“But They Are Nothing Like Us”: The Politics of Muslim Men in Prison

“They think that they are us, but they are nothing like us.”

An insight or two into the politics of Muslims in prison might be gleaned from unpeeling this short sentence, which was said to me off the cuff by a man I know well and whom in prose I call Baraka. Like all parties in this brief account, Baraka is to be found at Pennsylvania’s State Correctional Institution at Graterford, a maximum-security prison not far from Philadelphia. Starting in 2005, in pursuit of my doctorate, I spent sixteen months doing ethnographic fieldwork in Graterford’s chapel.

So I ask: who are these two theys—the they who are doing the mistaking and the they who are being mistaken for another? And who is us? Let us tackle the first person first.

US IS BARAKA’S OWN Muslim faction. If imperfectly, this group is best designated “the Warith Deen guys” after its one-time affiliation with the defunct Graterford mosque, Masjid Warith Deen Muhammad, which was named after Elijah Muhammad’s son. As is a common profile for African-American Muslims of a certain age, these men grew up in the Nation of Islam (NOI) before converting en masse to Sunni Islam in 1975 at Warith Deen’s behest following Elijah’s death.

Once these men were fearsome. As part of the Nation, they raised consciousness by boldly telling the truth about race in America, and they amassed a paramilitary order in case things should come to that. Meanwhile, as foot soldiers in the NOI’s notorious Temple No. 12—the so-called “Top of the Clock”—which Malcolm himself founded, they ran a good portion of Philly, too, through running numbers, extortion, and eventually drugs. But this history is by now as ancient as Attica, and the men are not far behind. While the Warith Deen guys do attract some new adherents—mostly younger men from the neighborhood with whom they have family ties—the group is disproportionately populated by elderly men serving Life without the possibility of parole. Baraka, who is pushing 60 and has been locked up for going on forty years, is in these respects representative of his crew.
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