Islam in Jail: Europe's Neglect Breeds Angry Radicals

By CRAIG S. SMITH (NYT)
New York Time, December 8, 2004

Abdullah, tall and muscular, with a shaved head and closely cropped goatee, sat on a metal bunk in the cramped cell here and described how he got religion.
''When I was in La Santé, I read books about the Prophet,'' he said, referring to a notorious Parisian detention center, the third of five jails where he has spent time during the past two years for dealing drugs and stealing cars.

When he arrived at the fourth, Fleury-Merogis, Europe's largest, another inmate gave him a DVD about the life of Muhammad and later, while enduring a three-week stint in solitary confinement, he vowed to devote himself to Islam.

''People here find God,'' he said.

In less than a decade, there has been a radical shift in France's prison population, a shift that officials and experts say poses a monumental challenge.

Despite making up only 10 percent of the population, Muslims account for most of the country's inmates and a growing percentage of the prison populations in many other European countries.

With radical strains of Islam percolating through Europe, authorities are unsure how to address the spiritual needs of the prisoners while guarding against the potentially toxic mix of extremist ideology and a criminal past. One result is often neglect, which officials say can be a still greater force for radicalization.

Prison populations have been expanding across Europe in recent years, partly because of stricteranticrime regimens influenced by the sort of zero tolerance on quality-of-life crimes that was epitomized by the former New York City mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.

France's prison population has risen by 20 percent in the past three years, largely because of aggressive pursuit of lower-level crimes.

The proportion of Muslims in prison has been growing even faster, reflecting the relative youth of Europe's largely Muslim immigrants.

While there are no official data on issues of race and ethnicity in much of Europe -- it is in fact illegal to keep such data in many places -- experts on prison populations agree on the new disproportion of Muslims.

Two months ago Pierre Raffin, the director of La Santé detention center, warned officials looking into the role of religion in France that extremist proselytizing in prisons was growing.

Other countries are facing the same problem. Spain's chief counterterrorism magistrate, Baltazar Garzón, said recently that the men accused of plotting to blow up the country's main counterterrorism court were recruited from among fellow inmates by an Islamic militant serving time for credit card fraud.

Those who are detained or convicted for terrorist-related crimes are not always separated from the larger prison population and are often ready to act as spiritual guides at a time when Muslim chaplains are in severely short supply.

Abdullah (prison rules prevented him from giving his last name) said that while he was at Fleury-Merogis, militants were active in the prison yard, preaching that Christians and Jews are enemy infidels. In May, the militants defied prison rules by organizing a prayer meeting during an exercise break. Several prisoners were disciplined as a result.

''Islam is becoming in Europe, especially France, the religion of the repressed, what Marxism was in Europe at one time,'' said Farhad Khosrokhavar, an Iranian-French scholar who has written a book on Islam in prisons. He says the growing Muslim prison population is evidence of an Islamic underclass that is developing across Europe and, at its margins, is increasingly sympathetic to the ideology of political Islam.

Europe has been slow to adjust to the changing ethnic and religious makeup of its prison inmates. France, in particular, has resisted approving Muslim prison chaplains, worried that inadequate screening could unleash potential militants into the system.

Missoum Abdelmadjid Chaoui, the imam responsible for the Nanterre institution here west of Paris, says there are only eight Muslim chaplains for the nearly 20,000 Muslim inmates in the Paris region. He handles 9 of the 25 prisons himself.

There are several efforts in France and elsewhere in Europe to train moderate clerics who are sensitive to the Continent's secular ideals, but progress is slow and Mr. Chaoui said it would take years before there were enough chaplains to meet the needs of France's prison population, which he estimates is already 60 percent Muslim.

Many people warn that neglecting the needs of Muslim prisoners breeds resentment and leaves them open for more radical interpretations of Islam.

Muslim inmates in France, which has Europe's largest Islamic community, complain that they are ignored in a system devised for a Christian population. Few prisons provide halal meat, butchered according to Islamic dietary laws, and fewer still hold regular religious services for Muslims. Catholic inmates can attend Mass once a week.

''This feeds back into the community of Muslims outside the prisons, who hear what goes on and are disturbed by it,'' said James Beckford, a sociology professor at Warwick University in Britain, who has studied the problems of Muslims in jail. ''It feeds their sense of alienation.''

Abdullah said that since Sept. 11, 2001, many prisoners of his generation have grown interested in understanding the religion of their birth.

But he and one of his two cellmates, Bandjougou, complained that they got little spiritual guidance. Both men were born and raised in the working-class suburb of St. Denis, north of Paris. The neighborhood, once a village surrounding a 13th-century cathedral where France buried its kings, is a sprawl of public housing peopled largely by Arab and African immigrants.

''In 30 months, I've seen the chaplain twice,'' said Bandjougou, a tall, clear-eyed man of West African descent. ''Maybe it would go in one ear and out the other, but at least it would be an alternative vision of life.''

A Catholic priest visits the block almost daily, but Bandjougou says he provides little solace for the vast majority of inmates, who are Muslim.

In the absence of an official spiritual guide, he said, the prisoners counsel one another. Prison officials say they are quick to spot serious proselytizing and regularly move prisoners deemed too influential on their fellow inmates.

''Every time we see detainees grouping in the yards to pray or proselytize, the group is broken up,'' said Géraud Delorme, deputy director of the Nanterre detention center. ''Everything is organized to prevent extensive contacts and such exchanges of ideas.''

In France, many prisoners spend up to 21 hours a day locked behind windowless steel doors in their small cells. Meals are delivered to the cells and there is little opportunity to socialize with anyone but cellmates, except during the twice-daily exercise breaks in the small concrete prison yard.

Drugs are prevalent, passed from cell to cell by strings hung through holes cut in the mesh covering each cell's small window. The ''yo-yos'' are tolerated at some prisons but the mesh has recently been replaced in Nanterre.

The prisons' shifting demographics are engraved in the small brick- walled exercise yard in Fresnes, a hub in transferring inmates around the national system. Names carved into the bricks a century ago are all French. ''Maurice Barbes, 1909,'' reads one. But those carved by the young men filling the yard these days are predominantly North African names like Oulmana, Chebbabi and Karim.

Professor Beckford says many countries are making adjustments for their sizable Muslim prison populations. Britain now has more than 20 full-time, salaried chaplains and hundreds of volunteer imams who go into the prisons every week, while prisons in England and Wales hold regular Friday Prayer and provide halal food in the daily diet.

But at Nanterre, a model compared with many other French prisons, halal food is available only through the prison commissary. Bandjougou pointed to boxes of dates, halal ravioli and chicken sausage piled on a shelf in the cramped cell. ''We have family that gives us money so that we can buy food,'' he said in the fading light from the cell's small window, ''but if you have no money, you're out of luck.''

The men cook the food over homemade stoves, illegal but widely tolerated, that they cobble together from tin cans, tissue paper and cooking oil. Muslims have the option of ordering vegetarian meals from the regular food service, but they say that the diet, like the missing imams, leaves them hungry.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

MC MasterChef's post on modernity and terrorism spun off an entire tangent about comparative religion as an area of knowledge, and how part of solving some of our conflicts will involve being open to learning about the "other" or the "alien". The discussion has been asking why this is especially a challenge in the field of religion, and some of the areas where greater learning should be promoted.

The topic is getting increasingly long and complex, so I thought moving it to the front page might help. The main part of the conversation starts here between Oscar and me.

This post responds to ideas Bondra presented about the frequent tension between personal faith and knowledge about other religions.

It is also a very belated attempt to respond to some of the observations JC made last week, responding to MC MasterChef's Christianism post, about the tensions between the personal and political in religious experience and matters of faith.

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When we deal with faith or religiosity at the individual level, rather than at the level of a religion's theology, institutions, history, etc. there are clearly a bunch of factors that come into play. Here are a few observations tossed out. Not as well organized as I'd like, but you'll get the drift.

One of the big problems we've had with this whole post-election brouhaha is that nobody pays attention to level-of-analysis. Here we're dealing with indvidual voting decisions and trying to claim causality from an institutional affiliation, where we keep focusing on personal attitudes on one topic (religion) being extended to other topics (abortion, gay marriage, etc) and we're paying less attention to the institutional affiliation aspects.

By that I mean that we don't know what the actual beliefs are of a voter who "belongs" to a specific denomination, who "regularly practices" the religion (which we measure by the proxy of church attendance), how strongly those beliefs are held, the degree to which the beliefs are internal (related to the experience of faith) or external (related to membership or loyalty to group), and so on and so on.   more »

Initially posted on Tacitus Fri Jul 16th, 2004

This is a followup to hcaufield's Diary Entry on profiles of 9/11-type Islamist terrorists and the observation that they seem like people who live next door .

IIRC from my old poli sci courses, the profiles of Islamist terrorist leaders cited by hcaufield and praktike are pretty consistent with literature on leadership of revolutionary movements. Similarly, the observation that poverty isn't "the breeding ground for terrorism" fits with conventional wisdom on revolutions. Revolutions are more likely when things are getting better than worse -- an improvement in absolute poverty, modernization, growing literacy and education, greater exposure to outside ideas, etc. The ancien regime fails to adapt, leaving it vulnerable to the ability of disenchanted elites to mobilize attacks against it when a crisis appears (e.g. Russia in WWI).

Although poverty has been generally dismissed as a "cause" of revolution, it is certainly relevant to the conduct and consequences of revolution (and we can hypothesize terrorism as well) in three ways. CAVEAT: the following are extremely broad generalizations.   more »