Islam is the fastest growing religion in the jails of the United States, according to a new report. Tens of thousands of prisoners in the US convert to Islam each year, a report by the CBS News said on Friday (Feb 28). The latest episode of “CBS Mornings” series “The State of Spirituality with Lisa Ling,” explored the reasons behind inmates accepting the faith.
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‘Spiritual freedom within the faith’
Tayba Foundation is the first ever organisation in the US which offers a distance-learning programme in Islamic education to inmates. Rami Nsour is the founding director of the organisation.
While talking to the news channel, Nsour claimed that on most days, his mailbox is filled with letters from inmates from across the nation, seeking his guidance to practice Islam.
“When we started about 15 years ago, that was the main need that we heard from Muslim prisoners,” Nsour told the channel.
“So, we developed this organisation to fill that gap and that need,” he added.
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So far, Tayba Foundation has served more than 13,000 individuals. Nsour estimated that around 90 per cent of them converted to Islam, mostly while behind bars.
He further discussed the main reason behind the growing number of people accepting Islam in US jails.
Nsour said that, with so much physical and spiritual confinement in prison, people find spiritual freedom within the faith.
“Because it has a level of submission, so you submit to a certain regiment, there’s five daily prayers, there’s a method,” he explained.
Nsour said Islam makes the prisoners believe that “those walls can’t confine them anymore.”
‘I recovered my humanity’
Muhammad Amin Anderson – a US prisoner sentenced 30-year jail term for a gang-related murder, accepted the faith after two years in jail. He said he converted to Islam for many reasons, with the spiritual freedom being the major one.
“When I came to prison, I didn’t have my humanity … but after entering prison, I recovered my humanity,” Anderson said, as quoted in the report.
He was born as Christopher Anderson in Philadelphia. Despite being the son of a preacher, he couldn’t stop himself from engaging in illegal and immoral activities.
“I actually fell into drug addiction for about a year and a half,” Anderson confessed, adding that he “got involved with a group of guys and they were selling drugs in our city”.
“I spent my years in prison learning about other faiths,” he said, adding that “Islam was the only one that made sense” for him.
(With inputs from agencies)
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