CHILLICOTHE, Ohio — Fewer came this time.
A single, positive coronavirus case discovered that very morning had forced the A2 bloc to initiate a two-week lockdown, so only six men stood outside the locked doors of Sacred Heart Chapel that afternoon. The teacher was late, and the biting cold had taken the opportunity to numb the waiting students’ hands and needle their Black, bearded faces. A white marble statue of Christ, and jet-black cross of metal, loomed over their heads.
Salvation came minutes later, breathing hard and gripping lesson plans, black sneakers pounding against the pavement and military-style cargo pants flapping in the wind, his emerald skullcap – or kufi, as Muslims call it – mirroring the white and brown ones huddled outside the chapel. Below the caps, broad smiles broke out.
Imam Ibrahim Abdulrahim, of Toledo’s Masjid Al-Islam, had come a long way for this congregation of Black men at Chillicothe Correctional Institute –185 miles of driving since that morning, 38 years since he began Islamic prison ministry, and 64 years since he first saw light.
Parole
Homer N. White, Jr., 60, was one of the inmates locked down in the A2 bloc that day.
Like so many other Black men of his generation, he grew up alienated from his family’s Christianity and first encountered an intriguing alternative through a local chapter of the Nation of Islam. But only in 1991, when he was sentenced to prison for aggravated burglary and arson, did he begin seriously exploring Islam.
By the 1990s, in fact, the Islam-based transformation of Black male inmates in U.S. prisons had become so common that it penetrated popular culture through films like South Central and the HBO television series Oz. By some estimates, about 15 to 18 percent of inmates in U.S. prisons today are Muslim (as compared to one percent of the general population). Islam is the fastest growing religion in prisons, and most of its newfound adherents are Black men. It’s a religious wave that has only amassed force since the 1950s prison conversion of Malcolm X, perhaps the highest profile example of the phenomenon.
CCI currently houses 103 Muslim inmates, according to data shared with The Blade by the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, amounting to roughly 4.5 percent of its total population. Since Imam Abdulrahim added CCI to his roster of prisons about a year ago, three men, all Black, have converted to Islam. About 90 percent of all Muslim inmates he’s encountered are converts.
The imam only visits CCI on Wednesday. Tuesdays are for the Toledo Correctional Institution, Thursdays for the Grafton Correctional Institution near Cleveland, and Fridays for the Allen-Oakwood Correctional Institution in Lima. His workday typically starts at 9 a.m. and concludes at 9 p.m. or later, and in a week he'll average 1,000 miles of driving.
Every prison has its own culture, and he adjusts his approach accordingly. Most of the inmates at Grafton, for instance, are long-time Muslims in their 40s, so they're “easier to reach and easier to teach.” Toledo's penitentiary is more challenging. It has a higher security level, and the more punitive environment draws and builds rebellious, hard-shelled inmates.
Imam Abdulrahim unlocks the hearts of his men with his warmth and compassion, but he isn't afraid to to be as tough as they are – or try to be – when necessary.
“I tell the inmates if you’re going to be Muslim, be Muslim,” said Imam Abdulrahim. “Don’t ask the state of Ohio to do something for you that you won’t do yourself. Right now there’s an initiative to have the ODRC provide halal food like it does Kosher food. You put yourself in that situation, now you’re asking the state of Ohio to provide you halal meals? ... Will you demand halal food when you leave prison? Will you be going to McDonald's?”
Imam Abdulrahim has seen it too many times – inmates whose newfound Islam cannot cope with the unstructured, intoxicating freedom of post-carceral life. Belief without practice can’t and won’t guard against relapses into crime. These are men for whom prison is a day without sunset and a night without sunrise, their time a carousel dancing about a flat circle.
White, who remains incarcerated, doesn't deny it. He traded his name for an Arabic one in 1994, and yet is on his fourth prison term, charged in 2009 with theft and still serving his 1991 sentence. His next parole board hearing is May, 2023.
“Since I got out on parole a few times, I didn't live up to my name and even Islam,” he said. Like the inmates he’s met who convert in prison to enjoy the protection of Muslim “gangs,” deen (faith) hadn’t quite penetrated his heart. “It's different being Muslim here than on the street. I have to show [my non-Muslim family] that I want to start living the life, show them what a true Muslim is.”
Imam Abdulrahim’s extended immersion in the carceral environment – where the structured homogeneity of everyday routine and the freedom perpetually on the horizon means that time both doesn’t exist and is all that there is – might be why, in lesson after lesson, he cites chapter 103 of the Quran, titled “Al-Asr.” It is a word can be translated as “declining day,” “passage of time,” or simply “time,” and it refers to that transient sliver of late afternoon, between the harsh light of day and the enveloping darkness of night.
“Man is a creature of the future,” Imam Abdulrahim preached to seven young men one morning at TCI. “Once Allah creates the human being, Allah also creates his future, and endows him with the ability to realize and shape the future.”
The only way to do that, though, is to reflect on the past. That’s a khalifa: “He looks back to move forward.”
Khalifa
His step-father, a construction contractor, was in the Nation of Islam. His mother was neither Muslim nor Christian, simply a “believer.” His best friend, who died at the age of 18, was a Jehovah's Witness.
This eclectic blend of influences shaped Imam Abdulrahim's religious outlook long before he came to Sunni Islam. Only when he saw his younger brother Michael supplicating outside the mosque they were constructing on Bancroft Street did he wonder.
“He more into it than I am, and he into nothing,” thought Imam Abdulrahim, then 17 years old. “How is this boy standing here doing that right now?”
Imam Abdulrahim thought he'd be an auto mechanic — cars were his first love — after graduating from Ohio Operating Engineers Apprenticeship and Training in 1982. Somehow, by 1984, he was the secretary treasurer at Masjid Al-Islam and newly-minted prison chaplain to the Marion Correctional Institution.
“I had no aspirations to be doing anything like Islamic ministry at the time,” he said. “I don’t know if I was qualified back then or not – I guess I was.” But to be clear, “people call me a scholar, I never claimed that.”
It is perhaps the Imam's defensive pose against the blowback he's received for his occasionally creative approaches to the Islamic tradition, the fingerprints of his religiously heterogenous upbringing glowing like neon in his present thinking. He has, for instance, a naturalistic interpretation of the virgin birth of Jesus and its associated miracles, and he's skeptical of eschatological claims of Jesus returning before the Day of Judgment (“Everyone dies”).
“Scripture, like everything else, evolved with time,” he said. “People’s understanding evolves with time. ...Prophet Muhammad was an Arab who lived on this planet 1,400 years ago. Do you think the mind today is structured the same way the mind was then? They were living at a time without artificial light. When night fell, that was it. The day was over. You can’t imagine what people were like at the time. No matter how much they may have looked like us, they were not like us psychologically.”
The imam, ultimately, is wary of what he calls the “I’m-right-you’re-wrong, I’m-going-to-heaven-you’re-going-to-hell syndrome.” Much as Prophet Yaqub, in the Quran, ordered his sons to enter Egypt through different gates, he doesn't think “everybody will enter Paradise through the gate of Islam.”
In keeping with his pluralistic philosophy and anti-dogmatic attitude, Imam Abdulrahim's preferred Quranic translation is “The Study Quran,” a massive commentary that draws on a broad range of interpretative traditions in Islam, from the legalistic to the esoteric.
“That’s my objective for my ministry,” said Imam Abdulrahim. “To broaden the inmates’ perspectives and give them a more complete picture of Islam in the modern era.”
Antoine Windom, for his part, hasn’t been able to put down The Study Quran since the imam introduced him to it. He's been incarcerated at CCI since September 2019 but converted to Islam in 1991. Only now, at the age of 56 and on his seventh imprisonment between Texas, Ohio, and California, does he feel that he's finally tasted the joy of comprehending his faith.
“I read the Quran only as far as learning Islam and studying the faith itself,” he said. “Everything else I fear is someone's outside opinion.”
Windom even has a favorite verse, which he knows by heart – 47:14.
“Is he who is on clear evidence from his Lord like him to whom the evil of his work has been made attractive, and who follows his [own] desires?”
Death row
Imam Abdulrahim still remembers visiting hell. It was in 2002, at the Kandahar Airbase in Kabul, Afghanistan. The war-torn landscape was littered with the wreckage of Soviet aircraft and smothered by the ruins of mosques, death embedded in the earth as unexploded Hornet missiles.
By the time Imam Abdulrahim retired from the military after 32 years of part-time service in 2014, he'd worked as an air reserve technician, a logistics management specialist, and, yes, an Islamic chaplain for the Ohio Air National Guard, U.S. Air Force, and Department of Defense.
So death has never strayed far from his path, yet this year is his very first ministering to inmates on death row. CCI is one of three Ohio prisons that has them.
“Icy cold,” was his first impression of the 13 Muslim inmates there, before discovering that they were quite easygoing guys. It's just that they see death hunched by the door, and that changes everything.
The Imam knows they've committed the crimes they're charged with. Two killed their wives. But most converted to Islam after their sentencing, so they’re assured that their past sins have been erased. All that's left is what they do now, before the end – “Am I worshipping right or not?” – and where they settle after the end: “Jannah (Paradise) or Jahannam (Hell)?”
“All of us are on death row,” Imam Abdulrahim once told an inmate. “I might die before you do on my way home tonight.”
He knew he was on death row since he was six years old, in the early 1960s, before they took him away to the orphanage. His mother and step-father were in another fight. She called the cops and told her children to run to their grandmother's house down the street.
The police car pulled up just as he fled the house, chasing after his brothers. The officer put two and two together and came up with five. He trained his pistol on the back of little Ibrahim's head and pulled the trigger.
Almost. The neighbor – “Mr. Morris," the imam recalled – shouted in time, “Don't you shoot that boy!”
To this day the imam marvels at the simplicity of it. A pop, and darkness, and he wouldn't have even known. It's a perfect reversal of birth, imparting the same fundamental lesson.
“There is light and darkness,” said the Imam. “First [comes] the natural environment in the womb of the mother, which is a state of total darkness. Then [the baby] comes out into the light of the world. It recognizes a separation between light and darkness.”
And there, nestled in between, is everything that has ever happened, and ever will.
Asr
On Feb. 14, LeVaughn Springer was officially released from CCI on parole.
He’s left behind Muslim brethren in the A2 bloc, but at the age of 56, he's eager to make up for the 25 years he's spent in prison and not with his five remaining sisters. It's not the first time he's going home to Dayton, but he's determined to make it the last. He's getting off the carousel.
“This particular time I’m scared, and I’ll tell you why,” said Springer. “I only fear God. But I’m scared, because this time I’m sober and sober-minded and I’m going to have to change everything...I’m not coming back to the prison unless it’s through the front door.”
Months before, on Dec. 8, he got caught in a coronavirus lockdown and missed the visit of the man that he credits for helping him understand true masculinity — not one defined by stoicism and ruthlessness, but integrity and “telling the truth even if it’s against yourself.”
It’s about 'Asr time when the ta’leem (education) session at CCI is over. The subject of the lesson had been straightforward — wudu, the ritual purification before prayer — but in characteristic fashion Imam Abdulrahim had found in wudu’s every motion insight into human nature.
The imam chatted with his six students a while after, teasing them about their strange names and mock-berating them for their violent felonies, before engaging them in a critique of Ohio’s “prison-industrial complex.” There’s an easy sense of companionship between them undergirded by a deferential respect.
Someone had once asked the imam why he does prison ministry. His response? “Well, somebody’s got to do it. Those guys need someone without a record to advocate for them...[and] the bulk of the incarcerated guys are African-American, and it’s easier when someone of your background is speaking to you.” Besides, as he would once tell his Toledo students: “You might think this just helps you. But it helps me too.”
They’re ultimately working together for the infinity of paradise, which, of course, the imam doesn’t understand quite the same way as others.
“Forever is a long time,” said the Imam. “We can’t even grasp the concept of forever. What are you as a created entity going to do forever? I can’t see us sitting there doing nothing. We don’t call it heaven, we call it Jannah — a garden, and a garden has to be cultivated. Those are signs that in the life beyond this reality, there is still work to be done.”
First Published March 5, 2022, 3:00 p.m.
