Prison Outreach
“Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.” - El Hajj Malik Shabazz
There is no greater example for the potential a person whose journey to Islam began in a prison than Malcolm X. He is a man who is well known and is in no need of an introduction. Merely reading his life story through his autobiography is a major influence for many people to choose Islam.
There are many people within the prison system that have and are following in his footsteps by serving the deen of Islam. There are even more people that have the potential to be like him. We, as a community, must dedicate ourselves to assisting them to gain access to material that will greatly enhance their study and understanding of Islam.
Read the letters of some of these men: Yusef Wiley, Amin Brazel, and Rodney Thomas.
To this end, TAYBA FOUNDATION is developing the “El Hajj Malik Shabazz Distance Learning Program” to offer quality Islamic education to the Muslim inmate population.
Muslim inmates within the U.S. prison system are currently benefiting from the curriculum and methods that the TAYBA FOUNDATION is developing.
In an effort to properly assess the religious instructional needs of Muslim inmates, TAYBA FOUNDATION conducted a survey that was sent to various prison institutions.
The following items were ranked by inmates in their own words amongst the top religious needs:
- Volunteers to provide religious instruction
- Access to distance learning programs for Traditional Islamic Training
- Qurans –current Qurans are worn, tattered and limited
- Qualified teachers to more effectively disseminate Sacred Knowledge
- Instruction on how to purify the self. If we are not able to break our inward and outward bad habits, whatever else we may learn may only increase us in wrongdoing
- Instruction in traditional Islamic knowledge with main emphasis on fard ‘ayn
- Knowledge of how to attain a halal livelihood in this society
- Knowledge of how we should be with our families. We need to know and see how Islam is lived so we can get away from this notion that the deen is simply a bunch of do’s and don’ts. This is important because it will dramatically lessen the oppression that occurs within many of our homes and it will also go a long way towards our dawa efforts
Islam in U.S. Prisons
In the United States, 15-17 % (about 350,000) of the approximately 2.3 million State and Federal Prisoners are Muslim. 8 out of 10 people in U.S. prisons who seek faith become Muslim.
It is our duty as a community to offer services to this growing population and their needs have largely been neglected. Many Muslim inmates identify with the story of Yusuf a. They feel that just as the king forgot about Yusuf a, so too the community has forgotten about them. It is for this reason that some Muslim inmates refer to themselves as the “Forgotten Believers”. (Statistics taken from Siraj Islam Mufti, a retired chaplain in the US Dept. of Justice, in his article titled “Islam in American Prisons”, found on www.islamonline.net)