Islam in American Prisons

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Van Baalen
Keyword(s):  
General Public ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
Black American ◽  
Correctional Staff ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
Conversion To Islam ◽  
History Of ◽  
Sunni Islam ◽  
Black Muslim

This chapter explores the gradual legitimization of the beliefs and practices of Islam in US prisons, analyzing the factors that led to the pronounced shift from “Black Muslim” to Sunni Islam over a fifty-five-year period (mid-1950s‒2010). An understanding of the history of prison Islam offers insights into the motivation of black Americans to embrace Islam and the reasons why correctional staff and the general public are suspicious of incarcerated Muslims. Program accommodations to protect prisoners’ religious rights are described to enhance the understanding of the complexities involved in providing a rich experience of Islam during incarceration and preparing prisoners for entry into the wider community of global Islam upon their release. A brief analysis of interactions between various factions—immigrant, black American, Sunni, Shia, Sufi, Salafi, and Wahhabi clarifies issues related to prison conversion to Islam and to the perceived extremist threat created by the mass incarceration of under-educated and marginalized. Muslim prisoners.

Conclusion

Black Market ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 184-200
Author(s):  
Aaron Carico
Keyword(s):  
Black Americans ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
Great Migration ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Great Migration

The conclusion turns to the trap of the ghetto where Black Americans found themselves caught in the wake of the Great Migration, on the brink of another reformation in U.S. slave racial capitalism. Linking the racial geography of these spaces to the history of slave racial capitalism, it outlines the colonialism inherent in segregation, from zoning laws to slumming to the Bronx “slave markets.” It connects the ghetto to the plantation and to the rise of the prison and mass incarceration, ending with the Watts uprising of 1965 and the call for total abolition.

Archival Amnesty: In Search of Black American Transitional and Restorative Justice

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tonia Sutherland
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Predominantly White ◽  
Restorative Justice ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black American ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
Counter Narratives ◽  
History Of

Archives as memory institutions have a collective mandate to document and preserve a national cultural heritage. Recently, American archives and archivists have come under fire for pervasive homogeneity - for privileging, preserving, and reproducing a history that is predominantly white and further silencing the voices and histories of marginalized peoples and communities. This paper argues that as such, archives participate in a continuing amnesty that prevents transitional and restorative justice for black Americans in the United States. Using the history of lynching in America as a backdrop, this article explores the records and counter-narratives archives need to embrace in order to support truth and reconciliation processes for black Americans in the age of #ArchivesForBlackLives.

scholarly journals Understanding Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Rejection of Hope

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 22-30
Author(s):  
Maanvi Dhillon
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Dream ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Black American ◽  
White Americans ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Work First

Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book Between the World and Me is written as a letter to his son, but serves many roles: a collection of personal experiences as an African American man, a history of black people’s exploitation and oppression in America, and advice for navigating the country and its historical, systematic, expansive and deeply embeddedd racism. Readers and critics have noted the pessimism of the work, as Coates writes pragmatically and coldly with no optimism about the potential to end the racist oppression of black Americans. This essay analyzes Coates’ rejection of hope by parsing through the audiences he addresses and the respective messages underlying his work. First, the essay considers how Coates urges readers to think critically about the hopeful narrative of the American Dream and see how it obscures the racism underlying and determining both white Americans’ economic, political and social successes, as well as the struggles and cyclic obstacles afflicting black American communities. Using literary analysis, the essay argues that Coates’ rebuke of the American dream is meant to be addressed towards white Americans, as they are more susceptible to accepting its tempting and convenient narrative. Coates provides his son and the black American community with a different critique of hope; he shows the futility of maintaining optimism about the achievement of racial equality when that outcome depends on their nation and white peers who demonstrate no interest in ending the racist structures and systems that privilege them. Coates’ argument is clarified in the essay by framing it as a form of literary theorist Lauren Berlant’s conception of cruel optimism. Ultimately, by exploring the nuance in Coates’ pessimistic work, the essay reveals how Coates’ rejection of hope is both an effective message in addressing his various audiences and a justified sentiment, particularly given the high cost of holding on to hope for black Americans.

The Making of the Medieval Middle East

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Tannous
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Religious History ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Conversion To Islam ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Millennium ◽  
Muslim Communities ◽  
The Middle Ages

In the second half of the first millennium CE, the Christian Middle East fractured irreparably into competing churches and Arabs conquered the region, setting in motion a process that would lead to its eventual conversion to Islam. This book argues that key to understanding these dramatic religious transformations are ordinary religious believers, often called “the simple” in late antique and medieval sources. Largely agrarian and illiterate, these Christians outnumbered Muslims well into the era of the Crusades, and yet they have typically been invisible in our understanding of the Middle East's history. What did it mean for Christian communities to break apart over theological disagreements that most people could not understand? How does our view of the rise of Islam change if we take seriously the fact that Muslims remained a demographic minority for much of the Middle Ages? In addressing these and other questions, the book provides a sweeping reinterpretation of the religious history of the medieval Middle East. The book draws on a wealth of Greek, Syriac, and Arabic sources to recast these conquered lands as largely Christian ones whose growing Muslim populations are properly understood as converting away from and in competition with the non-Muslim communities around them.

Perfection Makes Practice

2006 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 98-100
Author(s):  
Muhamad Ali
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Muslim Community ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
Psychological Dimension ◽  
South Sulawesi ◽  
Complex Dimensions ◽  
History Of Religions ◽  
History Of

Studies of Islam in Southeast Asia have sought to better understand its multifacetedand complex dimensions, although one may make a generalizedcategorization of Muslim beliefs and practices based on a fundamental differencein ideologies and strategies, such as cultural and political Islam.Anna M. Gade’s Perfection Makes Practice stresses the cultural aspect ofIndonesian Muslim practices by analyzing the practices of reciting andmemorizing the Qur’an, as well as the annual competition.Muslim engagement with the Qur’an has tended to emphasize the cognitiveover the psychological dimension. Perfection Makes Practice analyzesthe role of emotion in these undertakings through a combination ofapproaches, particularly the history of religions, ethnography, psychology,and anthropology. By investigating Qur’anic practitioners in Makassar,South Sulawesi, during the 1990s, Gade argues that the perfection of theQur’an as a perceived, learned, and performed text has made and remade thepractitioners, as well as other members of the Muslim community, to renewor increase their engagement with the holy text. In this process, she suggests,moods and motivation are crucial to preserving the recited Qur’an and revitalizingthe Muslim community.In chapter 1, Gade begins with a theoretical consideration for her casestudy. Drawing from concepts that emphasize the importance of feeling andemotion in ritual and religious experience, she develops a conceptualizationof this engagement. In chapter 2, Gade explains memorization within thecontext of the self and social relations. She argues that Qur’anic memorizershave a special relationship with its style and structure, as well as with thesocial milieu. Although Qur’anic memorization is a normal practice for mostMuslims, its practitioners have learned how to memorize and recite beautifullysome or all of the Qur’an’s verses, a process that requires emotion ...

The Reformation of Prophecy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. Sujin Pak
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
Word Of God ◽  
Priesthood Of All Believers ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
The People ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
A Site ◽  
Developmental Analysis ◽  
Sacred History

The Reformation of Prophecy presents and supports the case for viewing the prophet and biblical prophecy as a powerful lens by which to illuminate many aspects of the reforming work of the Protestant reformers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It provides a chronological and developmental analysis of the significance of the prophet and biblical prophecy across leading Protestant reformers in articulating a theology of the priesthood of all believers, a biblical model of the pastoral office, a biblical vision of the reform of worship, and biblical processes for discerning right interpretation of Scripture. Through the tool of the prophet and biblical prophecy, the reformers framed their work under, within, and in support of the authority of Scripture—for the true prophet speaks the Word of God alone and calls the people, their worship and their beliefs and practices, back to the Word of God. The book also demonstrates how interpretations and understandings of the prophet and biblical prophecy contributed to the formation and consolidation of distinctive confessional identities, especially around differences in their visions of sacred history, Christological exegesis of Old Testament prophecy, and interpretation of Old Testament metaphors. This book illuminates the significant shifts in the history of Protestant reformers’ engagement with the prophet and biblical prophecy—shifts from these serving as a tool to advance the priesthood of all believers to a tool to clarify and buttress clerical identity and authority to a site of polemical-confessional exchange concerning right interpretations of Scripture.

Rebels, Believers, Survivors

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noel Malcolm
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Religious Conversion ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
Conversion To Islam ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
External Powers ◽  
First Time ◽  
Modern Myth

This book of essays covers a wide range of topics in the history of Albania and Kosovo. Many of the essays illuminate connections between the Albanian lands and external powers and interests, whether political, military, diplomatic or religious. Such topics include the Habsburg invasion of Kosovo in 1689, the manoeuvrings of Britain and France towards the Albanian lands during the Napoleonic Wars, the British interest in those lands in the late nineteenth century, and the Balkan War of 1912. On the religious side, essays examine ‘crypto-Christianity’ in Kosovo during the Ottoman period, the stories of conversion to Islam revealed by Inquisition records, the first theological treatise written in Albanian (1685), and the work of the ‘Apostolic Delegate’ who reformed the Catholic Church in early twentieth-century Albania. Some essays bring to life ordinary individuals hitherto unknown to history: women hauled before the Inquisition, for example, or the author of the first Albanian autobiography. The longest essay, on Ali Pasha, tells for the first time the full story of the role he played in the international politics of the Napoleonic Wars. Some of these studies have been printed before (several in hard-to-find publications, and one only in Albanian), but the greater part of this book appears here for the first time. This is not only a contribution to Albanian and Balkan history it also engages with many broader issues, including religious conversion, methods of enslavement within the Ottoman Empire, and the nature of modern myth-making about national identity.

Atomized urbanism: secrecy and security from the Gulag to the Soviet closed cities

Urban History ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Asif Siddiqi
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Urban Geography ◽  
General Public ◽  
Early History ◽  
Physical Isolation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Camp System ◽  
Spatial Terms ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The City

Abstract This article recovers the early history of the Soviet ‘closed city’, towns that during the Cold War were absent from maps and unknown to the general public due to their involvement in weapons research. I argue that the closed cities echoed and appropriated features of the Stalinist Gulag camp system, principally their adoption of physical isolation and the language of obfuscation. In doing so, I highlight a process called ‘atomized urbanism’ that embodies the tension between the obdurate reality of the city and the goal of the state to obliterate that reality through secrecy. In spatial terms, ‘atomized’ also describes the urban geography of these cities which lacked any kind of organic suburban expansion.

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