The following feature was written in Spring 2026 for Issue 45 of The Abolitionist Newspaper by Shereen Yousuf, published in June 2026. Check out the project here & support the project with a paid subscription to sponsor free subscriptions for people locked up in jails, prisons, and detention centers.
“Oh Allah, bless Muhammad and his family! Adorn me in the adornment of the righteous, and clothe me with the ornament of the pious in: Spreading justice, restraining anger; Quenching the fire of hate, reuniting the separated; Correcting differences between men; Spreading good behavior, covering faults; Mildness in temper; Lowering the wing (of humility), beauty of conduct… Perfect these for me through: a continuous obedience, an attachment to the community…”
This is an excerpt from Dua Makarimul Akhlaq, a prayer I shared with the Muslim community at Stateville Correctional Center in Illinois. I began in the name of God, as is the customary practice for Muslims, and with the words of a political prisoner whose prayer has traveled across generations of captivity and resistance.
During my final visit in August 2024, we met in the large theater hall that served as the site of Friday prayers. Although congregational prayer typically started around 1pm, the community spent the hours beforehand in workshops and collective learning. Typically, when I entered the hall with the other Muslim abolitionist organizers, the space was already alive: A teacher guiding Arabic lessons at a portable board, groups gathering in corners discussing various Islamic topics, others leading conversations on trauma healing.
On that day, we sat together as one whole group, and the brothers invited me to speak. I chose to use my final visit to share a story from Islamic history about resistance and survival under conditions designed to erase humanity.
I told them the story of The Battle of Karbala and of Husayn and Zaynab, grandchildren of the Prophet Muhammad. I was inspired to share it because of what I had witnessed in the community Muslims had built at Stateville: Disciplined care, forged over decades.
I came to know the brothers at Stateville through my work with Believers Bail Out (BBO), a community-led effort to free Muslims from pretrial and immigration detention and support them after release. In 2024, I joined a group of Muslims that had been visiting Stateville every Friday for decades. In the months before the prison’s closure, BBO gathered stories from the brothers about their journey to Islam and compiled them into a zine, which I draw from here.
What I witnessed firsthand was a collective spiritual assertion against captivity and a sustained effort to build a community grounded in mutual accountability, shared leadership, and care.
The Jamaat at Stateville
The Muslim community at Stateville called itself Jamaat Ibad al-Rahman, or the “Congregation of Worshippers of the Merciful.” It was formed over decades through the labor of Muslims across the prison’s walls and shaped in large part by Abdul Saleh, often referred to as “Imam Saleh”, who curated curricula in Islamic Studies.
When Jerel Matthews joined in 2018, the congregation consisted of nearly 80 members. He described it as a community that “transcended race, gang affiliations, ableism, socio-economic status, and prison walls.” He appreciated the “abundant leadership”: We were all leaders in different ways, sharing space and power… Sharing tasks and skills decentralized knowledge, encouraged learning and also gave everyone the understanding that they were all needed in the ecosystem of the jamaat.”
Weekly trauma healing circles reflected care as collective practice. The discussions facilitated by Manuel Metlock, who served as assistant Imam and holds a master’s degree in Restorative Justice Ministries, focused on “traumatic experiences, childhood trauma, fatherhood, brotherhood and being a better husband, all based upon Al-Islam.”
These discussions focused on ways the brothers could draw from their faith to not only heal from past and ongoing traumas, but to do what Metlock described as “perfecting the soul” in community. When discussing anger, for instance, he explained that the relationship that Islam emphasizes requires “balance”. Excess anger could become harm and a transgression of someone else’s rights, whereas an absence of anger could become cowardice in the face of injustice.
I observed the brothers in these circles sharing their genuine struggles to exert this principled and “disciplined anger” with their partners, families, and one another and against the conditions of imprisonment. These brothers used this discussion to hold space and support each other and even offered suggestions to care for one another.
The ethic of collective care extended beyond these weekly trauma healing discussions and was practiced in various forms. Marcial Guerrero captures the beauty of the Jamaat in his reflection: “This wonderful community is by far the best I have been part of in any prison…here in Stateville, I have not only had a great teacher, I also have Brothers. My community has been wonderful and has helped me to become a better person.”
Karbala and Beauty
When I spoke to the community on my final day, I shared a story from Islamic history that embodied faith as a medium for liberation: The Battle of Karbala in 680 CE.
Husayn, the grandson of Prophet Muhammad, resisted Yazid, an authoritarian leader known for his violence and coercion. His resistance culminated in a battle in a city in Iraq called Karbala, and it is often framed as a massacre because of the brutality by which several members of the Prophet Muhammad’s family were martyred. The surviving women and children were taken as prisoners, their tents were burned, and they were paraded through cities in acts of public humiliation. Among the survivors were Husayn’s son, the author of Dua Makarimul Akhlaq, and Husayn’s sister, Zaynab. When a military commander officer attempted to publicly humiliate her by asking, “How do you respond now that God has killed your brother?” She replied: “I see nothing but beauty.”
Without context, this response can be misunderstood. Zaynab was refusing the framing of the violence. She was rejecting the attempts of the oppressors to define her experiences by their rubrics. Her statement focused on the capacity to perceive dignity, devotion, and truth, even in the face of brutality. It resonates with the abolitionist practice of offering an alternative mode of living and being.
Religion in Liberation Movements
Religion has often been used to justify domination, rationalizing conquest and genocide. European colonial projects equated Christianity with civilization and framed followers of other spiritual traditions as either “lesser human” or “not human” at all. Later moves to frame religion as backward, lacking progress, or anti-science stem from this very specific colonial perspective. The same narrative that frames religion in this simplistic manner, simultaneously upholds the narrative of Western, European thought as “ideal” and “progressive”.
However, religion and spirituality have been integral features of abolitionist struggles and liberation movements more broadly. They have functioned as sources of resistance and survival for those under oppression by preserving one’s sense of “self” in bondage, reclaiming the language of spirituality in service of the oppressed as “liberation theologies”, and offering spiritual practices that stir hope, change, love, and resistance in the face of organized state violence and empire-building, most notably through community-building.
Islam in particular has a longstanding history in abolitionist organizing and liberation movements. Enslaved Africans carried Islam across the Atlantic. Though many were forced to convert to Christianity, others preserved their religious practice, such as fasting during the month of Ramadhan—which was practiced well into the US antebellum era—in secrecy.
The connection to enslaved African Muslims also illustrates why Islam maintained a strong presence through the 1960s and 70s in Black liberation and internationalist movements. While these movements strove to disengage with the language of white supremacy and capitalism, they also sought to reclaim the heritage of their ancestors, which included the religious beliefs and spiritual practices their ancestors were forced to dilute or completely dismantle.
Figures such as Malcolm X are often cited in this lineage alongside scholars like Sylviane Diouf, who documents Islam as a “galvanizing force” that functioned as “a world in itself, with its own particular set of beliefs that did not depend on the slaveholders’ view of the world.”
The connections between religion, spirituality, and abolition become clear when we recognize how religion offers alternative modes of “living” and “being” that are not tethered to the mechanisms of state violence and empire-building. Spiritual practice helps people cultivate inner and communal ways of life that resist despair and punishment. This resistance against what our society has conditioned us to believe is “normal” is one of ways religion has served the abolitionist movement.
As Safiya Bukhari, former head of Information and Communications for the East Coast branch of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, a former political prisoner, vice president of the Republic of New Afrika, and a Muslim, wrote:
We must exorcise those characteristics of ourselves and traits of the oppressor nation in order to carry out that most important revolution–the internal revolution. This is the revolution that creates a new being capable of taking us to freedom and liberation. As we are creating this new being, we must simultaneously be struggling to defeat racism, capitalism, and imperialism–and liberate the Black Nation.
This internal struggle is not separate from material struggle. The terrain of religious and spiritual growth offers tools for people in the movement to survive, remain human, and transform.
Jamaat Ibad al-Rahman: A Vision of Beauty
The Muslim community at Stateville prison, Jamaat Ibad al-Rahman, exemplified the ongoing legacies of religion in liberation movements. They used religion, in this case Islam, to put abolitionist principles into practice by intentionally crafting community.
What I witnessed during my time visiting Stateville was companionship, resolve, and commitment to improve oneself–efforts that were grounded in a community of faith and shared practice. I saw the beauty that Zaynab’s message conveyed–to see ourselves outside of the violence, or, to draw on Tupac’s famous analogy, as a whole rose garden defiantly flourishing through the concrete cracks of that crumbling theater.
I saw the efforts of “perfecting the soul” as a vehicle that brought the abolitionist principles of living “other-wise” into practice. Within the Jamaat, the brothers were encouraged to practice accountability and repair with one another. Here, Matthews connects that to Metlock’s discussions of excess:
Accountability is a skill abolitionists must commit to developing that requires both courage and forgiveness. Abolitionists frame accountability as an internal resource used for recognizing harms we’ve caused or may potentially cause to ourselves and others…I understand that I cannot move with the vindictive nature of my oppressors who carry the spirit of retribution in excess.
The Tension of Beauty & Beauty of Grief
It would be a mistake to name what I witnessed of the Stateville Jamaat as “beautiful” without also naming the conditions under which it was built – separation from loved ones, constant surveillance, the violence and control of imprisonment – and the wider conditions of state violence by the US both domestically and globally.
Zaynab’s declaration, “I see nothing, but beauty,” was a refusal to let state violence define how her loved ones and their resistance were seen. She chose to see them for the beauty of their actions instead: Their devotion to God, their courage, their love and kindness for one another, and their unyielding commitment to oppose injustice even in the most dire circumstances.
Her statement also exposes how our oppressors, who remain shackled to white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, empire, are trapped by their narrow vision, making beauty illegible to them altogether.
This is the kind of refusal I saw from the Stateville Jamaat. The brothers did not deny the conditions they were living under, but they refused to let those conditions dictate how they saw themselves and related to one another.
How can movements draw from religion and spiritual practices in our ongoing efforts for liberation?
Communal grieving is a strategy that can further nourish the movement towards abolition. Our grief is both beautiful and radical in its own right, as it serves as a reminder of our shared humanity. Across many spiritual conditions, grief is shared, narrated, embodied, and held collectively. In the aftermath of Karbala, Zaynab initiated gatherings that practiced collective mourning, preserving memory through storytelling and transforming the grief of loss into resolve in the ongoing fight against injustice.
When it is practiced collectively and intergenerationally, grief sustains struggle. To grieve together is to affirm that what has been lost matters, to recognize pain wrought by injustice, to ensure that we remain accountable to one in another in the face of loss, and to exercise agency over how we see ourselves and each other.
In her foundational essay, “Hope is a Discipline,” abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba defines “hope” as “believing despite the evidence and watching evidence change.” Kaba recalls getting the idea of “hope as a discipline” after a conversation with a nun who stated that “We tend to live in/for the afterlife, but hope allows us to live and be part of this world too.”
For the brothers at Stateville, hope was a discipline, nourished by communal spiritual practices of study, devotion, care, and willingness to remain in relationship.
Movements do not survive on outrage alone. They survive when we cultivate ways of being that preserve our humanity and tend to our spirits in the face of systems designed to strip that away.
About the Author:
Shereen Yousuf is a scholar out of North Central College and a Muslim abolitionist organizer whose research interests lie at the intersections of rhetoric, race, and decolonial studies. She aims to explore the ways that abolitionist paradigms can inform social activism within US Muslim communities and strives to practice these ethics herself, most recently through her volunteer work with Believers Bailout, a community-led effort to bail Muslims out of pretrial and immigration detention, and offer post-release support.