By Laura McTighe

This is the third in a series of articles that Laura McTighe will be writing for The Revealer over the next year about issues at the intersection of race and religion. She will be writing about incarceration, activism and organizing, reproductive justice, and more, with an eye to questions of history, violence, and justice. 

This month, Laura speaks with Hakim ‘Ali in anticipation of the NYU event, “Making Time: Discipline and Religion in America’s Prisons” on April 10, 2015. More information about this roundtable conversation can be found here.

 

It is shortly after the Fajr morning prayers and snow is falling as big as fists. Hakim’s deep laughter punctuates the steady chug of the steam radiator in the corner, as he launches into another tale of a Philadelphia long since passed. I smile in knowing recognition. Hakim has an unparalleled gift for storytelling. We have been talking for almost an hour.

Colloquially, folks often speak about incarceration as “doing time.” What Hakim and I have been discussing is the idea of “making time.” Can we better understand the everyday work of building geographies of confinement, as well as the complex strategies for transforming our darkest of institutions, if we think about time as “made” rather than “done”? Who makes time in prison? And how do they make it? Hakim knows the world of prisons far better than most: he spent forty years of his life behind bars. “And it is only, ONLY by the grace of Allah that I am sitting here having this conversation with you,” Hakim reminds me, with a sudden somberness. “I am a Black Muslim man, 71 almost 72 years of age, and I understand fully what that means in this day and time, in this country, and in the world.”

Hakim and I met in Philadelphia more than a decade ago. Our connection was one of intention as much as coincidence: in 1978 – the year I was born – he had been transferred to the federal prison in Lewisburg, PA – the town I lived in as a teenager. Over the years, we have built a relationship of closeness and reciprocity, as beloved friends and comrades. Through our work together, I have come to know Hakim as a poet, an educator, a revolutionary, a father, and a confidant. He rarely talks about how he survived the hell of the local, state and federal prisons that held him captive, and I know better than to ask. Those silences in his life story have been built up because of too many small abuses to count, because of great and incomprehensible ones.

But this morning, under the guise of “making time,” with the snow showing no sign of relenting, Hakim began to speak about his conversion to Sunni Islam, his work with the Revolutionary Action Movement, and the Baltimore bank robbery that catapulted him into the caverns of justice in America. The year was 1972. The date was February 23^rd.

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When we got popped, the Baltimore cops told us the folks in Philly were calling a citywide holiday. The “Philly 5” they called us in Baltimore. Of the five, three of us were Sunni Muslim and one of us was Nation of Islam. And the other one, because of his association with us, was sympathetic to Islam, even though he wasn’t Muslim. So Islam was our point of unity as we were doing what we were doing, existing before the trial, and even during the course of the trial in the way that we were referred to, you know.

So one day while we were in the city jail, we were in the yard – something had just happened, a dude had tried to escape earlier – and they had everybody out of the buildings and we were in the yard, with the police around us. I saw this brother walking down the yard, and he had this paper rolled up in his back pocket. And I saw different parts of words – something about Islam, and the some parts of the Arabic… So I approached him, and asked him, “You mind if I look at that?” and he said, “Man, you can have it.” And he gave me the paper. So I opened up the paper, I was reading it, and it was in fact a newsletter coming from this masjid in West Baltimore. It had an address and contact information, so I got together with the other brothers and showed them the paper and we decided to see if we could get some materials sent in for us to read.

Just to be clear: Sunni Islam was not in Maryland. Anything related to Islam was the Nation of Islam, or this little small group of dudes who were Five Percenters. At the start, we didn’t have intentions of establishing anything in the jail. We were just seeing if we could get some materials, something to read, or a contact. But eventually this effort on our part led to us establishing traditional, orthodox Sunni Islam in the Maryland system.

First, we started with the city jail, where we were awaiting trial. Eventually we got somebody to come out. The first visit was a personal visit – the Imam, Ali Akbar, came out and met with one of the people in our group. Then Ali came back again, and we created an opportunity for him to meet not only with ourselves but also with a couple of other brothers that we found out were there and were Sunni Muslim. They had been existing under the radar, you know what I mean? Because the Baltimore jail is transitional, and folks were focusing on their case.

So we got to the point – and I’m really, really, really summarizing this – that we were able to get this brother Ali from the masjid to come in and meet with the Superintendent of Baltimore city jail and we literally got jummah started there. It was the first time that the dude had heard about jummah, it was the first time that Muslims from the community had even entertained the thought of coming into the city jail. And from that, later on down the line, a position was created where Ali got appointed as the community Imam – the representative of Islam for the Baltimore jail.

That was sort of our first political/religious statement, with all the other stuff we were doing prior to coming to Baltimore and getting locked up. We believed that we were in the course of revolutionary action, taking from the government, supporting the people… It was the same sort of concept as what the Black Panther Party was doing, but we had not been building institutions. We mostly just focused on meeting the community’s immediate needs – helping folks with rent, paying their bills, getting food… So this was the first real thing that we literally did in an institution, and to this day what we started still exists.

So that was a real spiritual change for me. Now, I was already a Muslim when I got popped, I had just taken Shahada, I was rolling on the reputation of another Muslim brother in our Philly network, what I saw in him and his character and what led me to want to convert to Islam. But I was not well read. I had not at that point had real – other than knowing what I should be doing – I had not had a spiritual conversation, wasn’t following through on all the tenants of what I should have been following up on… But that experience of getting Islam established in the city jail, and ultimately in the state of Maryland, was a real transitional time period for me as a Muslim.

That beginning that I just shared with you – the other side

of that beginning is that a focus had been placed on us both from the perspective of the community and the prison administration. We had a lot of support from the community, tablighing in the community. Inside the institution, the community started to grow. We were recognized as people you wanted to speak to in case you wanted insight about Islam. We did a lot of unifying, because we found out more about who was actually there. And as a result of our efforts, other people started to come to the forefront – the Ahmadiyya movement, the Five Percenters, the Revolutionary Guard, which was a collective down there… All these different entities started to raise their heads a lot more, because of what we were able to accomplish. And we sort of, like, set the bar for people to get stuff done.

On the other hand, the prison administrators – the guards and the captains – were really upset with us. We had started this momentum, and they were dealing with stuff that they had never dealt with before, you know what I mean? A lot of the guards and captains had been used to leaning on religious institutions to keep control in the jail – getting the chaplain to preach from the pulpit about jail rules like tucking in your shirts, or watching noise while walking by the library… Having Sunni Islam recognized really threw a wrench in the way they’d been used to manipulating religious institutions, you dig? It was also one of the most eye-wakening things that I ever experienced in my entire life – the kind of power that these people have over you when you’re locked up.

So it was this dual thing that was happening. And because of the kind of stuff that was happening on the inside, and this brother Ali getting this kind of position that was brand new in the city of Baltimore, our work started reaching out of the prison and being topics in the community. And Ali started participating in various community groups, representing what was going on in the jail, because he was our voice on the outside. We even helped to get him appointed to a board of community leaders working on policy issues in the city. It was the first time when someone representing the Islamic community was allowed to sit on that board. Ali was a really progressive brother, involved in the community – as opposed to just dealing with Islam as making salat and functioning in the mosque.

And so, you know, making a long story short, he was able to make some contacts with people that were involved with this effort to create a moratorium on prisons being built, not only in Maryland but specifically in Baltimore. At that time, there were some ideas about building more prisons – and the penitentiary was, you know, was right in the heart of the city, right there on Forrest Street, right downtown. The argument was that it was so close to the waterfront that was supposed to be being built and people had different positions about “do we want this atrocity in the middle of something that,” you know, “we’re trying to create a different vibe…” So that whole conversation was taking place. More people was starting to get involved – not only on the prisons, but on the whole political climate surrounding incarceration, you know, and what should be done.

So as this progressed, I became more of a voice. First and foremost, I was the oldest among the five of us. I started gathering a lot of respect from people because of that factor. The wardens on the inside, and the social workers and the religious people, would always ask me different things. And it made me do a lot more reading and a lot more research, and it made me be a lot more conscious of what I should be aware of. And eventually, a couple of things started happening where programs started coming into the city jail and the penitentiary, and different things was happening from both locations. Then I got a visit from this sister representing the black social workers’ network in the city. She wanted to interview somebody on the inside to get some perspective on life and all this kind of stuff, and what did she believe would have changed the direction I was going in and all this kind of sociology-type conversation that she was having, which I didn’t have no problem participating in. But what that eventually did was… the kind of respect and inquires that was being made of me on the inside started getting to these groups that I didn’t even really know about on the outside.

So, making a long story short again, I started getting mail, and would be responding to stuff in my letters. They were asking for my views about stuff. I would send my position or what I thought to these particular organizations. And I found out later on – again, I’m leaping forward a little bit – that there was a mass movement of a multitude of different community organization that was a part of this moratorium in terms of prison construction and developing alternatives to incarceration. They had some leaders in the community involved with this thing, including judges and lawyers. One particular judge incorporated some ideas that came out of this coalition. Any first time offender that came through his courtroom was eligible, no matter whether they had a felony or a misdemeanor, so long as it wasn’t a homicide charge or rape. Community organizations would be present at the trial and they would make recommendations, being aware of the different cases. It was like a referral thing where guys would be sent to one of the organizations that supported this effort and would be assigned to stay there and do certain jobs, fulfilling obligations, whatever the case may be. And if a guy participated in the program, and if he was successful in it, his record would be immediately expunged. He would never go into the system. Never ever go into the system, you dig it? So that was one of the major things that was accomplished as a result of this. And as a result of this, I started getting a lot of play… I think that they wanted me to reap the benefits of it. I became eligible for a whole lot of stuff.

The Superintendent of the Baltimore City Jail at the time – who ultimately became the Head of Corrections for Maryland – was

aware of my activities, and my work. When they started having regular meetings about the alternatives to incarceration work, he offered to hold them at the City Jail. And he created an agreement with the Warden of the Penitentiary, where I got moved to after being sentenced, so I could attend these meetings. And get this… Officers from the city jail would literally, literally come down and officers from the penitentiary would handcuff me and escort me down in these tunnels between the jail and the penitentiary, and right at the middle they would exchange me. They would literally exchange me – had paperwork where one officer would sign me over to the other officers, they would change handcuffs take the penitentiary handcuffs off me, put the city jail handcuffs on me, and then they would escort me into the city jail, take me into the room, take the cuffs off and I would participate in the meeting! You know, I mean, it was unheard of, and it was something that could never be put in the public, because it was completely, completely off the books. I mean, there were a whole lot of things that would be at risk for the Warden of the penitentiary and the Superintendent of the city jail if this stuff had gotten out. So there was a stated trust level from both the officers that were escorting me and the community people that participated. They couldn’t voice this stuff, you know?

So that was a key political education for me, during the course of that period I stayed in Maryland in the penitentiary. It was really, really key to my growth and development, understanding the system and who the players were, what could be done, what the challenges were… I mean, I just got an instant education without trying to get an education. My involvement sort of like put me on the right track as far as my thinking – thinking things through and what the possibilities of things were and are. So that was real deep. And it all started with our work to bring Islam into the Baltimore jail, and with my own work to get deeper into my own spirituality.

There ain’t no doubt in my mind what religion, belief, spiritually should do for people who are incarcerated – not necessarily what it is doing and the way that religious institutions are set up inside these prisons, but what it should do. Even if people are not staunch believers in any religious perspective – not just Muslims, but Christians, orwhatever the case may be – there still should be some measure of spirituality in people’s lives, so that they can make whatever kind of change would be emotionally beneficial for them… so that they can think clearly about whatever next steps they need to take in their life. For any kind of progression to take place, there needs to be something there, so that they can really become cognizant of “what the hell did I do to end up in this place?” And

the majority of the time, religion does that, or some measure of spirituality does that, for people. And that’s what it should do. It’s not necessarily functioning in that way.

The religious institution – and I’m always adding that word “institution” – becomes part of the system, you know. Like how the guards used to get the chaplains to preach about prison rules from the pulpit. They tried to coopt me, too. If something went down in the facility, the guards would come to my cell all respectful, calling me “Imam,” asking me if I would talk to the dudes who got in a fight. I’d do it, because I cared about the dudes and didn’t want them to spend any more time in the hole, but not because the administration asked. I knew exactly what kind of time they were on. In the everyday running of the jail, religion was a measure that the guards and captains used to stop people from being as progressive as they should be. It was a measure that they used to calm progressive activity and movements in the jail. It was their way of quelling any kind of what they would call “subversive” activities that would go against the orderly running of the jail, you know. It was part of the system when it was supposed to be part of people’s souls and spirits.

That was what was so powerful about my time in Baltimore. Here I was, a Muslim dude, growing in my belief in Islam by doing some serious progressive work to stop prisons from being built and to keep people from ever entering in the first place. I wouldn’t have been invited into those meetings if I hadn’t been working in the community and with brothers inside. And I wasn’t there on institutional time. The Superintendent asked me to participate because I had become a respected voice for bettering our community. It’s like we say in Philly: “Changing Ourselves to Change the World, Uniting the Many to Defeat the Few.” That’s what religion was for me when I was in Maryland.

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Join us Friday April 10, 2014 from 3:30-6:30pm for Making Time: Discipline and Religion in America’s Prisons, a conversation with Hakim ‘Ali (Reconstruction, Inc.), Tanya Erzen (University of Puget Sound), Robin McGinty (CUNY), and Angela Zito (NYU), moderated by Laura McTighe (Columbia University).

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Laura McTighe is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Religion at Columbia University. Through her dissertation project, “Born In Flames,” she is working with leading Black feminist organizations in Louisiana to explore how reckoning with the richness of southern Black women’s intellectual and organizing traditions will help us to understand (and do) American religious history differently. Laura comes to her doctoral studies through more than seventeen years of direct work to challenge the punitive climate of criminalization in the United States and support communities’ everyday practices of transformation. Currently, she serves on the boards of Women With A Vision, Inc. in New Orleans, Men & Women In Prison Ministries in Chicago and Reconstruction Inc. in Philadelphia. Laura’s writings have been published in Beyond Walls and Cages: Bridging Immigrant Justice and Anti-Prison Organizing in the United States (2012), the International Journal for Law and Psychiatry (2011), Islam and AIDS: Between Scorn, Pity and Justice (2009), and a variety of community publications.