Author: Hamid Reza Kusha Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351925997 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 232
Book Description
The growth of Islam both worldwide and particularly in the United States is especially notable among African-American inmates incarcerated in American state and federal penitentiaries. This growth poses a powerful challenge to American penal philosophy, structured on the ideal of rehabilitating offenders through penance and appropriate penal measures. Islam in American Prisons argues that prisoners converting to Islam seek an alternative form of redemption, one that poses a powerful epistemological as well as ideological challenge to American penology. Meanwhile, following the events of 9/11, some prison inmates have converted to radical anti-Western Islam and have become sympathetic to the goals and tactics of the Al-Qa'ida organization. This new study examines this multifaceted phenomenon and makes a powerful argument for the objective examination of the rehabilitative potentials of faith-based organizations in prisons, including the faith of those who convert to Islam.
Author: S.I Khan Publisher: Jade Media Group LLC ISBN: Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 23
Book Description
A simple, cohesive explanation about the racial disparity of African American Muslims within the prison system. It examines and explains the misinformed views that some Americans have concerning Al Islam.
Author: Garrett Felber Publisher: UNC Press Books ISBN: 1469653834 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 273
Book Description
Challenging incarceration and policing was central to the postwar Black Freedom Movement. In this bold new political and intellectual history of the Nation of Islam, Garrett Felber centers the Nation in the Civil Rights Era and the making of the modern carceral state. In doing so, he reveals a multifaceted freedom struggle that focused as much on policing and prisons as on school desegregation and voting rights. The book examines efforts to build broad-based grassroots coalitions among liberals, radicals, and nationalists to oppose the carceral state and struggle for local Black self-determination. It captures the ambiguous place of the Nation of Islam specifically, and Black nationalist organizing more broadly, during an era which has come to be defined by nonviolent resistance, desegregation campaigns, and racial liberalism. By provocatively documenting the interplay between law enforcement and Muslim communities, Felber decisively shows how state repression and Muslim organizing laid the groundwork for the modern carceral state and the contemporary prison abolition movement which opposes it. Exhaustively researched, the book illuminates new sites and forms of political struggle as Muslims prayed under surveillance in prison yards and used courtroom political theater to put the state on trial. This history captures familiar figures in new ways--Malcolm X the courtroom lawyer and A. Philip Randolph the Harlem coalition builder--while highlighting the forgotten organizing of rank-and-file activists in prisons such as Martin Sostre. This definitive account is an urgent reminder that Islamophobia, state surveillance, and police violence have deep roots in the state repression of Black communities during the mid-20th century.
Author: Allen M. Hornblum Publisher: Penn State Press ISBN: 0271074280 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 232
Book Description
From 1951 until 1974, Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia was the site of thousands of experiments on prisoners conducted by researchers under the direction of University of Pennsylvania dermatologist Albert M. Kligman. While most of the experiments were testing cosmetics, detergents, and deodorants, the trials also included scores of Phase I drug trials, inoculations of radioactive isotopes, and applications of dioxin in addition to mind-control experiments for the Army and CIA. These experiments often left the subject-prisoners, mostly African Americans, in excruciating pain and had long-term debilitating effects on their health. This is one among many episodes of the sordid history of medical experimentation on the black population of the United States. The story of the Holmesburg trials was documented by Allen Hornblum in his 1998 book Acres of Skin. The more general history of African Americans as human guinea pigs has most recently been told by Harriet Washington in her 2007 book Medical Apartheid. The subject is currently a topic of heated public debate in the wake of a 2006 report from an influential panel of medical experts recommending that the federal government loosen the regulations in place since the 1970s that have limited the testing of pharmaceuticals on prison inmates. Sentenced to Science retells the story of the Holmesburg experiments more dramatically through the eyes of one black man, Edward “Butch” Anthony, who suffered greatly from the experiments for which he “volunteered” during multiple terms at the prison. This is not only one black man’s highly personal account of what it was like to be an imprisoned test subject, but also a sobering reminder that there were many African Americans caught in the viselike grip of a scientific research community willing to bend any code of ethics in order to accomplish its goals and a criminal justice system that sold prisoners to the highest bidder.
Author: Karen Isaksen Leonard Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation ISBN: 1610443489 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 214
Book Description
As the United States wages war on terrorism, the country's attention is riveted on the Muslim world as never before. While many cursory press accounts dealing with Muslims in the United States have been published since 9/11, few people are aware of the wealth of scholarly research already available on the American Islamic population. In Muslims in the United States: The State of Research, Karen Isaksen Leonard mines this rich vein of research to provide a fascinating overview of the history and contemporary situation of American Muslim communities. Leonard describes how Islam, never a monolithic religion, has inevitably been shaped by its experience on American soil. American Muslims are a religious minority, and arbiters of Islamic cultural values and jurisprudence must operate within the framework of America's secular social and legal codes, while coping with the ethnic differences among Muslim groups that have long divided their communities. Arab Muslims tend to dominate mosque functions and teaching Arabic and the Qur'an, whereas South Asian Muslims have often focused on the regional and national mobilization of Muslims around religious and political issues. By the end of the 20th century, however, many Muslim immigrants had become American citizens, prompting greater interchange among these groups and bridging some cultural differences. African American Muslims remain the most isolated group—a minority within a minority. Many African American men have converted to Islam while in prison, leading to a special concern among African American Muslims for civil and religious rights within the prison system. Leonard highlights the need to expand our knowledge of African American Muslim movements, which are often not regarded as legitimate by immigrant Muslims. Leonard explores the construction of contemporary American Muslim identities, examining such factors as gender, sexuality, race, class, and generational differences within the many smaller national origin and sectarian Muslim communities, including secular Muslims, Sufis, and fundamentalists. Muslims in the United States provides a thorough account of the impact of September 11th on the Muslim community. Before the terrorist attacks, Muslim leaders had been mostly optimistic, envisioning a growing role for Muslims in U.S. society. Afterward, despite a brave show of unity and support for the nation, Muslim organizations became more open in showing their own conflicts and divisions and more vocal in opposing militant Islamic ideologies. By providing a concise summary of significant historical and contemporary research on Muslims in the United States, this volume will become an essential resource for both the scholar and the general reader interested in understanding the diverse communities that constitute Muslim America.
Author: Taymullah Abdur-Rahman Publisher: Augsburg Fortress Publishers ISBN: 1506489281 Category : African Americans Languages : en Pages : 248
Book Description
American Imam explores the contemporary Black Muslim narrative by tracing Taymullah Abdur-Rahman's story, from child to pop performer to convert. Imam Abdur-Rahman takes us inside his work as a prison chaplain and beyond, asking us to consider our biases against Islam, the Black American experience, interreligious dialogue, and abolition.
Author: Chester Warren Cornell Publisher: ISBN: Category : African American Muslims Languages : en Pages : 252
Book Description
Broadly speaking, my research focus is on African American religion, with particular interest in the various manifestations of black Islam in the United States. I am particularly interested in the question "Has religion served as an opiate or stimulant for black political protest?" And my research attempts to answer it by chronicling the experiences of black Muslims in southern prisons. My dissertation builds on Michelle Alexander's groundbreaking book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010). Alexander argues that African Americans were not over-represented in America's prisons in the 1970s, but with President Reagan's War on Drugs initiative in the early 1980s, black incarceration exploded. America's black urban poor became the targets of government laws that meted out harsh penalties for crack possession. As a result, the criminal justice system became a new tool of white social control of black Americans, replacing the old system of Jim Crow segregation. Now, America's prisons are the institutions depriving large numbers of African and Hispanic Americans of their democratic rights, even after they are released. If our prison system is a breeding ground for perpetuating white dominance, a new Jim Crow, then ultimately I ask if religion plays a vital role in motivating black communities to protest and demand reforms. My sources--in-depth interviews, prison newsletters, and Muslim publications--contain much testimony from the religious experience of a specific population of oppressed black men at the heart of this new, literally confining system. And, this testimony allows us to take a fresh look at the old question, a constant in the historiography since DuBois: Does black religion in the form of Islam, as it evolved throughout the 20th century, help this African American population? Or does it comfort, divert, and entertain them and tend to make them complacent? Some sources say that it does, generally, in the "free world" as well as in prison. But my research reflects on their testimony in light of past experience.
Author: Hamid Reza Kusha
Author: Jason Blumklotz
Author: S.I Khan
Author: 
Author: Garrett Felber
Author: Jimmie L. Wright
Author: Allen M. Hornblum
Author: Karen Isaksen Leonard
Author: Taymullah Abdur-Rahman
Author: Chester Warren Cornell