Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Sam.
[00:00:30] Speaker B: Hey everyone. Assalamu alaikum. I'm Eunice Mirza and welcome to the Islamic Mary and a Common Word podcast. A Common Word podcast focuses on Islam and inter religious studies, is inspired by the chronic verse 364 which calls the people of the book to a common word, and the Common Word initiative held in 2007 in Amman, Jordan. It interviews scholars, activists and practitioners in the realm of bridge building, peace studies and social justice.
Today I speak with Wala Qusay regarding her recent book When Only God can the Faith of Muslim Political Prisoners. Co written with Asim Qureshi and published by Pluto Press in April 2024, it examines how the body and soul of Muslim prisoners become sites of religious contestation between themselves and the carceral regimes in the context of the global war on terror. Drawing on ethnographic accounts of released political prisoners, primarily detained in Egypt and Guantanamo Bay, this research shows the way spatial confinement and exercise of control over bodies and souls in prison can generate a shift in the spiritual lives of the prisoners, their subjectivities and modes of resistance. I was always fascinated as a young boy with prisons. In high school I read the autobiography of Malcolm X and part of his transformation and conversion story happens in prison. As I got older and went to grad school and I became interested in the scholar Ibn Taymiyyah and he famously went to prison six times and died in jail. And most recently I've been writing on biblical and chronic figures and prison is prominent in the story of Joseph or Yusuf, where he goes to prison, finds himself falsely accused, and then eventually becomes the master of the land and the head of the storehouses. Even prophetic figures like Maryam, Mary and the Prophet Muhammad are initially in isolation before the moment of revelation occurs. Maryam goes to a trunk of a palm tree and is by herself where Muhammad was in the cave of Hira and then heard the voices of Jibril. Here is my interview with Willa Kusay. Hey everyone, Assalamu alaikum. Welcome to the Islamic Mary and the A Common Word podcast. So for today, I'm very fortunate to have an interview with Dr. Wala Al Qusay and this interview will be discussing her new book, When Only God Can See the Faith of Muslim Political Prisoners. So welcome to the show.
[00:02:59] Speaker A: Thank you so much for having me.
[00:03:02] Speaker B: So please, could you introduce yourself? Specifically, can you speak about your spiritual biography? How did it lead you to your academic profile?
[00:03:11] Speaker A: Thank you so much, Sam. Alaikum to everyone.
I guess spiritual biography is an interesting and cool way to put it, but yeah, I I think those things kind of inadvertently went hand in hand with one another.
So I grew up, and I can imagine a lot of people, a lot of young people going through the events that we are going, experiencing right now will have the same sort of muddled experiences.
But I mean, I grew up remembering the first bombs that were dropped on Iraq and trying to make sense of that. Being surrounded with a particular religious discourse in my family and then going off to university and experiencing that my version of Islam, or the vision of Islam that I grew up with, is just one discourse amongst many, many, many discourses and sort of having to navigate that and being so committed. And I guess this comes from my upbringing to not just taking things as they are, but really having to be convinced by a particular version of Islam or a particular argument.
So I'm Egyptian born, but I didn't grow up in Egypt. I grew up all over, actually. I went to 10 schools growing up. So we really traveled around a lot. My father is an academic as well.
He was in between institutions growing up. So we really lived everywhere.
And he worked on Islamic jurisprudence, Islamic law and political science.
His mentors were women, Dr. Nadia Mustafa, Dr. Muna Abu Fadl. And so I grew up around these really strong female figures.
But I was acutely aware that there was a particular narrative that I wasn't always convinced by within sort of my immediate environment.
And so when I was 19 at SOAS, a good friend of mine who was one of the students of Nur Keller, introduced me to Rihla.
And that's where I started thinking about spiritual retreats. And at the same time, the revolution in Egypt was on its second year and there was a lot of military violence. And so I was living between these two worlds, one of immense, immense political violence where my friends were facing bullets and a particular narrative of Islam that seemed to be more deeply rooted.
[00:06:05] Speaker B: And.
[00:06:06] Speaker A: And so I had to navigate these two worldviews and these two discourses, and I wasn't convinced by either. And that's sort of what started my sort of intellectual and spiritual journey or sort of where I wanted to kind of search. And so when I went on to do my PhD, it was partly to really unravel and understand the experiences me and the people around me had gone through in Rahim and sort of understand how to navigate that within the particular circumstances that were going on.
And it had to do with the relationship between the space and politics, but also it had to do with the relationship between my own sort of understanding or my own spiritual journey and the spiritual journeys of the people I was in Rihla with and the way they navigated life outside of that particular space. So it really started off there, but there was so much that was going on on the outside that there were so many little pieces of the puzzle I had to sort of think through in my own sort of spiritual and intellectual journey.
[00:07:32] Speaker B: That's fascinating. I definitely see that in your work. This connection between religion and politics, faith and spirituality, and the political realities.
So that. That sounds. That makes a lot of sense to see how you were navigating between meeting with teachers and Sufi sheikhs, but also looking at the world around you and seeing what was going on. Egypt with the revolution, as well as the war in Iraq. So could you speak about your recent book, When Only God Can See the Faith of Muslim Political Prisoners?
How does it connect with your previous book, Neo Traditionalism and Islam in the West, Orthodoxy, Spirituality and Politics? And what is the current book's basic premise and argument?
[00:08:14] Speaker A: So, yeah, I mean, when you see both books, they seem to have come from different worlds, right? One is about neo traditionalist shaykhs and a kind of political argument for reviving a narrative within the tradition that promotes a sense of stability, political quietness versus a kind of theology of a carceral theology, in a sense, how how prisoners navigate their theological worldviews or the constraints that they have within. Within that particular context. But there are a few things that kind of continue from this book to that book. I think what was always quite interesting to me on a sort of macro level, how different modalities of state violence, whether it's direct and in your face, forms of state violence, or more symbolic but inherent forms of state violence inform religious production and religious subjectivities.
So in the context of neo Traditionalism, you have people escaping all forms of constraints, whether they're political or personal, and how the political and the personal kind of intersect, a kind of spatial retreat from all of that. And then within the second book, When Only God Can See, you can see the state engaging in more direct and less symbolic forms of violence. But there are kind of different ways you can kind of see how the state engages in the disciplining of Muslim bodies and Muslim subjectivities. And the second thing that was really fascinating to me in both books is sort of how space informs religious subjectivities, how the form of spatial retreat, how spatial seclusion informs how Muslims understand their religious practices, their religious beliefs, and all of these things.
So, yeah, within the second book, When Only God Can See, I think I tried to do something that was a Continuation of what I did in my neo traditionalism book, Apologies, which is perhaps to really center the voices of the people.
So in both books you find that the subjects within.
Within these spaces, really speaking about their spiritual journeys, their spiritual struggles, their understandings, and their. The way that they conceive of fiqh within a certain space.
So that was something that was really, really central to me is how we can sort of foreground the voices of the people within these particular spaces when only God can see does not really provide a singular coherent argument.
But what it does is that it shows that there is complexity within the carceral experience.
So I'll give you one example. Usually when we think about the Odyssey or the question of suffering, there are several arguments that come out within a Muslim context.
There's the argument that Islam doesn't really navigate or does not really have or deal with the questions of suffering in the same way that Christianity really has to grapple with these issues. Islam has a clear and cut understanding of redemption and God's action in a way that is perhaps not clear within Christian theology. That's something a lot of shaykhs, usually that's their response to the question of theodicy.
But in the book, when I asked prisoners or former prisoners about their question of suffering and how they conceived of it, you really see that the lived reality informs how people conceive and deal with these texts in a much more living way, rather than just plain answers that could perhaps be found in books of theology, even though books of theology definitely do matter, and I'm not saying that they don't, but there is a direct and kind of lived engagement with these texts. And that's sort of what the book tries to do. It tries to show what we could perhaps think is a clear and cut answer to a lot of the questions or a lot of the issues that are dealt with or could be brought about within fiqh manuals, within Quranic interpretations, within books of Aqeedah.
And we see the prisoners grapple with them, sometimes reject them at certain points, but come to make peace with them at certain other points.
And this is something that I could perhaps talk about later is usually when we talk about prison theology, especially within the Muslim context in academic settings, we have two archetypes that come out.
We have the Sayyid Qutb archetype and we have the Malcolm X archetype. The Sayyid Qutb archetype in academic literature. And I'm not saying that this is the valid way of looking at it. But within academic literature, it shows how violence can cause violent retribution and violence and subversive ideology and pathology. So if you torture prisoners, they'll come up with really twisted ways of seeing world and theology. And that will inherently cause radicalization and violence. So that's how say, the Sayyid Qut case study is usually presented in academic literature. The Malcolm X archetype is seen in academic literature as a story of sort of finding oneself a brief moment of radicalization through the Nation of Islam and a kind of redemptive Islam that really loves everybody and accepts everybody, but has a tinge of justice that still remains right.
And even though you can kind of put pick apart these narratives and see which, which threads are truthful and which threads are sort of disciplined to fit within this, within a wider academic narrative on what is good Islam versus bad Islam, what is liberatory Islam and what is oppressive Islam.
What a look into carceral theology can really show us is that prison is such a productive space and the state really tries to discipline Muslim and even non Muslim subjectivities, but it doesn't create one or two archetypes. A world is produced within this encounter. And so, like I had written this article about liberation theology and the issues that perhaps cursorial theology can ask liberation Muslim liberation theologians.
And one of the arguments posited by some Muslim liberation theologians is that we need to read liberation within the Quran in order to produce a liberationist text. But what the prisoners show us is that in fact, no, the Quran is something to be grappled with. It's something to be not understood for a while. It's something to be explored for within its own terms. And then things can be produced as a result. You, you can't go in with the expectation that the Quran will be one way or another in order for liberation to be. And so even this conception of liberation then takes on so many different meanings.
And so this complexity within sort of carceral theology is what I was trying, or what I and also were trying to posit throughout our work on carceral theology, on prison narrative narratives.
Islam is not one thing, it's something that is grappled with and it sort, it becomes a kind of living organism and it continues to produce.
[00:17:31] Speaker B: Wow, that's, that's a great point. And I think I found that too when I was reading When Only God Can See that the voices of the prisoners were very, were very involved and highlighted and you could feel their hopes and dreams and, and pain and suffering. And you're right, I think in my own reading of theodicy and Islamic tradition, we often go to some of the great theologians like Ibn Taymiyyah or Ghazali, but we don't always hear from the everyday, normal person on the ground, and especially we don't hear from prisoners. So thanks for making that more clear. So could you now walk us through the book? What are the various chapters, sections? How did you put this together?
And then what was your central conclusion?
[00:18:21] Speaker A: So the way that awesome and I wanted to sort of start the book is go through a kind of life cycle of detention and explore the many sites of incarceration.
Initially, when we started thinking about the book, it was like a few interesting issues came up for us on in our own separate works. He was working in Guantanamo, I was working in Egypt. And we were sharing different questions that came up, particularly about Fuq and how different sites of incarceration produce different rulings, different practices, different understandings, or even bodily performances. But when we really started to dig a bit deeper and ask questions directly to prisoners, what became really abundantly clear for both of us is that you can't really separate the fiqh question from the question of why practice to begin with? Why. Why continue these bodily performances? Why continue doing Islam all in prison?
And the. The easy answer is a lot of these prisoners are practicing believing people, and they will continue to be practicing and believing people.
But practice and belief are a choice, and that's a choice people continue to make even when it's difficult.
So within the life cycle of detention, we had to really start from the moment of custody or capture to pinpoint the trauma that then really like, shapes or begins the whole experience of incarceration. That moment of trauma becomes really, really defining for many people.
For some they throw themselves into prayer, and for others, they can't remember a word of a single dua, a single thing that they. They can think of.
I remember interviewing Dr. Ulal Qaradawi, the daughter of Sheikh Yusuf Al Qaradawi, about her incarceration, and she just said it blankly. I couldn't remember a single dua. I tried to remember. I couldn't do it. There was nothing. My mind was erased. So moments of trauma can kind of lead people to that point of like, not being incapacitated in that way. Liberation from that incap. Incapacitation is a kind of reclaiming yourself, reclaiming yourself within that particular space.
And so the moment of capture becomes a way of outlining the trauma, but also outlining this, the spatial constraints in which the performances either become Difficult, or people have to contend with practices within these spatial constraints. And then we go into the fiqh of it all, particularly within the second chapter where we talk about the prayer of prisoners and we outline the different thigh questions that come up. Some of them are questions that you could potentially imagine, like how do we pray when we.
When we don't have access to water, or when we don't even have access to Tayamum?
What happens then?
What about the spatial constraints? So the actual of it all?
And then when the third chapter we. We call it the Ummah of prisoners. And I think Guantanam was an interesting case where they called their study circles Jamat Yusuf.
And so the story of, say, that Yousef or Joseph becomes super central to this communal making.
But again, community is fraught because the prison, the prison authorities will always be super aware of the power community holds. And so it will continuously need to break that sense of solidarity in order to control the prison population.
And so that becomes a super essential question. And so you do have the issue of solitary confinement that goes into the question of community and communal Islam.
And this is always a story that I will tell. Like it's one of the things that I found super powerful, and it's something that I found in the case of Egypt and Guantanamo, but within also other prison contexts that I've interviewed people in but don't write in this particular book.
So in cases where people want to pray communally and they're put in solitary cells, what you often find is that the prisoner is using sound in order to organize themselves in communal prayer.
So in many cases, the prisoners will try to talk to each other through the walls in order to stand in a particular way in order to create a sense of communal prayer. And sometimes people do that in Jummah prayers, where there's a lot of debate as to whether the prisoner needs to pray Jummah prayers or not.
And then there are people who say that this is not a valid way of praying. So this is. This becomes a very, very important sort of way. People organize where they stand.
They try to create a straight line as best as they can through the power of sound through the walls and try to pray communally.
The fourth chapter is Belief Crisis and the Quran. And this deals directly with the issue of the odyssey, which becomes a very, very central question.
And the Quran becomes super central to the question of the odyssey because the Quran becomes a living text where the prisoners converse with and try to navigate their tribulation through their questioning of the Quran and their engagement with the Quran, and with the knowledge that the physical copy of the Quran is not always available to prisoners. And so there are different ways prisoners try to keep their connection with the Quran alive, even when they do not have physical or banned or are banned from keeping physical copies of the Quran.
The fifth chapter, which is something that, again, Asim and I found to be very interesting, and we found a ton of commonalities between the Egyptian case and the Guantanamo case. But then when we talk to also other prisoners or former prisoners or children of prisoners from different places, this becomes a really, like, big theme within their incarceration narratives is the importance of ethereal beliefs, especially the importance of dreams within the prisons. And this is again where the story of Sayyidina Yusuf or Prophet Joseph becomes super central, where he was a dream interpreter in prison. And so there is an understanding that dreams are something that is divinely gifted to the prison population or to the prisoner for many reasons. It could be premonition that God is trying to tell them something, or it's a way that they feel that they're connected outside and they're humanized in the sense that this isn't the only reality. The prison reality is not only reality that they live in.
So prison. Sorry. So dreams really serves a myriad of, like, spiritual functions.
Djinn and black magic is an interesting one.
It's also more fraught because there are a lot of things that prisoners will tell you they know to be true. But there are a lot of other things that prisoners will tell you were not true, but were believed to be true by the prison population. Or sometimes the prison authorities tried to pretend that certain things were haunted in order to sort of control the different beliefs of prisoners. Indeed, like the authorities in Guantanamo try to simulate black magic and possessions in order to terrify prisoners. And some people believed it, some people didn't.
Similarly, something like that also happened in Egypt, where the prison authorities tried to pretend that the prison was haunted. But then there are other stories that are that kind of make you think so. One of the stories that came up within the question of Jinn and possession is one of the prison complexes was built on a desert site.
And it's widely believed that the Jinn inhabit deserts.
And so there was a story within that one of my interlocutors had mentioned was that the Jinn within the prison were trying to drive the prisoners away.
That there was a kind of moment of humanity where he said, they didn't know that we couldn't leave.
They thought we were taking over their homes. But we, we were Forced here, we couldn't leave. And so that was a moment that I felt was really kind of powerful to me.
And the last two chapters were about torture and resistance.
The torture chapter was really tough for me to write in my interviews. I tried to avoid asking people directly about the questions of torture. Even though this was all over my interviews. People talked about torture a lot.
And you can tell a lot about the.
The experiences of prisoners through what they choose to talk about and what they hint at. But whenever people hinted at torture, I wouldn't go and kind of probe them into answering more questions because I didn't see that it was necessary to re. Traumatize them.
So for me, the majority of what I wrote about in terms of torture came from reports that were already out there just because I didn't want to have to ask people about their experiences with torture.
And the last thing, faith and resistance.
We talked a lot about hunger strikes. I have another article which was just dedicated to the question of hunger strikes and the Fiqhi debates regarding hunger strikes and especially in the prison context.
And then we looked at resistance strategies. I think Guantanamo had a really fascinating sort of debate as to whether they would opt for hunger strike or different times of resistance, types of resistance.
A lot of them actually adapted some of the strategies from Ireland, where, you know, the funny thing is they threw their own feces at the guards. Not something that came straight from Ireland. So people were.
Had that debate as to whether or not it was important for, or whether we should hurt ourselves by putting ourselves through hunger or we should use our bodies less and use something else as a kind of active form of resistance in a way.
[00:31:07] Speaker B: Great. Yeah. And I, I found the book really comprehensive and as you mentioned, everything from torture to resistance to mystical experiences, relationship with the Quran.
And that was a funny point in the book about the feces and how they. Some became very skilled actually of shooting, shooting at the guards and, and the small acts of resistance and build up over time and maybe a source of empowerment for the, for the prisoners. So I'm really interested in these two sites of Guantanamo and Egypt. And arguably someone can say you could write one book about the Egyptian prisons and another about Guantanamo. But I was fascinated at how you connected both of these experiences and locations and what was similar and different between those two and why even put them in the same book.
[00:32:01] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that.
So whenever you talk to a former prisoner from Guantanamo, it seems to me the question that always preoccupies their mind. And you can see that from Omar's introduction in the book, which I, I find that forward between Omar and Leila to be really, really just like, very touching.
But the question that preoccupies them is the question of how do you sort of make sense of a Muslim sort of betraying you in that way?
And so, because a lot of the people that were imprisoned in Guantanamo had to navigate that through the fact that they were sold by Muslims to the Americans, right? They had to navigate that sense of betrayal. But they always ask that question to the Egyptians, like, you were not only betrayed by Muslims like you, you were imprisoned by Muslims like you, you were tortured by Muslims like you, you were prevented from prayer by Muslims like you. How did you navigate that betrayal? And so I think the interesting question for Asim and I was, well, how do we make sense of a Muslim majority population being imprisoned by a Muslim prison authority ve someone who was non Muslim and navigating this like, kind of religious question.
And in a way, it seemed to the Egyptians less of a relevant question.
Like, I, it didn't seem that they had this sense of betrayal by people who were their co religionists in a way, because they knew that this is what the Egyptian state did. They, they were used to this particular narrative of state violence being directed against them.
But there were interesting ways that the prison authorities within the Egyptian context tried to religionize, I guess, their particular methods of torture, their particular methods of repression.
One super, super interesting story that came out of my interview, actually, whenever I say something is interesting, it's heartbreaking. It's not interesting in a sense of like, intrigue or fascination.
It's actually awful. But one of the men who were imprisoned had said that he was imprisoned alongside the Palestinian, and the Palestinian was imprisoned under the suspicion that he was a member of Hana Mess.
And he was sentenced to five years.
And so the guard had taken hold of the guy's phone, all of his belongings, and he found, he opened the Palestinian guy's phone and he found, you know, pictures of the guy in nightclubs, partying, drinking, etc.
[00:35:14] Speaker B: Etc.
[00:35:15] Speaker A: And he said to the Palestinian guy, well, I know now that you're not a member of Hamas, but I'm going to keep you in prison for the rest of the your sentence because you need to repent to God and this is my way of helping you reach repentance. So the state acts in the sense of like, paternalistic, and it uses a religious narrative to justify something that it was doing. And this is something that goes back all the way to Nasser, by the way. This isn't something new like, like you, when you read old prison narratives, there is this consistent kind of story of the torturers taking a break to go pray and then come back to continue torturing people.
In fact, I remember hearing a story by a. A Coptic Christian guy who was imprisoned in Egypt, and they would say that they would stop the torture at the time of the event to show him, you know, we actually respect the call for prayer. And how do you make sense of you being very, very violent and very, very.
Doing something so horrific and having the sense of, oh, I respect my religion in the same way that Leila was talking about how, you know, they would tell her, oh, you can't pray in front of us. You're a woman. It's haram to bend in that way in front of men.
So you're not allowed to do that. And so there are just interesting ways in the Egyptian context in which religion is used.
In the Guantanamo context, the narrative of betrayal is very, very strong against sort of the Pakistani authorities that sold a lot of the people that ended up in Guantanamo.
And there was a big financial incentive to give up people to the Americans.
And we don't go into questions of innocence or guilt in the book, but a lot of people are genuine, genuinely did not have to do with the war. You know, they were taken on the stake in identity and were tortured to. In order to admit certain things. But the Americans used something.
And it's really fascinating when we think about sort of our Middle east department and our Arabic studies programs, but they use this thing called cultural experts.
These cultural experts usually, but not always, are people who interpreted Arabic and they marketed their expertise. As we are insiders, we know how these people think, and so we can tell you which ways to hurt them more.
And after 9, 11, this sort of, like, profile of being a cultural expert on Islam, on Muslims, became such a big thing. The. The American government was trying to foster, and it became an important sort of national security effort. But these guys were involved in telling interrogators how best to break a person.
And so awesome writes one of the most horrific things that I can recall from the Guantanamo context, where one of the cultural experts told a female guard, if you pretend to smear menstrual blood on the guy while you were sort of interrogating him, he will feel that he was impure. And that's one way to break them. And so it becomes such a sinister job where Islam is fetishized in a way, where these people are so peculiar and particular in their cultural traditions that they're unlike US and so these are particular ways to break them.
Another instance in Guantanamo where they used like, pornographic images in order to shock the sensibilities of people.
And so when you have like, prisoners who like, were never, had never seen these images, it was a real shock. People from, like, who were imprisoned from Afghanistan, for example, it was a real, real shocks of their sensibilities. But other folks that were imprisoned from the UK say they were desensitized to these images. So this is not like, even if they were pious individuals, these are people who are not locked away from society. So you, you have this understanding of this Muslim as this peculiar, pious, mystical individual that you can violate in this particular way, when actually this is a person who grew up and lived in your society. They're not peculiar in any sense at all. And so the use of these cultural experts became part and parcel of the way that the Guantanamo authorities tried to govern or try to discipline the prisoners.
And I know that I'm rambling up a little bit too long, but if you can think about the sort of beginning of Muslim intellectual production after 9 11, you would have like, people who were experts in Jahili poetry becoming sort of experts on Islamic radicalization and stuff. And so there's this particular Orientalist narrative that these Muslims are peculiar, and if you know one thing about them, you know everything about them. Right. And so that in that way Islam, or the understanding of Islam became used in order to violate and exceptionalize these individuals.
[00:41:25] Speaker B: Oh, that makes sense. And I especially that point about the Muslim majority context versus where Muslims are minority. And reading the work, I did feel that sense of betrayal that was part of almost much the, the pain and the suffering of those Muslims in Egypt that they, they felt. These people, these, these guards are reading the same Quran, they're doing the same prayers, but then at the same time they are violating central tenets of the religion. And then, yeah, the, the almost Islamophobic and racist attitudes that some of the American guards had towards those in Guantanamo. And then feeling the prisoners feeling disrespected and also slighted in so many different ways that. So that's helpful to have that comparison. So, as you know, part of my interest is in biblical and chronic figures. And this podcast deals with Islamic interreligious relations.
And I was really fascinated to see how the stories of the Quran and the Bible fit in with the prisoner's faith journey. So, for instance, the use of Joseph Yusuf, you already mentioned his story emerges many times. And as a dream interpreter, also as someone who was in prison, Mary Mariam as well in terms of her pain and going to the trunk of the palm tree and wishing she had died and was long forgotten. So could you expand on how these stories intersect with the prisoners faith journeys?
[00:42:52] Speaker A: Yeah.
So the story of Joseph becomes central to every prison narrative.
And again you find this not just within the Egypt and Guantanamo case, but almost every sort of prison, Muslim prison narrative you're going to read. There's going to be some sort of allusion to the story of Sayyidina Yusuf and for more obvious reasons he was imprisoned like those in prison. But there are so many different stories that depending on who you are, you kind of gauge from his incarceration story.
So for many it's that story of redemption. In the end, you know, he comes out and he rules the earth. For others there are so many different like minor plot points that touch people in a very significant way. There is his relationship with his father, the fact that, that the father lost his eyesight weeping over his son. And they were both prophets.
It gives people solace that a prophet could go through what, what they are going through. Think with Egyptians it hits even harder because it creates a sense that Egypt is a primordial prison. You know, Prophet Joseph was imprisoned here, we are imprisoned here. So, so the prison story never ends. It's a sort of ongoing prison from, from the time of Joseph to today.
And so it, for some people it creates, it takes on a pessimistic kind of like. But it creates a kind of solace as well. Like that Prophet Joseph is a kind of comrade in prison.
But with the story of Miriam, I think it was, I mean when I interviewed, when I interviewed the former prisoner who talked about Sayyidina Maryam, I hadn't made those links. And so I was really touched when I was reading that as well. And it shows you the way, the living way people navigate the question of theodicy. So, so what he was saying, and it was a very like long and touching story, at some point he felt that he had lost complete hope, that there was nothing, he was going to be imprisoned forever.
And so the story of Sayyida Maryam kind of came to him in a sense that he was fighting with his own mind, he was fighting with his own thoughts. He said that God recognized that she had a suicidal thought. And that in of itself didn't mean that she gave up on believing in God's mercy and God's power.
And in fact God gave her solace.
So he basically said that if I had said that I wished I was dead, before this day, just as Mary said or the Quran said, Mary said, people would have said, you know, you have lost faith in God.
You're outside of the fold of Islam. This is. You're uttering words of Kuf.
He said God's response was much more forgiving, much. He. He gave her solace. He said, you know, take the. Take, take the dates from the tree.
Here is some solace for you. And. But you have to go through these pains. And the way that he connected that to, to her was in a sense, that he had to go through what he's going through in order to come out the other side.
And so this was one of the many ways I found that theodicy is not something that is just an intellectual exercise. It's something that people navigate and people struggle with in order to reach the answers that speak to the tribulation that God puts them through. And in that sense, the dialogue with the Quran becomes a very living thing.
It becomes a back and forth that the prisoners experience.
That was one of the many things that was very, very striking to.
I think another interesting thing that came up was one of the prisoners was a Christian woman that was imprisoned for sort of falling in love with the Muslim man. And she was a believing Christian woman. And there was a dialogue between her and one of the female prisoners about the odyssey and God and why God lets this happen.
And these sort of interfaith experiences exist in a very interesting way where when the violence of this state kind of neutralizes everyone's power, it creates inadvertently this democratic, in a way, free flow of debate and conversation that you wouldn't really find outside of that. That someone had said this to me once, in a way, the prison in our society is the freest place where you can talk about questions that you would never dare to talk about outside of prisons because of the surveillance of the state, because of the power structures that criminalize or outlaws certain conversations. And so, so yes, prisoners do have regulatory and even like, punitive ways of dealing with blasphemy within their spaces.
But in a way, it's the freest place you can talk about because no one has power. And when no one has power and when everyone is already punished in perpetuity, you can really say and do whatever you want.
And so it really does become the freest place you can speak your mind. Mind.
[00:49:43] Speaker B: That's, that's super fascinating. And I can see how those stories connect with the prisoners, as you mentioned, Yusuf and Joseph, that story, the idea of redemption, of being released from prison, it's Almost things have been flipped, that he was the lowest of the low, powerless, and then eventually he becomes the master of the land. And then Mary, Maryam also very. Being very raw and open about her emotions and feelings and describing her state and then being rewarded and heard by God. And that's a fascinating point also about this democratic space. I didn't think about it that way, but I could see how the prisons could be a space of interfaith or interreligious solidarity where everyone's experiencing the same pain and suffering and circumstances, so they may connect in. In unique ways. So what would you say are the implications of the book for the wider field? Would you say that prisoners faith journeys are neglected in scholarship? And you mentioned this already, I think, and maybe you could even expand on it on the idea of theodicy that you mentioned earlier, that in terms of Islamic theodicy, people maybe immediately go to the work of theologians and the classics. But I think you're making a profound argument here that we need to look at the faith of everyday Muslims as specifically those of prisoners is.
[00:51:05] Speaker A: So it's. It's really difficult because as free as we think the academic space is, there are certain narratives of Muslims that are allowed to be amplified and others and others that are not. And so when we think about Muslims in prison, we have to really.
Have to really understand that our sort of contemporary field still survives under the shadow of the war on terror.
And even though we have been able to break the binary of the good Muslim versus is bad Muslim, there are still certain orthodoxies within the field that are very, very difficult to sort of break.
One small example, when we think about Salafi Islam, we think about it in the classification. I forget the name of the scholar, but you have the classification of the Salafiya Jihadiya, the Sahwa and the Matkhali rights. But when you actually delve into prison narratives, you see a wider scope of what people think. Salafism means that if we were to outline it as it is, you might be called an apologist.
For example, different scholars who could be called Sanafi or have called themselves Salafi. Abdullah al Hamid in Saudi Arabia who died in prison. Jawedat said those two. Take the Salafi argument.
We could sometimes be considered very revisionist in its historical understanding, but all ideological points of view are revisionist in one way or another. But they take it to pacifist forms, right?
There are other narratives that take it to other places.
And so because the shadow of the war on terror casts Muslim thought as kind of binary or in very rigid categories, categories that we can discipline, understand, and sort of reduce the harm of some, mitigate others, amplify certain voices that we think, think not, perhaps not valid, but helpful to society, take away other voices. There is a kind of political underpinning or a policy implication to the way we always study Islam.
And so that sort of prevents us from having a real honest understanding or. Yeah, understanding or study of Muslim thought in the way that it's supposed to be studied or giving it the depth that we perhaps give other religious traditions.
And so that's one thing about it. The other thing, and this is something that I've said often, and it's something that really prompted my work on prisons.
Well, it's one of the things that prompted my work on prisons is that the vast majority of Muslim intellectual thought from the early modern period to the present has been impacted by incarceration in one way or another.
Most Muslim thinkers have been to prison or have been under the threat of incarceration, or have been under threat of state violence or have had people close to them go to prison.
So prison touches Islamic thought in such intimate and deep ways.
But we always pathologize incarceration because we have this inherent way that we try to discipline Muslim thought into sort of valuable, invaluable, violent, threatening, or domesticated and moderate.
And so that prevents us from doing actual scholarship that shows the complexity of Islamic thinking.
And to show the complexity of Islamic thinking, we have to account for state violence in its most naked forms. And even though sometimes we are able to do that, we are able to do that with limits.
And so those are some of the things that sort of prompted me to start working on this. But I'm very, very aware that there's so much work that needs to be done.
And, I mean, some of it I hope to continue to do. I hope other people continue to work on Muslim carceral theology or incarceration, or just study the impact of incarceration on the Muslim scholarship that they write about. I mean, it's pretty insane that you can be a sort of expert on X or Y Muslim thinker and just mention the fact that they were incarcerated three or four times and not really delve into how that has impacted this person's thinking.
So, yeah, these are things that were really central or at the heart of why I think it was really important to do the work that I, you know, started to do.
[00:56:54] Speaker B: That last point definitely resonates with me that I think in the contemporary times, we often view Muslims being in prison as they are the bad Muslim or the terrorists. But historically, as you know, there were many Muslims in prison. I work on Ibn Taymiyyah, and he was in prison six times, and he wrote some of his great works in prison.
So as you, as you mentioned, sometimes people just say, oh, you went, you know, he was in prison six times. And then as a footnote almost, and then move on to his thought.
So, yeah, his prison experience definitely is connected to scholarship and worldview. So, so, so wonderful. So we're at the end of our podcast, so I want to ask, is there anything else you would like to share? Anything specifically you're working on now that's building on these two works that you already discussed? Discuss?
[00:57:49] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I'm hoping to work with Maidan further on sort of mapping out different, like the relationship between incarceration and Muslim thought in different places. I think there are so many interesting sort of case studies that need to be amplified and thought about in a more sort of sober way.
And in a way, this is sort of like the unwritten story of our contemporary intellectual, like, Muslim scholarship, you know, even if so. And so thinker did not go to prison, they used other thinkers that definitely went to prison. So the idea of like, incarceration or thought that was impacted by incarceration really seeping into our sort of intellectual milieu's is something that is very, very present. And there needs to be a way that we think about how state violence and carcerality shapes what we think we know today, because it really, it really, really does.
Like, I remember I'd interviewed Sheikh Dadu about the hunger strike article that I wrote, and I hadn't even known this, but he just mentioned, oh, I'm telling you this because I was imprisoned for two years in Mauritania, and this was my experience about prisons. And so if I were to take his fatewa about other things or his opinions about other things without really having known this particular fact, I wouldn't have been necessarily, like, aware that that, oh, this was a very important point in his life where he was incarcerated. And that gave him insights in the way that the state enacts violence against people. This really shapes his understanding of bulma and justice.
And this is true for many people. And by the way, this isn't just for, like, people who were against the state. So, like, like, when you think about the Albani, for example, right? Albani was imprisoned in Syria, right? And he has. He's famously very quiet, famously very, very much against revolution, but he was imprisoned in One of the most violent states. How do we understand.
And he wrote a lot of his, his commentary in prison as well in Syria. So how do we understand this?
[01:00:34] Speaker B: Very.
[01:00:35] Speaker A: I mean, I'm sure people have written about it, but this very important point in Albani's life where he was imprisoned in one of the most violent carceral states.
So it's a very big story and I really hope more people also take up this particular theme and I really hope that in the future we see people, people really doing sophisticated work on this.
[01:01:03] Speaker B: No, I agree and I think sometimes academics in the west that many of them haven't been to prison or haven't been in that space. So they, they don't. They overlook that. But where, like you're saying, the many Muslim scholars in the contemporary world or, or even the classical medieval one, the prison experience was central and influenced the rest of the work. So, so with that, thanks so much, much for this opportunity and I look forward to being in touch.
[01:01:29] Speaker A: I appreciate it. Thank you.
[01:01:31] Speaker B: And that was my interview with Wodak Hussein. So many things stood out to me in that interview. First, the idea of the Odyssey or why does pain and suffering happen in the world and what is God's role within it? So many of the discussion of theodicy is of classical Islamic scholars, whether that Ibn Taymiyyah and Al Ghazali. We read the thoughts of youth theologians to try to better understand God's purpose on earth. However, Wila changes the discourse on the Odyssey and looks at the everyday person. In particular the lived experience of prisoners as she discusses their lived experiences, influences how they understand God and his role within the world. When we look at future studies of the Odyssey, we need to understand how people experience this on the ground and not simply an intellectual and elite discourse course. Secondly, the idea of the prison experience. So many Islamic scholars and Muslim activists from Malcolm X to Ibn Tay Mia were in prison and they spent years often in that space, wrote profound books and also transformed in so many ways. Many times in Islamic scholarship we look at these prison experiences as simply a footnote. However, they were deeply transformed narrative and they influenced how the individual looked upon themselves, the relationship with God and the world around them. Many of these Islamic scholars were activists in the sense that they challenged the structures of their society which led them to be confined, disciplined and even tortured. The prison experience is part of the Islamic experience and to better understand Muslims and Islamic society, we have to do more work, work in that space. And lastly, what fascinated me was how the stories of biblical chronic figures merge with the characters within the book. Many of the figures inside the book cite the story of Joseph of Yusuf, how he was sold into slavery, eventually went to prison, but then was released. He eventually became the master of the storehouses. He even became more stronger and powerful than his brothers who got rid of him and threw him in the bottom of the well. The story of Yusuf of Joseph, is a story of going to the bottom of society, whether at the bottom of the well, of slavery in prison, and eventually rising with the grace of God. We also see the importance of the story of Mary and Maryam, that many of the figures identify with her pain and suffering, that she is someone who expresses her faith faith, but at the same time notes that she wished she had died and was long forgotten. Many of those in the book identify with the struggle, that they can be a faithful person, while at the same time express their suffering and misery. Eventually they believe that the grace of God will emerge and that they will be redeemed and taken out of their pain.
The stories of these biblical and chronic figures give these prisoners hope and inspiration and belief in the future thank you once again for listening to the Islamic Mary and a Common Word podcast. You can order my book the Islamic Maryam through the Centuries, which has been out for a couple of months. You can subscribe to this podcast on Apple, Spotify and YouTube. You can encourage your friends, students and colleagues to listen to this podcast. I've been assigning several episodes to my various classes and the students have found them beneficial. There are now over 10 episodes of the K Word podcast and over 80 of the Islamic Mary. You can listen to those. Go back into our library and see episodes regarding interviews, chronic commentary and monologues. You can review this podcast. Reviewing the podcast helps other people find it and encourages them to listen to it. And you can visit my website and join my newsletter where you'll learn more about various events regarding the Common Word Podcast, the Islamic Mary Book Tour, as well as free giveaways, blogs and other relevant information. Thanks once again and take care.
