the prisoners to reform. "You will not be considered a Muslim," he admonishes, "unless people are considered safe from your hands and your tongue."

Across the United States, tens of thousands of Muslims are practicing their faith behind bars. Islam is most likely to win American converts there, according to U.S. Muslim leaders, and the religion has for decades been a regular part of prison culture.

But the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks have brought new scrutiny to Muslim inmates, many of whom are black men focused on surviving incarceration. While prison chaplains of various denominations argue that Islam offers a spiritual path to rehabilitation, others say it has the potential to turn felons into terrorists. The FBI calls prisons "fertile ground for extremists."

The reality is harder to read: Those on opposing sides have such divergent views they seem irreconcilable. Who's right matters not only for national security, but for the development of American Islam itself, which is struggling to be accepted alongside the major faiths in the United States.

Ever since the 2002 arrest of Jose Padilla, a felon and American Muslim convert who authorities say planned a "dirty bomb" radiological attack after he left jail, law enforcement officials, politicians and even a few evangelical leaders have warned that Muslim inmates are ripe for terrorist recruitment.

Sen. Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, has said: "Wahhabi influence is inculcating them with the same kind of militant ideas that drove the 9/11 hijackers to kill thousands of Americans." Wahhabism is a strict form of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia, which was home to 15 of the 19 hijackers.

Chuck Colson, founder of the evangelical Prison Fellowship Ministries and a Nixon administration official, predicted that "radical Islamists will use prisons, packed with angry and resentful men," to avenge Islam.

"Prisons continue to be fertile ground for extremists who exploit both a prisoner's conversion to Islam while still in prison, as well as their socio-economic status and placement in the community upon their release," FBI director Robert Mueller said Feb. 16 to the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee.

It’s Friday on Rikers Island, time for weekly worship for nearly a quarter of the city jail’s 14,000 inmates. The men, Muslims,…

Does anyone think nearly a quarter of New York City residents are Mohammedans? There must be a reason so many Muslims are in the prison at Rikers Island. Could it be Muslims break the law more often than non-Mohammedans?

… American Islam … is struggling to be accepted alongside the major faiths in the United States.

And the American branch of La Cosa Nostra is also struggling for acceptance alongside the major faiths in the United States. If you study history, you will see Mohammedism is much more akin to The Black Hand than it is to a religion. It is little more than an organized criminal activity masquerading as a religion to give it cover to commit murder, rape, pillage, and other crimes against humanity.

Islam is a man-made religion of empowerment through force as its underlying theme. It is no wonder that people who live by force and lawlessness are drawn to its tenets. Christianity is founded upon God's Grace toward the broken spirit of the sinner acknowledging his or her fallen state. To all but a very few in prisons, this is anathema for survival. Islam appeals to survival by force over others under the specious premise that the God of the Universe must have men to do his bidding. Christianity offers the already settle power of the Universe to those who are of broken and contrite spirit. The pride of humankind in a fallen state meshes with the pride of 'doing it for god' as found in Islam (and all other cults), where is the big lie told even in the Garden --man can be as God by doing his own salvation--which draws the prideful to ultimate destruction of the individual spirit. The same lie, the same appeal to human pride, permeates all of the great evils now infesting this age.

It is no accident that Muslims are over-represented with respect to crime -- and terrorism.

Few will openly embrace terrorism and will attempt then to distance themselves by means of semantics. As the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism’s director Boaz Ganor observed, the Arab League’s position neatly exemplifies the mindset. They declare that they are against terrorism, but assert that acts “aimed at ‘liberation and self determination’ are not in the category of terrorism.” Thus, nearly any means can be used to justify the end.

Thus crime and terrorism are permitted if it is deemed [by whom?] to be of Divine Will:

...All is permitted to the Righteous side; none is permitted the other because there can only be one group that is Chosen. The most explicit and voluminous articulation of this point of view was aptly articulated by Egyptian scholar Sayyid Qutb. Executed by Nasser in 1966, Qutb was likely, as observed by the Times of London’s Middle East editor Robert Irwin [among others], to be one of the Founding Fathers of modern Islamism. Citing obscure thirteenth century history as foundation, Qutb and his ideological descendants held that the Koran allowed for no peaceful coexistence with any other way of life – even within Islam. One interpretation of Divine Will led Mullah Omar to be content with creating a single country governed by Shari‘a, while the al Qaeda version would settle for nothing less than “global jihad that will end with all men under direct, unmediated rule of Allah” [presumably through his chosen human intermediaries] (Irwin). In either case, no limits could be allowed for those acting under the Almighty’s direction -- and no tolerance allowed for those who are deemed as not.

Quoting from Hadith 390, the virtual Islamic Library Witness Pioneer notes: “I have been commanded (by Allah) to fight people until they testify that there is no true god except Allah, and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, and perform Salat and pay Zakat. If they do so, they will have protection of their blood and property from me except when justified by Islam, and then account is left to Allah.” This passage is explained as meaning that non-believers who pay tribute may be spared, but goes on to assert that defensive war is not sufficient to be a good Muslim. “The real distinction of Islam lies in its enjoining Muslims to wage war for upholding the truth besides fighting for their own defense.” Any place wherein Islam is not practiced is by definition a place of “darkness, heresy and tyranny” that must be liberated as it is the realm of man-worship. Thus, true “Muslims are bound to fight such evils and finish them by means of Jihad”

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