When I became a Muslim in the summer of 1997, my first experience of Ramadan was an exciting one. Where I was housed, Muslims were exhilarated that the holy month of Ramadan had arrived. All day long greetings of “Ramadan Mubarak” (Ramadan is blessed) and “Ramadan Karim” (Ramadan is generous) could be heard.
Being a new Muslim, I had yet to understand why everyone was excited about Ramadan. Why were so many incarcerated men filled with so much joy and jubilation about depriving themselves of food and drink during the longest days and shortest nights in the hottest time of the year?
Then I attended my first evening service in the chapel where the community elders taught Quranic studies and led prayer classes for those who didn’t know how to pray or correctly recite the Quran.
From time to time, the imam, or the Muslim chaplain, would stop in to drop off prayer oils, dhikr beads, kufis, prayer rugs and books. The service concluded with stories from the life of the prophets, fast-breaking, and congregational prayer. The gathering was always peaceful, and we never had a problem — not even from the guards who were always courteous and respectful toward Islam and the Muslims back then.
Then 9/11 happened, and all those things went away. Ramadan changed. The imams changed. The entire corrections deparment changed in the way they treated Muslim inmates, our Jummah Friday services and especially our Ramadan.
Prison guards immediately became hostile, and they began to scrutinize us and block our services. The imams grew distant and withdrew their help from us. They stopped working for us. The lavish banquets we used to have on Eid got replaced by bland, sugar-free cake with no icing and cold water.
For decades, incarcerated Muslims had been a privileged group, and now that privilege was stripped away. I fear that, by the time the next Ramadan rolls around, there will be nothing to look forward to — no evening services, no congregational prayer or fast-breaking and nothing for Eid but disrespect.
A lot has changed in the last 30 years. The point of Ramadan is to please Allah and earn his mercy in this life and the hereafter, but the effects of all this change weigh heavily in our hearts and minds as we contemplate how to do our duty to Allah and meet these challenges in our diminished state, a shell of its former self.
Still, we trudge onward. Never daunted, always determined, full of light, hope and faith until the help of Allah comes. Until then, Ramadan Mubarak!
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Here are our ground rules:
- You must credit Prison Journalism Project. In the byline, we prefer “[Author Name], Prison Journalism Project.” At the top of the text of your story, please include a line that says: “This story was originally published by Prison Journalism Project” and include a link to the article.
- No republishing of photographs, illustrations or graphics without specific permission. Please contact inquiries@prisonjournalismproject.org.
- No editing the content, including the headline, except to reflect changes in time, location and editorial style. For example, changing, “today” to “last week,” or San Quentin to San Quentin, California. You can also make minor revisions for style or headline size, and you can trim stories for space. You must also retain all original hyperlinks, including links to the Prison Journalism Project newsletters.
- No translation of our stories into another language without specific permission. Please contact inquiries@prisonjournalismproject.org.
- No selling ads against our stories, but you can publish it on a page with ads that you’ve already sold.
- No reselling or syndicating our stories, including on platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. You also can’t republish our work automatically or all at once. Please select them individually.
- No scraping our website or using our stories to populate websites designed to improve search rankings or gain revenue from network-based advertisements.
- Any site our stories appear on must have a prominent and effective way to contact you.
- If we send you a request to remove our story, you must do so immediately.
- If you share republished stories on social media, please tag Prison Journalism Project. We have official accounts on Twitter (@prisonjourn), Facebook (@prisonjournalism), Instagram (@prisonjournalism) and Linked In.
- Let us know when you share the story. Send us a note, so we can keep track.
How Ramadan Celebrations in Prison Changed Before and After 9/11
