By Michael Ashcraft –
The place where Muslims are winning the battle for converts is in prisons, and some of them are becoming terrorists.
“Although there are no reliable statistics, estimates suggest that 35,000-40,000 inmates convert to Islam each year, and nationwide, it is estimated that 15 % of the U.S. prison population is Muslim, or as much as 350,000 current Muslim inmates,” the Huffington Post reported in 2013.
That percentage has risen in the last decade, with some estimates that currently 18% of the prison population is Muslim.
Inmates turning to Islam outpaces those turning to Christ or any other faith. J. Michael Waller, senior analyst for the Center for Security Policy, claims that 80% of the prisoners who find faith while in prison convert to Islam.
Many of them, as did Malcom X, adopt Nation of Islam, which operates quite outside the norms of traditional Islam and is classified as its own religious movement.
If it were just a matter of proselytization, Christians would be challenged to do better. Tragically, some of the Muslim converts are coaxed into acts of terrorism.
In the UK, Kahlid Masood converted in jail, and sometime after his release he drove a car into pedestrians in 2017, killing 4 and injuring 50. British ministers have said they are working to separate radical Muslims from the regular prison population.
In some cases prisoners convert to Islam for protection from other violent groups, as Muslims are the most unified gang, according to reports. In other cases, prisoners are being bullied into converting.
“There’s been clear evidence from a variety of different incidents of young men being targeted and then coerced into converting to Islam,” the UK prison officer’s union general secretary, Steve Gillan, told Sky News.
In Australia, Goulburn’s Supermax jail is so full of extremists and has seen so many conversion that it has been dubbed “Jailhouse jihad.” News.com.au reported allegations of forced conversions.
In the U.S., Levar Haley Washington got radicalized in prison in 2004 under the Jam’iyyat Ul-Islam Is-Saheeh (JIS) and recruited fellow Muslim Gregory Vernon Patterson to kill as many as possible at synagogues, at the Los Angeles International Airport, the Israeli consulate and military bases, an FBI report says.
To fund the acquisition of arms and bombs, the pair staged a string of gas station robberies. Their plot was only foiled because Patterson dropped his phone at one crime scene.
The brains behind the large-scale plot was Kevin Lamar James, directing from Folsom Prison. James penned the press release for the media destined for the day of mayhem:
“This incident is the first in a series of incidents to come in a plight to defend and propagate traditional Islam in its purity,” wrote James, who changed his name to Ahmed Binyamin Alasiri. “We are not extremists, radicals, or terrorists. We are only servants of Allah.”
There are significant and growing Muslim inmate populations in Chicago and in New York.
After studying Islam’s growth in prisons, Professor Lawrence Mamiya of Vassar University says Islam’s attractiveness is various: a sense of belonging, social justice and protection. Muslim Convert Stories on YouTube say that forgiveness and a transformed life, coupled with the discipline of praying five times a day, are also factors.
“The radicalization of prisoners is a problem unlike any other faced by correctional administrators today — or at any other time in history,” writes Mark Hamm in a government paper. “It grows in the secretive underground of inmate subcultures through prison gangs and extremist interpretations of religious doctrines that inspire ideologies of intolerance, hatred and violence.”
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Related articles:
- Can authorities deradicalize extremists in jail? So far, no.
- Does Islam plan to take over Europe with violence?
- Is Islam inherently violent? Look at the history.
- Are there really mass conversions to Islam in the West?
- Sharia in London today.
- UK cracks down on Christians who threaten violence but allows Ali Dawah to threaten apostates..
- Meet the woman Islam fears most.
- Al-Qaeda is offering $60M bounty to kill this man.
About this writer: Michael Ashcraft pastors a church in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles.
