Inmates and Imams
Eastland, Terry
Inmates and Imams Who selects Muslim prison chaplains? BY TERRY EASTLAND FEDERAL COURTS UNDERSTAND the First Amendment ban on establishing religion to mean that government may not prefer one...
...Umar told the Journal that "the Prophet said we are all Muslims, not Shiite, not Sunni, just Muslims...
...That question is at the heart of a lawsuit filed against the state by four shia Muslim prisoners at Fishkill correctional Facility...
...Glenn S. Goord, the state's prison commissioner since 1996, recently told the Wall Street Journal, "We kind of never knew how we got the people," meaning the Muslim chaplains...
...There is no comparable strife within Protestantism, Catholicism, or Judaism...
...How many prisoners in New York and other states are adherents of Wahhabism...
...In that capacity, Umar, who is still the president of the National Association of Muslim Chaplains, trained and supervised all of the Muslim chaplains in New York's prisons...
...It's safe to say that the National Association of Muslim Chaplains, presided over by Umar, did know, and that it ensured the hiring of Sunnis only...
...The Wahhabi influence could be seen in mosques, schools, foundations— and prisons...
...Upon Muhammad's death, Muslims struggled over who his successor should be, with one group (the majority Sunnis) looking to the community for leadership and the other (the minority Shiites) to members of the Prophet's family and their descendants...
...And in choosing Muslim chaplains, the department until recently relied on advice from the National Association of Muslim Chaplains, an advocacy group foundTerry Eastland is publisher of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...As it is, prison authorities have worried (see the Fishkill litigation) that if they accommodate at a sectarian level for Islam, they will have to do so for the other religions, thus creating separate programs within Protestantism, say, for Baptists and Pente-costals and Lutherans...
...Indeed, of greater concern is what it suggests about the spread of Wahhabism in the United States...
...As the brief relates, well before September 11, thanks to the support of the Saudi monarchy, Wahhabism had become well ensconced in the United States...
...understandably, the prison administration has looked outside itself for advice on the chaplains it should hire...
...Less well known, perhaps, is that Wahhabism is an expansionist religion, a point emphasized in a friend-of-the-court brief filed in the Fishkill case by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies...
...The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies flatly says that the religion the New York prison system has favored is Wahhabism...
...Wahhabism is a radical strain of Sunni Islam that arose in Saudi Arabia some 250 years ago and is today the kingdom's official religion...
...Not incidentally, it is stridently hostile toward Shia Islam...
...Thus, at a given prison, just as the Protestant chaplain ministers to both Baptists and Pentecostals, so, too, does the Muslim chaplain minister to sunnis and shia...
...And even now Shia are regarded by some Sun-nis as threats to the true faith...
...Yet here it must be said that among the religions the New York prison system currently accommodates, only Islam has sects that are so bitterly divided...
...ed in the late 1970s by Warth Deen Umar, the same Sunni imam who, from 1975 until he retired in 2000, was the department's ministerial program coordinator and Islamic affairs coordinator...
...Surely the state could argue that accommodations within these other religions aren't needed because none has sects in such strong disagreement...
...The sharp and persisting differences between Sunni and Shia Islam constitute a compelling argument for establishing a separate program for each, with its own worship services...
...The New York case is about more than just issues of constitutional law and state prison policy...
...Islam, along with Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism, is one of those religions...
...Wahhabism, of course, is the religion of osama bin Laden, and its adherents include the al Qaeda terrorists who attacked America on September 11...
...Yet the differences between the Sunnis and the Shia are ancient and deep...
...How many in the federal system are...
...Yet, the only Muslim chaplains the state has ever hired, more than 40 in all, are Sunni...
...Why the state has hired only Sun-nis isn't a mystery...
...Indeed, Saudi Arabia by law prohibits Shia forms of worship...
...A problem has grown up in our midst, and it's little comfort to note that, right now, it is contained within prison walls...
...What we do know is that those who adopt the sect tend not to be friendly to us, but hostile, and indeed prepared to give their lives to destroy us...
...Indeed, the Journal's exhaustive story, written by Paul M. Barrett and published on February 5, reports that Umar and some of his trainees indeed adopted "the fundamentalist offshoot of Sunni Islam known as Wahhabism...
...Indeed, it would appear that New York authorities could easily recognize the Sunni-Shia divide as having the same importance in Islam as the Protestant-Catholic divide does in Christianity—and justify separate programs for Sunni and Shia inmates by citing the ones they already maintain for Protestant and Catholic prisoners...
...The lawsuit challenges current policy under which the New York state Department of correctional services accommodates, as the attorney general explains in papers filed in the case, "religious activities with a significant inmate following...
...BY TERRY EASTLAND FEDERAL COURTS UNDERSTAND the First Amendment ban on establishing religion to mean that government may not prefer one religion, or sect, over another...
...Why then has New York state, in treating the religious activities of Muslim inmates within its prisons, favored one Islamic sect over another—name-ly, sunni Islam over shia Islam...
...Blood was shed over the issue, and there have been other violent conflicts since then...
...Named after its founder, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, it is a literalist, legalistic, and punitive form of Islam...
...We don't know...
...The prison system has programs for each religion, but not, the attorney general emphasizes, for "different denominations within a religion...
...Even today Shia Muslims mourn those from centuries past who were murdered and persecuted by Sunni Muslims...
...The Shia inmates don't believe a Sunni chaplain can serve them...
Vol. 8 • April 2003 • No. 32
