Down in the Chapel

The order observed by men at Graterford conforms as a rule to a Manichaean logic: the self wars for sovereignty with its baser inclinations, a dynamic that recapitulates the agony of a universe torn between God and the Adversary. Between the psyche and its cosmic mirror, we find a social realm similarly divided. Indeed, it may well be the social world of the Philly ghetto and its epic history of tribal warfare that furnishes the template. Much blood was spilled. With each man sacrificed, the once arbitrary boundary between gang and gang, neighborhood and neighborhood, was reinforced. And for every man left standing today, another, at least, lies underground.

While the aging lifers no longer swear allegiance to the degraded symbols those men died for, the habits of rancor persevere. Here acculturation to the prison plays a regenerative role: If I didn’t know a guy on the outside, I sure as hell ain’t gonna get to know him in this place! While this doctrine isn’t always lived in practice, it is lived enough to preserve, in the chapel’s religious subgroups, the trenches of gang and neighborhood along which men died and killed. Before the stakes of existence became eternal life and death, the vicissitudes of life and death were already too real. Before a man came to assiduously police himself against the deviations and innovations of men who would lead him off God’s path, he already policed street corners and back alleys for men who wished him harm. If a man is a lifer, then on at least one of those occasions another life (or lives) ended and his own was destroyed. As long as the exiled lifer wanders in this desert, the umbrella he has jerry-rigged to provide him just a little bit of shade will recast the shadow of the Angel of Death. In this shadow grows resentment.

Here, too, exceptions prove an opposing rule. In spite of the psychic, social, and cosmic forces driving toward war, men labor concertedly to impede such percolating tribulations. Rancor seethes, but wiser heads prevail.

Vic is mopping the vestibule floor. Baraka and the Imam are in the Imam’s office, quietly talking. Teddy is at his desk, looking shell-shocked.

He shakes his head no. Kazi arrives with a “What’s going on?” and sits down at Sayyid’s desk. Baraka closes the door to the Imam’s office. Across the hall on the Catholic side, Mike sits at his desk, reading the paper. In the chapel, Santana and Muti—the lowest-profile chapel worker—are lining up mics along the front of the stage. Al walks the center aisle in my direction, a coil of stereo wire draped over his shoulder. “Josh’s got the Holy Ghost,” he sings at me, as if only to himself, inducing in me a head bop for the same audience.

“Sure does,” Al says. “Him and the other three people that live in his head. That’s why I say to him, ‘What one am I talking to? Can I talk to the one that loves Jesus?’ I tell him, ‘I used to talk to those voices, too!’”

“Yeah, he know,” Al says. “He say he got to stay on the medication or else another four will come out!” With a deep belly laugh, Al rolls on into the Catholic office, where, I figure, he’ll mooch a snack or idly gnaw with Mike on one of their outstanding bones of contention, perhaps upping the stakes in their handball feud, or hammering yet again at Mike that since Mike did nothing to stop his high school principal from giving him a blow job, that makes him a faggot, too.

Leaning on the terra-cotta rampart separating the shoe area from the rest of the annex is a heavyset dark-skinned man whose billowy white shirt and red fez can only make him a Moorish Science Temple volunteer.

This is the first outside volunteer to the Moors that I’ve seen. Baumgartner claims he would have no difficulty fielding a volunteer-led Protestant Bible study every day of the week, but volunteers for the Muslim and the para-Muslim groups are harder to come by. According to Baumgartner, local representatives of the Nation and Muhammad’s Temple profess their eagerness but invariably fail to follow through. The situation with the Sunni congregation is more opaque. Prisoners and chaplains agree that many who might be interested in volunteering couldn’t pass the background check, either because of their own criminal histories or because of known associations with one or another Graterford resident. Beyond that, there is no consensus. Mamduh and others say that the Imam refuses to take the necessary steps to bring people in, while Namir claims he’s issued many invitations but that no one answers the call.

Baumgartner arrives and, rejecting the chair that was set out for him, leans against the wall next to the door. Jefferson, the Moors’ prisoner leader, approaches and takes a position by his side. With their eyes trained forward, the two men have a brief exchange, which concludes when Baumgartner hustles off with a sense of purpose.

From the lectern, a sharp-featured brown reads from chapter twelve of Noble Drew Ali’s The Holy Koran, in which the twentieth-century prophet details Jesus’ teaching to the downtrodden laborers at a spring. To these men who knew no happiness and thought heaven to be unreachably far, Jesus counseled: “‘My brother man, your thoughts are wrong; your heaven is not far away, and it is not a place of metes and bounds, is not a country to be reached; it is a state of mind! Allah never made a heaven for man; He never made a hell; we are creators and we make our own. Now cease to seek for heaven in the sky; just open up the windows of the hearts, and, like a flood of light, a heaven will come and bring a boundless joy; then toil will be no cruel task.’”1

While in earlier centuries African Muslims sounded the call to prayer on North American shores, by the dawn of the twentieth century these were but distant echoes. Unlike in the Caribbean, where the slave trade went on longer and where the permeability between West African and Catholic devotional practices spawned new traditions such as Voodoo, Santería, and Candomblé, in the States, the traditions the Africans brought with them largely died off. Trace elements carried over—but none more salient than the absent presence that is irreparable collective loss. This loss of the former slaves’ traditional folkways was the problem to which Noble Drew Ali’s revelation was both a symptom and a proposed remedy.2

Like Elijah Muhammad, who was born Elijah Poole, the son of Georgia sharecroppers, Noble Drew Ali was born Timothy Drew, in North Carolina. Along with millions of other black men and women of their era, both men migrated north—Poole to Detroit and Drew to Newark, New Jersey, where in 1913 he founded his first temple. A decade later, in Chicago, Noble Drew Ali registered the Moorish Science Temple.

An American religion par excellence, the Moorish Science Temple was and residually remains a hodgepodge of Protestantism, modern black nationalism, mysticism, mind cure, and fraternal order.3 Seemingly cribbed from two preexisting volumes of scriptural esoterica, The Holy Koran transmits the further revelations of Jesus, Muhammad, and the Buddha, and offers supplementary holy instruction from the final prophet, Drew Ali.4 Chief among these instructions was the disclosure, to an audience erroneously known as Negro, black, and colored, of their true national and religious identities: they were the descendants of the biblical tribe of Moab, which in its time also founded the city of Mecca; and they were members of the Asiatic Nation of North America, otherwise known as Moorish Americans. That this august lineage was unknown to the so-called Negro, black, and colored was a larceny of slavery. Rendered ignorant of themselves, the lost Moors strayed after the gods of Europe. It was this collective state of confusion about self, folk, and God that Noble Drew Ali hoped to rectify by reintroducing to the Moorish people the true religion of their forefathers: the religion he called “Islam.”

To understand how twentieth-century black nationalists expropriated elements of Islamic tradition for their spiritual projects necessitates accounting for what we might think of as “the missing Muslims.” For just as the story of Islamic practice at Graterford today begins with the oddity of finding empty spaces in the chapel where the Muslims are supposed to be, so, too, must a history of African-American Islam first make sense of a similar absence. The missing Muslims of this more epochal story are what we might sloppily call the “real” Muslims. Meaning where, during the emergence of these new American Islams, were the native-born traditionalist Muslims?

With rare exceptions, the answer was that they were back overseas.5 For while immigrants from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia had begun to trickle into the United States at the turn of the century, this diversifying drift was halted in 1924 with the National Origins Act. By tying quotas to expatriate populations in the states as represented in the 1890 census, the Act rolled back the demographics of American immigration by a generation. Until 1965, when this racist law was abolished, legal immigration was de facto limited to Europeans, and citizens of Muslim lands were barred from naturalization.6 If, as some allege, Nation of Islam founder Wallace Fard Muhammad, who established Temple Number One in Detroit in 1930 only to vanish shortly thereafter, was himself of Middle Eastern or Central Asian origin, he was one of the few.7 Without an appreciable population of natural-born Muslims on hand to police its boundaries, “Islam” became pure Orientalist fantasy, and an empty vessel to be filled as the religiously inventive saw fit.

During the war years, the Moorish Science Temple was but one node in Philadelphia’s burgeoning religious culture. In his 1944 classic Black Gods of the Metropolis, the homegrown biracial anthropologist Arthur Huff Fauset located the Moorish Science Temple alongside a host of other storefront churches, some fleeting and some seminal: Holiness Christianity, Pentecostalism, Black Judaism, and the Father Divine Peace Mission Movement. In Fauset’s influential interpretation, these religious cults were generated by and appealed to a black population that had recently arrived from the rural South and was collectively hungry for a sense of place and a sense of self.8

If in the Moors Fauset saw the Negro Church’s drive toward freedom taken to its racially separatist limit, subsequent developments would show this impulse still had a ways to go. A full generation before the followers of Elijah Muhammad, who, sporting bow ties and trading their slave names for X’s, would bring Islam into mainstream visibility, it was Noble Drew Ali’s Moors, who, donning red fezes and with “Bey” or “El” appended to their last names, first made something called “Islam” accessible to black Philadelphians.

“The brain is the most powerful machine known to man,” the Moor at the podium explains, “but when we give our thoughts to negative things, we’re using our own power against us. We have the power to do anything with our minds, but because of our own pettiness, we suffer. It all comes from our consciousness. Our thoughts harvest the magnetic force from the ether, positive and negative, so you got to be careful about what you think about. ’Cause when we let our minds run rampant, it’s like letting a machine run wild. And then we just react because we have no control of our thoughts.

“Nothing originates in the physical realm.” The Moor’s pitch rises with emphasis. “The physical realm is only a mirror of the mind, reflecting our thoughts back at us. What you see is what you get. Like Jesus talking to the common people because they had unhappy thoughts,” he says, referring back to the passage from Drew Ali’s Holy Koran. “It’s like when you get back to your cell and you’re reminiscing, thinking: ‘I can’t believe I did that.’ Well, thoughts travel out in the ether realm and manifest themselves in the physical realm. That’s why it’s important to always stay positive. We reap the fruits of our thoughts, and then we can’t believe that things are so bad for us! Our thoughts are actions just like our actions are actions. It all depends on how much you meditate on it.

“Thing is, you got your higher self and your lower self. When you’re thinking about something you did wrong and a voice in your head goes, ‘Nah!’ Well, that’s your higher self checking your lower self. Because the two are always battling, you know? The good lies in everybody. Those who falter are just the ones who let their lower selves take over. It’s easy for the lower self to do bad. It’s easy to take a gun and shoot people in our culture. What’s hard to do is to go up to a brother and say, ‘I love you.’”

In their talk of higher and lower selves, the Moorish Scientists offer the chapel’s clearest account of what Baraka and Al both pinpoint as the crux of doing religion in prison: the struggle for self-control, in mind and body. In its drive toward the sensuous, the lower self is a constant saboteur. That’s why, in their rearticulation of the Apostle Paul’s demand for daily death, the Moors preach how, with discipline, a man can subject the lower, carnal, self to his higher, spiritual, self, his ideal self. Fasting is critical. By fasting, one cleans his body of toxins and returns the body to its natural state of health. People are “addicted to eating”—I’ve heard it said here, which is why their lower selves run roughshod. That so-called black people, who have been separated from their natural folkways, should suffer from self-destructive diets is, to the Moors, entirely unsurprising. But via Noble Drew Ali’s divinely inspired scientific method for healthy living, Moorish Americans can transcend the life of vice and sin and move collectively in the direction of truth and justice.

Jefferson approaches the lectern and offers a salute, which the previous speaker returns. “Islam!” they shout at one another.

Not too many years my senior, Jefferson, I learned one fall afternoon in Baumgartner’s office, is also a native New Yorker, though he is from Brooklyn. One-on-one, as before his congregation, he is well-spoken, if a bit distant. That day especially, his affect could have been described as slick, but he might just as easily have been sad. Or perhaps it was me that was somehow off.

Jefferson broke down for me how the labels that have historically been thrown onto black people—Negro, black, colored—have been used to segregate blacks off from other races, from one another, and from themselves. “We’re the only race that has all these different labels, which is evidence of the uncertainty of who we are and where we come from.”

Jefferson knows that at Graterford his odds in recruitment are long. I asked him why guys here tend to choose Sunni Islam.

“Some guys cling to the majority Orthodox out of a form of protection, or so as to be accepted in prison,” he said. “I know from being in institutions that when guys come to prison, they feel the need for protection and acceptance, and to be a part of a family or brotherhood.”

“If it were,” he answered, “then we’d have a lot more people, so that’s not the answer. Once people come down, and they understand the religion and they understand the belief system, and the knowledge and wisdom they receive, if they feel it in their hearts, that’s what makes them a member.”

As a religious minority at Graterford, the Moors are at their greatest disadvantage when trying to stake a claim on turf regarded by the majority as unequivocally its own. While the Moors used to be included in the Sunnis’ Ramadan observance, in response to a popular upsurge, Namir made clear that as non-Muslims who take guidance from a prophet after Muhammad, the Moors, as a group, were not welcome. Jefferson has a request for a separate Moorish Ramadan before the Religious Accommodation Committee, but his case, which Baumgartner showed me, cited no sources and offered no precedent from the Moorish tradition. Not that, these days, a scholarly treatise would necessarily fare any better.

The Sunni majority’s exclusivism frustrates Jefferson. “We don’t tell them they’re not Muslim. They tell us that we’re not.” In fact, the very openness of Moorish Science, its reluctance to denounce other religions as false, is part of what attracted Jefferson in the first place. Contrary to the Jehovah’s Witnesses with whom he grew up, who were smugly confident that theirs was the only true path, the Moors claim no monopoly on how to get right with God. “I always wondered: What about a kid that was born a Buddhist? A just God will accept his children and judge them for their deeds on earth.” As for the varieties of religion, Jefferson takes a liberal stance. “The journey to God is always the same,” he said, “even if the paths are different.”

Ordinarily two flags flank the lectern—the stars and stripes on one side and the Moroccan green star on a red field on the other—but today there are none. Crouching slightly, Jefferson lays his forearms on the lectern’s ridged edge. He bites his bottom lip, pauses, runs his tongue along the dimple below his mouth and tongues his bottom lip again. “There’s some sort of problem with the tapes,” he says. His facial tic repeats. “They’re not here. Reverend Baumgartner has gone up to try to get them.” Before Jefferson turns it over to the “Grand Sheik”—he gestures deferentially toward the volunteer—he’s got a word to say about unity. Jefferson reads from The Holy Koran:

“‘Let the bonds of affection, therefore, unite thee with thy brothers, that peace and happiness may dwell in thy father’s house. And when ye separate in the world, remember the relation that bindeth you to love and unity; and prefer not a stranger before thy own blood. If thy brother is in adversity, assist him; if thy sister is in trouble, forsake her not. So shall the fortunes of thy father contribute to the support of his whole race.’”9

Jefferson pauses. “You see, we’ve got to stand together. If we stand together we will find peace and happiness. The only thing that separates us is ignorance. God is in everyone. Isms have always separated us. If you look back at our movements in the sixties and the seventies, they were trying to come together, but tactics were used to destroy them. But they also did things that contributed to their destruction. Because we come from a vicious state of slavery, and a lot of us haven’t recovered from it yet.

“The Prophet says, ‘We need to learn to love instead of hate.’ People are killing each other over sneakers, for looking at each other wrong. There’s so much hate in us. We need healing. The first step is to know who we are. We are not niggers. N, B, C—Negro, black, and colored—these were the names given to us by the slave owners. That’s why the Prophet taught us that we should proclaim our free national identity to the government in which we live. We are Moorish Americans. Moorish from Moor, which is from the land of Moab, part of the universal family.

“During the postslavery period, there was a lot of chaos. The Prophet had a different vision. We didn’t need to whine for the government to help us. We are the government. All we have to do is get together, unify, get people into Congress. If we knew back then what we know now, where would we be at? Now that I know Noble Drew Ali’s teachings, I see the whole world different. Allah says that struggle brings out the best in us. The first step is to know who we are. A couple of guys was talking yesterday on the block about trying to get some finances together, but as I told them, the first step is to come down to the Moorish Science Temple and learn who you are. Because it all starts with yourself. You need mental food and spiritual food, not just physical food. It’s like a fuel. To understand yourself, your history, your place in this country. Why would you settle for money on the corner when you can make the same money in a legitimate way?

“The game is rigged. Prosecutors cheat, and the laws are set up to put you here. Three strikes and you’re out. We can’t win that game. The very fact that we’re here talking today is evidence of that. We’ve got to start playing a new game. The game we been playing has got a lot of wins. A hell of a lot more than us. We saw the old heads in prison, and what do you know, we fell into the same traps that they did. We’ve got to find a new game, and that’s this,” he holds up The Holy Koran.

“This is life,” he says. “Allah has a way of showing us stuff. This is the new way. You can get the same money in a legitimate way. We’ve got the Internet now. When I was on the street it was just starting, but now we got the whole world at the tap of a few keys. We got foreigners coming to this country who are making it. We built this country, and we’re filling up the penitentiaries!”

Jefferson’s voice lilts toward a conclusion. “The actions we take affect everyone around us,” he explains. “When I first fell, someone told me that when a man is sent to prison, it’s like his mother has been sent to prison, too. Now, twelve years later, I understand the burden I’ve placed on my family. I mean, what happens when your kid at school hears his pal talking about all the things his daddy does for him?” He pauses. “We’ve got to respond positively.” Conclusive nods bring a ripple of applause.

The red-fezzed volunteer rises and faces Jefferson. “Islam!” they half-shout at one another. The Sheik takes the lectern. Holding up five fingers on his left hand and two fingers on his right—a mystical seven in all—the Sheik leads the men in responsive prayer.

Following the pledges of allegiance to the Moorish people and to the United States of America, the Sheik (“not Grand Sheik,” he corrects Jefferson, “just Sheik”) fields a fusillade of inquiries, some guileless, some skeptical. Asked about a dragon symbol, Moorish holiday observances, and whether a man can give birth (“Yes, a womb-man can”), the Sheik splices zany readings of the pledge of allegiance (“We pledge allegiance to the Republic because it was the Republican Party that freed the slaves, not the Democrats” and “The pledge is one nation under God, with liberty and Jesus for all, because Jesus is another name for justice”) into an address extolling sovereignty and the self-control and self-governance that sovereignty entails.

The moment the service ends, Mamduh and Muti rush in and hastily begin unrolling the carpets in preparation for Jum’ah.

In response to Al’s mild guffaw, I voice my sympathies for groups like the Moors and the Nation.

And I mean it. Still vital outposts in their own right, these groups are most notable as residual forms in the chapel’s living genealogy of black religion. Without the groundwork laid by these inventive American traditions, it is simply unthinkable that on an evening in the ninth month of the Muslim calendar in rural Pennsylvania, seven hundred black men would come together to break fast and pray in Arabic. Because the “second resurrection” superseded what would retroactively become “the first,” it’s hard not to see the eventual eclipse of black nationalist Islam as somehow inevitable. But that would be a mistake. There are good reasons—both world-historical and idiosyncratic—for the eventual triumph of Sunni Islam at Graterford, but it is important to remember that history needn’t have turned out the way it thus far has. While Sunni Islam, whether of the Warith Deen or the Salafi sort, is indisputably a richer religious tradition than its black nationalist predecessors, history is not the story of the systematic elimination of antiquated forms by their rightful successors. Especially with regard to the most triumphant social forms, it is important always to remember: no regime of truth was foreordained, just as none of its vanquished counterparts was somehow intrinsically in error.

To this day, moreover, the Moorish Science Temple’s framing of the intractable predicament of black men in America lives on. As I often hear it—from Muslims and Christians no less so than from Moors or members of the Nation—because of slavery, black Americans are unique the world over for their culturelessness. While I contest this point, arguing not only that African-Americans have a robust culture all their own but that this culture is, in many ways, the vibrant core of American culture, I take as authentic the sense of unparalleled loss that men here articulate. For those whose culture had been torn away, the manufactured histories and identities of the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam offered a place to stand, and a way to stand up. If nowadays their incessant talk of “science” and “nation” seems hokey and their self-styled ancestries manifestly fanciful, their principal diagnosis remains no less true. As Jefferson characterized the practical imperative behind these once innovative religious forms: We’ve got to start playing a new game.

Where my sympathies become outright appreciation is in how, even at their more militant edges, groups like the Moors and the Nation practice a form of multiculturalism that necessitates moving beyond the wan mutual condescension of “tolerance” and into something kinetic requiring coalition and compromise.10 At least at Graterford, Moors and members of the Nation are careful to foreground their truths as historically constituted and culturally specific, as but one set among many. Not simply the realpolitik of the minority faction, this philosophical modesty is a function of the black nationalists’ insight into how a people’s collective experience shapes its sense of the world. Especially against the backdrop of the expansionist universalism common to the chapel’s Muslims and Christians, as a Jew and a pluralist, I very much appreciate this philosophical modesty. And all the better that it comes with a side of undisguised textual and ritual creativity!

“The thing that I find admirable in them,” Papa says, “is their call for unity.”

“Sure,” Al asks, “but why do they have to separate themselves? Why can’t we all just get along? Why can’t we all come together and unify? Why do they have to unify all by themselves?”

I protest that while that sounds great in the abstract, in his call for unity, isn’t Al really demanding that the marginal group suck it up and sign on to the dominant group’s agenda? “Like, ‘Hey, you Jews,’” I say, “‘can’t we all just put aside our differences and come together in Christ?’”

Al shakes his head. “That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m not talking about doctrine. I’m talking about everybody coming together and talking. And taking it from there.”

“Nah,” Papa counters. “Maybe in God’s time”—meaning, in the end of days—“not our time.”

Al and Papa go back and forth, with Al arguing that such unity is not merely a reasonable hope, but that it’s our duty to build it, and Papa standing firm that while unity in time is inevitable, its implementation is wholly in God’s hands.

I suggest to Papa that if he takes a look at the unity between faiths that we find in the chapel, maybe he needn’t be so pessimistic.

“Arguably the wisest that I know,” I say, “excluding, perhaps, my father.” Loosened by intellectual stimulation and concord, I speak before I think and launch into a tangential anecdote from a couple of years back, recalling how in a grim winter of the soul I mustered the energy to communicate to my parents that, lest I somehow fail to mention it again, they should know that I would miss them when they were gone.

Without skipping a beat, my father, a lifelong observant Jew and a man of letters, though arguably also a man of greater comedic than emotional intelligence, fired back: “Don’t worry. Someday we’ll all be together with Jesus.”

It was the perfect thing to say. By burlesquing with a heavy and misplaced theological hand what, in that moment, was the unbearable burden of human terminableness, my father gave me cause to laugh in the face of the absurd. Absent the balm of a viable solution to the precipitating problem, I’ve come to believe that such laughter is a tactic worth trying to cultivate.11

At present, my own speech has been less propitious. From the looks on their faces, Al and Papa are, at best, puzzled, and, in a way I wouldn’t begrudge them, perhaps a bit offended. If for me, counseling courageous mirth was an act of love, for them, Jesus hardly belongs in a punch line.

As I quietly thrash about hoping to somehow hit the switch that will clean up the mess I’ve made, grace comes in the unexpected form of Mamduh and Muti, who arrive in search of Al’s technical assistance. Trying to get the PA system up and running, they’ve hit a snag. With a halfhearted show of reluctance, Al hauls himself up and lumbers after them annex-ward.

Redeemed by interfaith logistics, I follow along. As Al fiddles with the wires and connections, Mamduh grabs the live mic and dates us all with a prophecy from hip-hop’s golden age:

Baumgartner is more circumspect. “The Sheik is eager to get things rolling, but he doesn’t quite understand how things work here.”

The Sheik, Baumgartner explains, is on a temporary pass and has yet to undergo the whole security protocol—a background check and so on—but he’s already talking about adding a second weekly service and getting his wife involved. “He doesn’t get that things don’t happen overnight here. He needs to learn to exhibit a little patience.”

“Oh, didn’t you notice? They didn’t have any of their stuff today.” Which brings Baumgartner to the saga of the Moorish Science Temple paraphernalia cart. He tells the story. A few weeks back Jefferson expressed his desire to have their cart repainted. Jefferson asked Baumgartner to put in for a painting order so that he might wheel it to the paint shop. Knowing the pace of this place, Baumgartner suggested that they wait until the folks at the paint shop were ready for them, and when they were, the paint shop could send somebody to pick it up. Jefferson suggested they remove the cart’s contents now, but Baumgartner again countered that they should wait for the paint shop’s go-ahead. Jefferson agreed to do it Baumgartner’s way.

Fast-forward a couple of weeks. Baumgartner comes back from vacation to find Jefferson in his office, wanting to “inventory” the cart’s contents. The cart, however, is nowhere to be found. Baumgartner looks for it. Jefferson looks for it. They look for it together. No cart. After a quarter hour of this fruitless hunt, Jefferson turns to Baumgartner and says, “You know, I think somebody took it down to the paint shop.” Meeting Jefferson’s eye, Baumgartner asks, “Okay, if the cart was taken down to the paint shop, then why are you here looking for it, and why am I here helping you look for it?”

So is this why Baumgartner was castigating Jefferson last night in his office? I ask.

That’s only half of it, Baumgartner says. This week Jefferson put in a request slip for a couple guys to come down early this morning to set up. Having dealt with Jefferson before, though, Baumgartner checks the names and numbers on the computer. Lo and behold, one of the numbers is off. Not just slightly off, but totally off. And it wasn’t simply an honest mistake—Baumgartner answers my question—because if you know nothing else in this jail, you know your own number. So last night, Baumgartner asked Jefferson what was up. Jefferson took responsibility, saying that he’d somehow messed up the name and number. Baumgartner shakes his head. His intention, he says, was less to ascertain the facts, than to reestablish his authority.

Which brings us to this morning, when Jefferson comes up to Baumgartner and says, “Okay, why don’t you write someone a pass and we’ll go get the cart?” To which Baumgartner replies, “No, why don’t you choose someone to go with me?” All of which went for naught, of course, because when they went to the paint shop, they couldn’t find the cart there, either.

“Sure, it’s locked,” he says, between air quotes. “But that’s no obstacle. It wouldn’t be hard in this place to find somebody with the skills to pick it.”

“Could be anything,” he says. “Drugs, a cell phone, oil. Could be anything. Or it could be that it’s got nothing in it now, but they’re doing a test run to see if it gets through.”

Baumgartner shrugs again. “It could be oil,” he says. “That’s what they’re saying about Sayyid. That that’s what he was smuggling.”

“Well,” I sigh. “I suppose that when you’re living in a place like this, you just don’t get the presumption of innocence anymore.”

Baumgartner disagrees. “It’s not that I don’t give guys the presumption of innocence. If it’s a guy I know well—say, a guy who works down here—I don’t presume that he’s up to something. It’s just when there’s a confluence of certain odd occurrences that I begin to get my hump up. And the Moorish Science Temple, well, they’ve been having a lot of those. But still I don’t presume anything. That’s how we’re different from the guys in the bubble. They do presume that all these guys are criminals, always up to something dirty, always hatching a plan. I don’t assume that they are, but I’m not about to put my head in the sand and say that they aren’t. Obviously, if I only thought of these guys as criminals, I couldn’t do my job. But by the same token, if I wasn’t open to being suspicious, I couldn’t do my job effectively, either.”

In a speech Baumgartner gave me last month that struck me as plainly rehearsed with the destination of my field notes in mind, he described a range of attitudes toward the prisoners. At the anti-inmate end—Security Captain Simpson’s—prisoners are regarded as nothing more than criminals in need of surveillance. At the other extreme—that of Reverend Carvel, the notoriously pollyannaish St. Dismas volunteer—prisoners are nothing more than unfortunates in need of love. According to Baumgartner, these attitudes on the ground mirror broader American outlooks toward prisoners, with “fry ’em” at one end, and “there but for the grace of God go I” at the other.

“I want to reject both those extremes,” Baumgartner said. “I don’t get to do the ministry at all if I’m not compliant with the rules of the system, and yet at the same time I want to bring a message to the guys that this system is not your lord and master. This system is not the definition of your life, of who you are, and I want you to find a sense of freedom, joy, contentment, and accomplishment, even in the midst of what this place is, even in the face of everything that you have been and can never quite escape. I want to toe the line of the institution on one side, deny the authority of the institution on the other side, and feed my family and pay my mortgage in the process. If that’s not the definition of a tightrope, I don’t know what is.” He concluded: “We live in a system that insists on everything being either black or white, but the reality is just a fog of grays.”

Not that the job’s uncommonly rough edges are without their pleasures. Intrigues aside, Baumgartner appreciates as well the license to deliver the sort of tough talk that might cost a more conventionally placed pastor his or her job. “On the outside, one can’t just say, ‘Cut the shit, bitch,’” Baumgartner has said. At Graterford, by contrast, such speech is well within bounds. “God put you here for a reason?” Baumgartner likes to say. “No he didn’t. You were an idiot. Now that you’re here, though, what are you gonna do about it?”

While Baumgartner vocally takes pride in his staff—which he refers to as “the most subversive in the institution”—for its ability to operate within the ruling custodial logic without buckling under it, sometimes he is less than confident. “To what extent am I a part of an oppressive system?” Baumgartner once wondered aloud. “To what extent do I subvert an oppressive system, provide opportunities for self-definition in terms other than those that the system provides? For chaplains this is an ongoing struggle.” On his more pessimistic days, Baumgartner suspects the administration sees his staff as little more than affable opiate peddlers—feeding inmates false hopes that make them, if nothing else, better prisoners. And because prison management relies on communal substructures to maintain order, theological content is, in this regard, perhaps secondary to social form. As Baumgartner acknowledged, the applicability of the tutelage that helps a man survive prison is severely limited: “The guys are taught how to live in here, not how to live out there.”

Speaking of oil, I ask Baumgartner about why I haven’t smelled any this week. To the best of his knowledge, Baumgartner says, the Moors, the Nation, and Muhammad’s Temple are all out. Pulling at another loose thread, I ask him about his comment from Wednesday about “having handed Simpson the_____on a platter”—I refer to the notorious street gang. Baumgartner lights up and launches back into narrative.

Well, it all started about a month ago when he got a tip. (Baumgartner pauses to let me not ask what precisely he means by a “tip,” which I dutifully don’t.) The tip was that the gang was using the Thursday-night Spanish service as cover for their meetings. The Spanish regulars were none too pleased, of course, and a couple of them gingerly approached the purported gang members, asked them to leave, and were told to fuck off. Baumgartner waited until Thursday night and went looking for the gangsters. Finding them there, all tattooed and sinister in the back of the chapel, he hung around. After the service, he noticed that the whole crew was deferential to one guy in particular, whom Baumgartner took to be the leader. Baumgartner fired off an e-mail to security, and the following Thursday, a four-man search team showed up ready to bust them. The gangsters, however, were a no-show. The search team hung out for a while but then left, taking a little bit of Baumgartner’s face with them. The following week the team returned, but again, no discernible gang. Baumgartner sensed his stock drop even lower in the security bubble. Finally, as is often the case in jokes, folktales, and other yarns, on the search team’s third try, the gangsters appeared. The service was allowed to commence, but then, with the visiting preacher on the dais, the search team struck. They pulled the suspected gangsters into Classroom B, where they patted them down and found evidence connecting them to the gang. I ask what precisely they had. Baumgartner assumes that it was their tattoos that gave them away.

“Oh, so that’s who those two COs were last night,” I say, finally getting it.

This Baumgartner confirms. Having rounded up the majority last week, the COs came back around for one final sweep.

The Imam’s office bustles. Guys drop in to fetch their prayer robes, emerging, quite a few Assalamu alaikums later, draped in white. Others stay on, laughing and touching. The atmosphere is light, the air perfumed. Salat al-Jum’ah—Friday prayer—will soon begin.

Muslims flow into the chapel—a steady mixture of blues and browns, black kufis and white kufis, mass-produced kufis and makeshift, knotted-cloth kufis, punctuated by the stray uncovered head. The faces—but for one or two, all black—are obscured by beards, full and partial, unkempt and manicured, though here and there a cleanly shaven chin shines out from the rest.

At the doorway to the annex vestibule, Muti dispenses drops of oil from a small plastic squeeze bottle. Spreading the substance between their hands, the recipients trace their fragranced fingers on the backs of their necks and cheeks, before wiping dry onto their shirts whatever vestige of scent might linger.

Inside the annex door, three old heads exchange numbered slips for shoes. Past this bottleneck, cliquey clusters are forming. On the annex’s eastern wall, another old head directs traffic, pointing barefoot men to bald patches on the floor. In places, these sprawled bodies hint at the rows they will soon become.

Back in the chapel, I take a front-row seat to watch the crush. Insights sometimes arrive via drive-by: “Write how obedient we was, how disciplined we was. Write good stuff about us,” a young Muslim once called out to me without adjusting his gait. More often, engagement is more concerted, with ongoing conversations furthered and new relationships sparked. For gaining insight into Islam at Graterford, such cultivation has been especially vital. For unlike the chapel’s Protestant practices, which to a substantial degree manifest legibly on the chapel’s surface, Graterford’s subterranean Muslim culture required some excavation. By pointing me toward some of what had been lost, the chapel workers started me off. Then, once I’d been told what to look for, the unpast history of Islam at Graterford began to stuff up through the cracks of the ethnographic present.

Given all the things that Islam has meant here, the differences between the fading Warith Deen faction and the ascendant Salafi ought not be overstated. Each asserts there to be one God, a God whose final Revelation was delivered through the Prophet Muhammad in the form of the Qur’an and the Sunnah. For each, a Muslim who has declared his faith is ideally to pray five times a day, be charitable, fast during the Muslim month of Ramadan, and, should he be afforded the opportunity, make pilgrimage to Mecca. The list goes on, well beyond the fundament of the Five Pillars. Not least among this common ground is the unequivocal assertion of Osama bin Laden’s apostasy.13

But the conflicts are real, too. The obligatory, public rituals provide the main stage of contestation. As the majority, the Salafi nowadays dictate the public terms of the debate. Qasim, the final imam of Masjid Sajdah, noted how because Imam Namir relies on an unsubstantiated hadith, at Jum’ah, he erroneously addresses the community before praying; or how on the day of the Eid, “Imam Namir was chanting Takbir—God is Great—and the Warith Deen guys were shouting it along with him.” But not the Salafi. “The Salafi were just there for the prayer”—meaning, enacting the Sunnah without man-made embellishment.

Mamduh, who before he accepted the Salafi da

wah (call) used to pray with Masjid Warith Deen Muhammad, pointed to how his former co-congregants circle their hands, one over the other, prior to eating. “That’s a bid’ah,” an innovation, he says. “All the Prophet says is that one has to say the Bismillah before one eats and el-hamdullilah afterwards.” The followers of Warith Deen are similarly mistaken when they greet one another on Ramadan with the formulae “Ramadan Kareem” and “Ramadan Mubarak”—the Prophet said neither. Another Ramadan bid’ah is their distribution of raisins after the evening prayer, which they do, according to Mamduh, in imitation of the Christian ushers who circulate holiday cards and prayer requests.

For the religiously maximalist Salafi, for whom there is no boundary where the obligations of ibadah (religious worship) leave off and something like the private sphere or secular citizenship begins, the Warith Deen group’s ceremonial missteps are only the beginning. “We have not left out anything in this book,” Qasim quoted from the Qur’an.14 With every action sanctified, the practices of everyday life become a minefield of potential errors. While all avow the standard prohibitions against alcohol, drugs, fornication, gambling, and eating pork, the Salafi go further. The prohibition against listening to music showcases the thinking. Since music possesses you, it is analogous to drinking, and therefore haram (forbidden). Demonstrated, as well, is the gap between such dogmata and people’s actual behavior, since though frequently cited, the prohibition, I’m told, is rarely if ever observed here.15

That the body is a key site of distinction should by now be clear. As a testament to the thoroughness of their prostrations, some Salafi have scarred foreheads. Less onerous are the Salafis’ beards, kufis, and the high-water pants worn to honor a statement of the Prophet that any garment that hangs below the ankle is in the hellfire.16 By contrast, the Warith Deen guys are, in style, both less uniform and less emphatic. Some have beards, but an equal number sport goatees, and some wear no beard at all. Nor is their clothing particularly telling. They are aware of the hadith about garment length but read it homiletically, as an admonition against wastefulness and the arrogance of the rich man who would let his garments tatter. The prescription, for them, is an ethical one, with pant length being only a symbol. As long as one is being neither profligate nor haughty, he is being a good Muslim. As such, they maintain, it is the Salafi who in their literalist overreach fall short of the Prophet’s ideals.

As a place where offense is easily given and taken, the cellblocks are a crucible. Members of each Muslim faction maintain that those in the opposing group lob insults like kafir (infidel), dalala (deviant), or la madhhab (one without loyalty to a school of law). Men on both sides lamented as well the tendency of the other group’s youth to pass by the aged without properly greeting them first, as has long been the custom, or by failing to make the proper amends for interpersonal trespasses within the mandated three-day period.17

As I canvassed the Muslims from both sides of the aisle, everyone told me to talk to Abdullah Shah, Masjid Warith Deen Muhammad’s onetime spiritual leader. In the back of the empty chapel, I asked him what he says when confronted with the prohibition against music. “They know better than to come to me with that stuff. I would say, ‘Present me with the proof.’ If there is one, I’ll abide by it.” If Abdullah Shah showed respect for the Salafis’ methodology, Mubdi was more polemical. Questioning the aspiration to religious perfection, he asked: “What? Are you going to stop needing to shit just because you’re studying Tawhid [Islamic monotheism]?”

One way to cast these sectarian differences is as a dispute over religious authority.18 Evincing Salafism’s originalist sensibility, Qasim claimed that to know Islam, one has only to look to the Qur’an and the hadith. One needn’t get too caught up in distinctions between the various legal traditions that came after. Making a similar case, but revealing the conduit through which the foundational texts are accessed, Yunus said, “Salafi is about doing what the predecessors did. We’re like the Wahabbis. Or what in Egypt was called the Muslim Brotherhood. We’re about not introducing any innovations. That’s what we do. Don’t veer to the left. Don’t veer to the right. Sajdah always took the middle course.”19

Residually attuned to cultural factors, the Warith Deen guys are quick to note how there’s nothing middling about the specific form of Islam propagated in the tracts the Salafi acquire directly or, via family members, from West or North Philly bookstores and Salafi websites. Karl, a meandering but incisive Warith Deen old head who first talked me up at the chapel’s Veterans Day service, assessed the situation as follows: “They take the old ideas from across the pond and not the leadership that’s been sent to them. They read these foreign books that’s not feasible for our situation in America.” By contrast, he explained, “We adhere to the traditions but we use a new method, a new approach, an approach suited to this time and place.” It is a talking point taken from Warith Deen himself who, back in 1975, borrowing a move from the Ahmadiyya, alluded to himself as a mujaddid, a renewer as per the hadith, stating that “every 100 years the religion has to be revised.”20

Like those in the Nation and the Moorish Science Temple, then, Warith Deen Muhammad’s followers, in their embrace of his message, see themselves as privy to a fresh, modern Islam, one culturally suited to the experiences of black people in America. Conversely, the Salafi outsourcing of religious authority to the Arabian Peninsula is indicative, as they see it, of the residual dysfunctions wrought by slavery. In their ignorance of self, the Salafi are easy prey for the Saudis, who exploit black rootlessness, resentment, and, indeed, self-hatred, to spread the Saudis’ own nationalist version of Islam. As Karl said: “Many of them are trying to dress and to be like the Arabs because they don’t have their own identity. I like who I am, and that’s the big difference.” The purported self-hatred also accounts for the Salafis’ rejection of Warith Deen as an interpreter of the tradition. Defenders of Warith Deen recite the Qur’an’s counsel against rejecting a bearer of wisdom “simply because he is one of you.” Or as Omar, the aging chapel worker, cut it to the bone: “They don’t think a nigger has anything worthwhile to say.”21

Which, in turn, provides their Salafi detractors the opportunity for amusement. As they see it, Warith Deen Muhammad’s demigod status among his flock is embarrassingly reminiscent of his father’s onetime position. Just as the members of the Nation used to turn to the newspaper Muhammad Speaks to get their marching orders, so today do they subscribe to Warith Deen’s Muslim Journal. As an interpreter of the tradition, moreover, Warith Deen is a hack. Sure, he might have studied the Sunnah and gone on the haj, but he never fully escaped his father’s essentially political, and therefore un-Islamic, worldview. As such, his cult is little more than zombie black nationalism. Parodying their purported posture, Mamduh said, “‘We don’t care about the white man in Europe! We want to hear it from somebody in America!’ They want to hear it from somebody who came through the gang wars. They think they shouldn’t have to turn to anyone else. But everything they know they learned in 1981!”

For the pluralist Mubdi, the conflict over authority is as much a matter of tone as of content. More than anything, what he objects to is the Salafis’ stiff-necked absolutism. He asked rhetorically, “After all the things that African-Americans went through, you’re going to tell me what I can and can’t read?” In defending his allegiance to Warith Deen, Karl is pragmatic. He’s a Muslim because, as he says, “like a good pair of shoes,” he feels “comfortable in it.” He extolled, as well, the Muslim American Society’s economic-empowerment programs that work to retain wealth within the black community.22 Mubdi underscored the same economic operations. “Religion is just a cover,” he said, “a tool for extracting emotions. What’s really going on is economics.”

It is precisely this underlying materialism that, for Qasim, evidences the two groups’ “different mindsets.” “Our concept is based on religion,” he said. “They don’t look at it that way. They are interested in politics, getting things together, but the Salafi position is this: We need to get our own house in order, and become good Muslims before we can do anything else. But they’ll say: We’ve got to deal with the real world! You’ll bring them a hadith, and they’ll say: I won’t work with that; that was then. They’ll reject verses of the Qur’an. See? Different mindsets.” Whatever Warith Deen Islam might be, in Qasim’s view it is not religion. “Warith Deen is an aqeedah [creed] based on economic empowerment, not on din [religion].” By subordinating God to worldly affairs, the very practical-mindedness that to Mubdi and Karl makes their version of Islam worth practicing renders Warith Deen Islam, for Qasim, not merely a misconstruction of Islam, but shirk (idolatry), and therefore, in the final analysis, not Islam at all.

The protest politics of their counterparts’ youths is to the Salafi another false god. “The Qur’an and Sunnah boys,” Qasim said, referring to the former members of Masjid Sajdah, “we’re not racists, we’re just into the Qur’an and Sunnah.” The more accommodationist attitudes into which the Warith Deen guys have matured are little more palatable. “What’s up with that?” Mamduh said, pointing to the American flag on the cover of the Muslim Journal.23 If for Mamduh the entanglement of faith with patriotism—especially amid the current American military incursions into Muslim lands—is farcical, Karl is unapologetic. Recounting his cohort’s evolution out of the Nation of Islam and into the political mainstream, Karl said: “Back in the day we weren’t as political as we are today. We were separatists, too. We were told not to vote. When Warith Deen became imam, he made a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. It was nothing short of a miracle.”24 And now? “I’m as American as Pepsi Cola, hot dogs, and apple pie.”

In that way that one is especially irked by someone else’s bad behavior that calls one’s own foibles to mind, Karl is unforgiving of the Salafis for their abdication of civic pride and civic duty: “They don’t understand what America is about: freedom. We have the right to practice our religion. Yes, they’re apolitical. Isolate, alienate yourself from everyone else because you don’t know how to deal with the rest of humanity. But you shouldn’t live like a monk. You should be part of society.” Karl noted: “They have politics, but that politics is about alienation.”

If, over time, the followers of Warith Deen Muhammad have taken the integrationist route, in their refusal of civic engagement the Salafi have, in a roundabout way, taken up the Nation’s mantle of protest. In their uncompromisingly apolitical religious maximalism, they express the “cosmic No!” that is one of black religion’s defining themes even as, in the same breath, they simultaneously negate the tradition of black religion itself. Whereas the Moorish Science Temple, the Nation of Islam, and the Warith Deen guys continue the Sisyphean pursuit of erecting for themselves, as black men, a place in contemporary America, the Salafi plumb a deeper well. The problem is not political or economic, and it’s not about figuring out their true identity as a people. While distancing themselves from such modern distinctions, the Salafi seek to solve those problems, too, but only as fully integrated into the comprehensive web of prescriptions and restrictions mandated for man by God.

Ironically, then, the Salafis’ repudiation of political engagement at long last brings Islam at Graterford into proper conformity with what religion is supposed to be. Recall that in the Supreme Court’s 1965 appropriation of theologian Paul Tillich’s “ultimate concern”—which to this day marks the Court’s deepest incursion into theology—“political, sociological, or philosophical views” were cast as subordinate, not ultimate, concerns, and deemed therefore unworthy of First Amendment protection.25 What the secular Court didn’t spell out, Tillich himself did: the mistaken “elevation of a preliminary concern to ultimacy” was “idolatry”—or, as the Salafi call it, shirk.26 Mid-twentieth-century white liberal Protestantism and early twenty-first-century black Muslim ultra-orthodoxy have a great many dissimilarities. And yet, it is according to the religious logic they share—a logic that has in time carried the day—that the doddering dinosaurs who follow Warith Deen Muhammad increasingly look to would-be Graterford adapters like quasi-Muslims, and the Salafi hardliners, whose otherworldly piety once evoked for many the self-defeating dreams of hoodwinked slaves, have become, for most here, the guardians of true Islam.

Struggling to make sense of this all, after Jum’ah one Friday, I huddled with Baraka in the chapel and outlined the dynamics of Graterford’s Muslim communities as they then appeared to me. When he was done nodding his head at my account, he took my pen and diagrammed black Islam’s parentage.

N.O.I.		Sunni
Nationalist		Orthodox
Defiant		Passive
Movers		Observers
Encompassing		Exclusive

Particularist		Universalist
Aggressive		Gentle
Foolish		Sophisticated

Baraka made no objection. Where on the chart, I asked him, would he place the Warith Deen Muhammad version of Islam? To my softball, Baraka offered a dialectic. “We combine the wisdom of each,” he said. The Nation, he explained, was the father, aggressive and directed. Orthodoxy was the mother, providing instruction of what to do and what not to do. Gesturing toward a more general sociological truth, Baraka observed, “There have always been a group of guys who represented that kind of purism and practiced that kind of intolerance.” He added: “A wise member of the moderate middle would wish for the Salafi to continue to grow.” That is, nothing is more conducive to the march of progress at the center than vibrant zealotry at the margin. But this takes the long view.

The funniest thing about the Salafi, as Baraka sees it, is that in spite of their vehement renunciation of politics and social action, they continue to stoke the administration’s paranoia. “They think that they are us,” he said, “but they are nothing like us.” Meaning, the administration mistakes the avowedly apolitical religious radicalism of today’s Muslim majority for the political radicalism of yesteryear’s. What the administration doesn’t realize, according to Baraka, is that the Salafi don’t have a seditious bone in their collective body. The administration wrings its hands, monitoring the Salafis’ presumed Jihadist tendencies, but the paradigm is ill-fitting. Unlike their predecessors, who in pursuit of their rights were willing to adopt any means necessary, the Salafi—as Baraka put it—are merely struggling to comport their personal hygiene according to the appropriate seventh-century standard.27

Nevertheless, it now stands as common knowledge in the chapel that the FBI is embedding informants at Graterford. Paranoid, perhaps, but could it really be otherwise? In this Age of Terror, in which the protectors of the state have shown little appetite for drawing fine-grained distinctions between, say, Shia and Sunni, or secular nationalist Iraq and Islamist al Qaeda, are we really to expect the authorities to distinguish between the Nation of Islam and the Salafi? And that goes double for today’s “jailhouse Muslims,” who, fantastically conjured in the muddled shadows of two mythic types—the black nationalist revolutionary and the bin Ladenist terrorist—can only spur public paranoia.

For what it’s worth, in my time in the chapel, I’ve heard nothing remotely resembling Jihadist speech—though, admittedly, a would-be Jihadist would know better than to talk to a snooping scholar of religion about it. But the anxiety—and the concomitant excesses of control that the anxiety underwrites—is overdetermined. Between indiscriminate violence in Muslim countries and the mass incarceration of African-American men at home, if it was our express intention, could we design a system any more conducive to generating insurrectionist ire among black Muslim men than the one we’ve already erected?28

Donning his trademark rasta-colored knit kufi, Sabir sidles down the pew and starts talking to me like we’re already mid-conversation: “The thing you need to understand about all of this,” he says, “is the way that all of us coexist here.” Soft-spoken almost to the point of inaudibility, Sabir is a People Against Recidivism counselor and an old Nation guy from Holmesburg days.

“It stems from a willingness to endure and survive together. If there was conflict, there would be a lot of useless taking of life.”

“Everybody,” he says. “Men in each religion have the same capabilities. Each has a right to believe and to practice that belief. We don’t intrude on the other.”

“Because wiser minds prevail,” he says. “If more ignorant minds were in positions of power, then ignorant things would happen.”

“Nah, not much,” he says. “It starts with us. We’ve been functioning this way long before there even was an outside imam.” Sabir relates some history, about the old days of the basement mosques, and about other splinter groups that met in the school and the hospital—most of which I’m familiar with.

“I’m part of the Sunni group,” he says, “but I’m a follower of the teachings of Warith Deen Muhammad.”

Sabir surveys the gathering throng: “There was a time when they wouldn’t let even four or five of us walk together. It took a lot of work to get this.”

The chapel is mostly bare. On the pews neighboring mine, a handful of men sit and listen; while spanning the T of the dais and center aisle, seven Warith Deen old heads—Baraka, Peanut, and Carlos at the top, Ahmed and Mikhael halfway down, and Chuck Crews and Sabir at the bottom—honor tradition by providing security. Some stand in place, while others roam. Now and again, as the sentries pace past one another, heads are dropped, and whispers, nods, and smiles are shared.

The injunction comes from the speaker on the dais, which is broadcasting the Imam’s khutbah (Friday sermon) from the annex. “We pray for God to give us strength to follow the Prophet,” Namir says in his accented, almost tonal English. “We need two things, according to the Qur’an. We need hope, and we need fear of Allah. We cannot be arrogant as to be sure of where we are going, but we need to have hope. That is our prayer.”

Last week’s khutbah, the Imam reminds the assembled men, was about a hadith that states: “Beware of unlawful things. If you distance yourself from the unlawful, you’ll be the most righteous on earth. And if you are contented with what Allah has provided for you, you will be the richest.” Today’s khutbah turns to that hadith’s second part: “Be good, be kind to your neighbor, and you will be a believer. Whoever is good to his neighbor, that is the proof of his faith.”29

For faith to be complete, the Imam says, one must respect his neighbors. In Islam, the Imam explains, it is forbidden to cause one’s neighbor to live in fear, just as it is forbidden to take life or destroy someone else’s property. He quotes the Prophet Muhammad: “One must stop such things if he is to be counted among the believers.” As additional support, the Imam cites hadith from al-Bukhari and al-Muslim—the two most prolific and authoritative of the ninth-century compilers of hadith.

With the exception of Sabir and Peanut, who remain standing by the rear chapel door, the rest of the security detail is now huddled by the speaker.

“True faith keeps one from doing atrocities to his neighbor. If, however, a man’s faith is only surface, and not affecting his actions, then the Prophet wanted nothing to do with him. People give excuses, that his neighbor is from another race, that his neighbor is from another culture, that he speaks another language. Islam doesn’t care about any of that crap. What Islam is saying is that you are all one.

“And what if he is not a Muslim?” the Imam asks. “Well, the cook in the Prophet’s home, he was instructed to give food to the neighbor, who was not a Muslim. So Muslim, not Muslim, it doesn’t matter.” While I’ve never heard it expressly avowed, it is claimed by many of their detractors that the Salafi preach against associating with non-Muslims. For the Imam in his khutbah to tack directly into this thicket of contention strikes me as daring.

In Arabic and English, the Imam recites another hadith in which the Prophet declared: Be good to your neighbor. “And what is a neighbor?” he asks. “Count forty houses to your left, forty houses to your right, forty houses in front of you. All these people who live in these houses, they are all your neighbors. That is why it says: ‘Be good to your neighbor and you will be a believer.’ And that is why we make prayer to give us iman” (faith). “Because without iman we’re nowhere.”

Qasim, Masjid Sajdah’s final imam and, for many Salafi, Graterford’s true imam to this day, arrives in a white prayer robe and a harried air. Knowing the Salafis’ reservations about the Imam’s authority, I’ve long taken Qasim’s perennial Friday lateness as a subtle signal—nestled within his obedience to the Prophet’s mandate that one listen to the Friday khutbah—of insubordination toward the DOC employee who happens to be delivering it. I haven’t begrudged him his apparent resentment. The animating disputes between the Salafi and the Warith Deen guys strike me as real and pressing and cut to the heart of how one is to stand in relation to his maker, to his fellow man, and, therefore, to himself.

In the chapel one fall Friday, a man I didn’t know approached me and introduced himself as Jamar. In order to understand the split between the Salafi and his own group, Masjid Warith Deen Muhammad, Jamar said, I needed to factor in the “gang tendency in African-American culture.” It was hardly the first time at Graterford that I’d encountered gangs used as a heuristic. Most commonly, the gang is invoked to disparage some party not currently present, whether they be the Warith Deen guys, Muslims in general, or some other faction. More ecumenically, Bible-believing Christians speak of gangs when calling out those seen as concerning themselves unduly with religion’s ceremonial and sociological components. One, it is said, has a relationship with God, but has a gang relationship with his religion.

Not until talking with Jamar, however, had I encountered someone who evoked the gang in a way that implicated his own group as much as the other guy’s. I was all ears. Jamar explained that when guys get to prison, they tend to gravitate to the people they knew on the outside, which for many of them means their fellow gang members. The next time I talked to someone, he said, I should find out what part of Philly he grew up in. What I would find, he promised, is that the vast majority of Sajdah guys grew up in either West Philly or North Philly, while the vast majority of Warith Deen guys grew up in South Philly or North Philly. “When I look around during Jum’ah, I see it plain as day,” Jamar said, sweeping his forearm across the chapel. “North Philly guys standing along the wall over here,” he pointed. “South Philly guys over here,” he pointed again. The exchange lasted fewer than five minutes, but it was as ground-shifting to me as it would later be astonishing to Teddy and Khalifa that anyone could be oblivious to something so obvious.

Returning to the office after Jum’ah, I asked Baraka, Kaz, Teddy, and Sayyid where they’d grown up. South Philly, I learned. In fact, Kazi, Teddy, and Sayyid had grown up together on the same city block. I burst out laughing. What I’d taken as a paragon of ecumenism—of Christians and Muslims who, stuffed in cramped quarters, managed to do a great deal more than merely coexist—was, in addition to that, also just a bunch of old friends hanging out.

That very night I caught up at length with Qasim. Because Masjid Sajdah’s former imam is standoffish, because I am wary of forcing myself on people, and because of my intuitive and conditioned loyalties to Baraka and his crew, we’d not yet sat down together. I proposed that we do so, and he agreed.

Belying his brusque public persona, one-on-one Qasim proved exceedingly gracious. I had some questions about some of the Qur’anic verses and hadith I’d heard cited, so, pulling books off of the Imam’s shelf, Qasim answered my questions in sequence. I queried him about the early history of Sunni Islam in Philadelphia and the days of Masjid Sajdah. Then I probed the conflict between the Salafi and the followers of Warith Deen Muhammad. While he was initially reticent to say anything, wary of stoking the fires of fitnah (conflict), eventually he opened up about that, too.

When it was almost time for lockup, Qasim showed me a yellowed book-pressed clipping from the Philadelphia Tribune, a black newspaper, about his case. It had been a murder case, and the article focused on the plea for clemency made by a local civic organization on Qasim’s behalf. When the killing took place, Qasim was sixteen and his codefendant only a year his senior. The victim, age twenty-four, was “a well known heroin pusher” affiliated with the Black Mafia and the Nation of Islam, who, according to the article, had been “trying to put pressure on them to sell narcotics.” The boys were noncompliant. A fight ensued. The young man was shot dead. Whereas his codefendant struck a deal with the DA and got off with a few years, Qasim refused to cop a plea, maintaining throughout the trial that he’d been acting only in self-defense. The jury didn’t see it that way, and at age seventeen, for killing a guy in the Nation, the future imam of Masjid Sajdah was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. This was in 1974.

Like many of Graterford’s juvenile lifers, Qasim’s manner has the rough edges of a man raised by this place. Qasim’s full beard is almost done graying, and he is recently married. He is learned in the tradition, and, as the Salafi imam, is often asked to settle disagreements. As imam, he also takes it as his duty to sniff out percolating strife and head it off before anyone loses control. As someone who, temperamentally, would just as soon be left alone with his books, Qasim doesn’t necessarily excel at this task. Though Imam Namir, who once a season has Qasim deliver the Friday khutbah, says he’s improving.

As far as his serial lateness goes, Qasim assured me he intends no disrespect. He expressed horror when I told him how it looked and vowed to do more to nullify this possible interpretation. He’s not trying to make any sort of political statement, he said, it’s just that he works in the prison’s underwear plant, where, in a month, when he makes his bonus, he nets $135 for 120 hours of work. The longer he’s away for Jum’ah, the less money he makes. He needs the money primarily for the phone calls he places to his wife, which for a fifteen-minute call cost five dollars. Not infrequently, as I’m told, the lines cross, and the system, having mistaken the crossed line for the unlawful engagement of a third party, terminates the call. When that happens, Qasim loses his money and, frequently, depending on who’s around, also his place in line.30

“That is why we have freedom,” the Imam continues. “So we can do what we want to do, and so we can be accountable for it. We have a choice: Do what the Qur’an says or do what I have to do? Doing what I have to do—that is the language of jahaliyya,” the period of ignorance that preceded Islam. “To be in jahaliyya is to be handcuffed, because that is what the Qur’an says. The Prophet Muhammad, salla ilahu alehi wasalam” [Peace Be Upon Him] says byoot—houses—showing that your neighbor is not merely the house next to you, but many, many houses.

“There is an ayah [a Qur’anic verse] that says: ‘When a conscious greeting is offered you, you should greet with an even more conscious greeting in return.’31 Greeting one another is part of being good to your neighbor. Allah takes careful account of all things that we do.

“Another ayah says: ‘Restrain anger and pardon all men.’32 Don’t carry a grudge. This is part of what’s destroying us. You can’t give it up: revenge. You don’t do anything now because you don’t have a chance. You’re nice, you’re good, for thirty years even, but then if you get out, all those thirty years are out the window.” Again, I’m a bit taken aback by how confrontational the Imam is being. “In Islam, with iman”—faith—“you say: ‘In jahaliyya this is what I will do, but he—the one who did bad to you—is lucky because now I am in Islam, so I will pardon him.’ Allah loves those who do right.

“It’s not easy. But nothing is easy in this life. The Qur’an says that, too. It’s not easy, but it’s the same for everybody. That it isn’t easy is no excuse to not be kind and humble in our nature.

“We make reference to the salaf, the men who received direct, pure, Islamic education from the Prophet. They are human beings like us, but they are special, because they let Islam be their lead. In jahaliyya, Umar—you know Umar,” he refers to the second caliph. “In jahaliyya, Umar was a hater and persecutor of Islam. And then look at what he became. He became the Umar that you know!

“So you must know jahaliyya before you know Islam. You want to know all the bad things that happened in jahaliyya, then when you make the transition into Islam, you will appreciate the difference it makes in your life. In jahaliyya, life is nothing. It has no value. For Umar, for example, his intention had been to kill Rasul Allah”—the Messenger of God—“because that’s the language he knows. All he knows is the sword. Like guns today. But when Islam opened his heart and when he took the shahaddah”—the Imam recites the declaration of faith in Arabic and then repeats it in English: “‘There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah.’

“When they found out that Umar became a Muslim, those in jahaliyya said, ‘Oh, we are in trouble.’ ALLAHU AKBAR!” the Imam yells. “Before Umar, everyone could say only, ‘Allahu Akbar’”—he drops to a whisper. “But after Umar came into Islam, Umar told everyone to sing it aloud. Umar was transformed! ALLAHU AKBAR!

“That’s the real Islam, the Islam that can transform. From bad to good and from good to best. ‘Be good to your neighbor and you will be a believer.’ It’s not me who’s saying that. It’s Rasul Allah who’s saying that.”

Through the speaker on the stage, I hear the Imam’s hushed voice recite a benediction in Arabic. After which, I needn’t see any longer to know, he sits down, then stands again, for the brief, second khutbah.

First in Arabic, then in English, the Imam reads in honor of Hijjah, the final lunar month, what, he will later explain, is commonly regarded as Muhammad’s final sermon, in which the Prophet, Peace Be Upon Him, counsels the Muslim to respect the life and property of every Muslim and forgo violence and usury, and warns that he will one day face the ultimate judgment. He instructs the believer to treat his women well, to worship five times daily, fast during Ramadan, pay his alms, and make pilgrimage to Mecca if he can afford it. “Every Muslim is the brother of another Muslim,” the Prophet says. “You are all equal. Nobody has superiority over another except by piety and good action.” Declaring himself to be the last prophet, Muhammad instructs the Muslim that should he abide by the laws and examples laid out in the Qur’an and the Sunnah, he will never go astray.33

A silence, and then quietly, more Arabic. The few guys remaining in the chapel file into the vestibule. Then the muezzin recites the call to prayer.

The first half-dozen times I attended Jum’ah, I observed the men worship from the shoe area inside the annex, where four rows of plastic chairs are set up for guys too old, infirm, or, it is said, too lazy, to sit on the floor. I sat, unmoving, my head bowed slightly. Wary of giving any indication of trying to pass, I was equally wary of being reduced to a gawker by the mesmerizing spectacle of hundreds of uniformed black male bodies lined up in disciplined rows uniformly standing, bowing, prostrating, and chanting. Unable to resist taking what felt like fugitive glances, I soon found myself in the habit of taking in Jum’ah blindly from the chapel.

Prayer comes to an end. In the annex doorway, men and their shoes reunite in a jumble, and the chapel begins to fill. I try to make it back to the office but, with the door to the main corridor still apparently locked, the mass of bodies is too dense.

The office, when I finally arrive, is no less packed. Unable to secure a vacated corner, I stand by the door and look on as a tattooed blue shows Khalifa a stack of photographs of faces and places they must share in common.

From the vestibule, the unmistakable command of authority can be heard scattering the Muslims back to their blocks. A minute later, a “whitecap”—as Graterford’s ranking officers are known—steps into the office.

“All right,” the captain says, “move it out.” And the remaining Muslims do.

When the office is empty, a scowling Teddy emerges from Keita’s office. “Close that door!” he shouts acidly, traversing the room. Teddy kicks the doorstop, and the door slams shut, trapping Papa and me inside the office’s suddenly soured air.

Dumbly, I follow Baraka back into the Imam’s office. The intensity of Jum’ah now fully dissipated, I find the world largely stripped of coherence.

Baraka agrees. He “felt violated almost,” and was “forced to think hard about real and present things in his life.” I think back to Wednesday’s conversation and Baraka’s avowed reluctance to have his mood affected by another. “That’s why some of the guys don’t like him,” Baraka says. “He makes them think about things they’d rather not think about. So, what’s going on?” he repeats.

Incoherent from fatigue and exuberant from the power of Jum’ah, I splutter out something to that effect.

“Sure you do,” he says, “but there are some smells that even sights can’t see.” I don’t understand, and tell him so. He demonstrates his frustration at my noncomprehension. That he is being abstruse, I am certain, but whether deliberately or not, I cannot say. The Imam arrives and sits behind his desk. I commend him on his khutbah and he thanks me.

When next I register stimulus, Baraka is full tilt on a rant about how everything has its threshold, and everything has a safety valve where its maker can shut it off. He speaks of the natural order generated by the Creator in which everything is in its proper place and will remain in its proper place long after we’re all gone. Lost as I am, I nonetheless try to counter, suggesting that the existing order is far more fragile than he gives it credit for, and that ecologically, for example, there is no guarantee that the earth as we know it will be around for our children. He scoffs at that, saying that we overestimate our own capability. We are talking past each other. Mistaking what I take to be mutual confusion for disagreement, he turns to the Imam to arbitrate.

“Oh, I agree with you, Baraka,” the Imam says without pressing for clarification.

“Oh, come on, Bar,” I say. “He’s only placating you. He didn’t even hear what you said.”

Apropos of little, I ask Baraka if he’s seen Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, which I’ve been chewing over since I Netflixed it the other night. Using found footage, the film documents the story of a wayward soul named Timothy Treadwell, who for many summers had lived in Alaska among the grizzlies, until one day when, with his camera rolling but the lens cap still on, he and his girlfriend were killed and devoured by a bear.34 Baraka knows of it but hasn’t seen it. I tell him he should if he gets a chance. He asks me why I’ve thought of it. It’s crossed my mind, I say, that a comparison could be drawn between Treadwell’s Alaskan folly and my time at Graterford. Should I somehow manage to get myself mauled in here, I say, I can picture the perspective from which that outcome would seem a fitting comeuppance for such deathwishingly dilettantish behavior. As I’m tiredly reporting this private musing to Baraka, I grow sickened by my likening of men like him to wild beasts and let it drop.

Only much later, upon further reflection, will I come to realize that I needn’t have been so prudish, and that, if anything, such an obliquely associated dangerousness is, to Baraka, not the least bit unflattering. Not that the man is interested in being confused for a devil, only that he’d even less like to be mistaken for a saint. For a fox like Baraka, who only plays at being the hedgehog, the role of saint is simply too dull. For my benefit he may play the character of the Magical Negro, dutifully helping this clueless but well-meaning white boy along on my way, but then he may lurch into a more menacing persona.35 For sure, some of this is about the pleasure of play. It is also a matter of style. Not to be overlooked, however, in Baraka’s performance of a self that falls on the shadier side of virtue are the dictates of his ethics. For unless it is my fantasy, and I don’t believe it is, Baraka regards the drive to mere goodness as a temptation to be resisted.

For what, in this world, without final judgment or even medial relief, is the point to goodness? Once, acute goodness might have gotten a man home, but in this era of life without the possibility of parole or commutation, even the best of men can’t win that game. And so, just as there is neither sense nor honor in groveling before the parole board, neither is it fruitful to go about proclaiming one’s moral transformation. Both can do little more than reaffirm the contempt of those who would disdain you, and reaffirm the pity of those who (more grotesquely still) might wish to be of help.

And so, instead of the vanity of goodness, Baraka has, over the years, cultivated a character of a different kind. It is a persona that has served him well in the chapel, and perfectly positions him to flypaper the next intellectual or otherwise sticky stranger to come along. His is a social strategy that takes without asking the recognitions and license that all the chapel’s transformed men plaintively clamor for, and proceeds from there into terrain as yet uncharted. If not quite beyond good and evil, Baraka is, at the very least, spectacularly askew of these prefabricated poles.

Let the less talented content themselves with the pursuit of goodness. Baraka’s game is something rarer and more refined. What Baraka manages to be is interesting.

Left by ourselves, Namir and I fall into an ongoing conversation about recidivism. Of all the chaplains, Namir is the one on whom the problem weighs heaviest. Recidivism weighs on him since there are more young Muslims than Christians, and so the revolving door leads right past his desk. Moreover, as a relative newcomer, he still retains the greenhorn’s capacity to be shocked by things to which others around him have become inured, such as the frequency in which a young man living in the city of Philadelphia will pick up a gun and shoot another young man. To make sense of the weird corner of the world he has found himself in, he draws on a hadith foretelling the final days. One of the signs, it is said, is that “men will be killing one another without cause. They will be asked why they kill one another and they will say, ‘I don’t know.’”36

When guys are leaving on parole, Namir tells them, “Just remember to feel Allah wherever you go.” But most return. The other day, he reports incredulously, he asked Mamduh about one guy who recently got out. Mamduh told him, “Oh, he’s good.” But then, Namir says, his voice rising in pitch, “Just the other day I saw him in the chapel and found out he’d been in county for the last six weeks! And when I see him at Jum’ah he acts as if nothing happened!”

For all the religious discipline they cultivate on the inside, I say, no analogous structure exists to support them on the street.

This the Imam concedes. More basic than that, though, he says, is the problem that going to prison is, for them, a legitimate option. “That’s why it’s not fair to compare these guys to people who come to this country with nothing in their pockets. Because the immigrants, even those who don’t have anything, don’t know that prison is an option that’s there for when things get tough. Nothing is easy in this world,” he repeats from his khutbah. “Like your project,” he says, commending me for the hours I’m putting in this week.

Embarrassed by his praise, I look away, and notice, as I have on many occasions, the two index cards on his desk laminated under clear tape. Written in Arabic in time-faded pencil are two verses: “For the sake of them, don’t let your soul flee” and Jacob’s instruction to his sons: “Do not lose hope. Go and find your brother.”37

Keita waddles in. Lately he’s been gravitating to the Imam’s office for its more functional radiator. The three of us get to talking about Hamas’s landslide victory in yesterday’s Palestinian parliamentary elections, which Keita interprets as a huge screw you to President Bush and to Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, but which Namir and I presume reflects factors closer to the ground.

As the Imam packs away his desktop for the weekend, Keita asks if he thinks their rumored pay raise might come through. Namir hasn’t heard one way or another, but he figures to find out now.

From his pocket, Keita pulls a handful of Reese’s peanut-butter cups, which he extends to me, and I take. He saw Sayyid, he says. The Imam asks how he seemed. His mouth full of Teddy’s chocolate, Keita reports that he seemed fine.

When we’re alone, Keita explains what happened earlier to piss Teddy off. Returning from the Restricted Housing Unit, Keita found the office overrun with prisoners who’d “come to Jum’ah” but weren’t, in fact, at Jum’ah. He called Teddy into his office and instructed him to shoo them out. Teddy took the instruction as an ascription of personal blame.

“Okay,” Keita responded. “Then I’ll get someone to do it for you.” So he picked up the phone and called for the whitecap.

He’s having it real hard, he says, rubbing his eyes. Every night he’s up until five a.m., and he hasn’t talked to God all week. He says he’s thinking: “I tried it your way, Lord, but I’m just gonna do it my way now.”

I understand better Teddy’s moodiness this week. As he’s told me, Christ is his “venting system”—how he “disposes” of his negative feelings. If he’s not talking to Jesus, then he’s lugging all that garbage around.

I understand, I say, how I don’t understand just how tough it must be to stay positive in here, but that it’s obvious to me how hard he works at it. So if he’s talking about it, I know he must truly be suffering.

“You don’t know the half of it,” he says. “You don’t see the stuff that I see. Guys crying in their cells at night. Guys who’ve just given up, who just lie there all day in their cells.”

“Maybe half,” he says. “You’d just never see these dudes, these dudes that just lie there. These dudes never come off the blocks. They don’t get visits. They have no connection to the outside world. They just know that this is the rest of their life, and they’re gonna die here. I don’t even like to tell ’em I have visits.”

It’s that much harder on the white guys, Khalifa told me last week. Black people are accustomed to hardship. But the white guys, they’ve had so much and have fallen so far. That’s why only the white guys kill themselves. Khalifa loves himself too much to do that to himself. Plus, he remembers that if he does do it he’ll burn in hell forever. But the white guys, they feel like they’ve already lost everything and have nothing left to lose.

“Tomorrow.” He closes his eyes, shakes his head, and says, “Thank you, Jesus.” She’ll get here at seven, first thing, he says, so she can be in the visiting room when it opens at nine. All told, they’ll have six hours together.

I ask where Al is. Al never comes down Friday nights, Teddy reminds me, he’s got his Bible study. Who runs the Bible study on D Block? I ask. Teddy doesn’t know—he’s still new there.

Teddy had been on B Block, but switched to D a few weeks back “for a change.” An honor block with lighter security measures, B was just too dead, he said, which was making him soft and was lulling him into a dangerous place. I’ve made no attempt to confirm Teddy’s account, but it wouldn’t surprise me if his move was somehow less than voluntary, just as it seemed to me likely that his recent block detention hadn’t been for rejecting the advances of a female CO who refused to take no for an answer.

Teddy says that having tired of the squabbling, he doesn’t participate in block Bible studies anymore. Guys would agree about the stories, but when they’d talk about an individual verse, everyone would just spout off about what they thought it meant, and it would get wild. In defending their understandings, guys would get angry. “Some guys just can’t take the disagreement,” Teddy says. “Skins aren’t thick enough.” He pivots. “But the blocks is crazy, for real.”

“No,” he concedes, “not like it used to be, but these dudes is still crazy here.” He launches into a story he’s told me before, about how, a few years back, there was this new kid on his block, a wide-eyed kid who’d just fallen for the first time and a couple of bad actors brought him under their wing, were looking after him, “protecting him,” all the while letting the kid fall farther and farther into their debt. They were setting the kid up to be victimized sexually. Teddy watched the whole thing unfold, how these vultures were setting the kid up to turn him out. So even though he doesn’t like to get involved, he went to the kid, who seemed like a nice kid. Teddy took the kid aside and said, “You know they’re going to rape you, right?” Of course the kid was shocked. “You see, when you’re new to this place you don’t understand how things are,” Teddy explains. But Teddy reassured the kid: “Don’t worry, I’ll make sure nothing happens to you.” So the kid distanced himself from the predators. But then, when they figured out it was Teddy who’d thwarted their plan, the would-be rapists came looking for him. Teddy said to them: “Look, if you want him you’re gonna have to go through me.” Promising Teddy they’d get him later, the guys left. One evening soon thereafter, they came and stepped to Teddy in his cell. Teddy told them to back off but they wouldn’t, and so—bam!—Teddy clocked one of them. The guy stepped again and—bam!—Teddy put him down again. But that’s when Teddy realized that he’d been “brought back to that conviction” (he uses the word to indicate something like moving back over to his lower self) and he felt remorse at having resorted to violence. So he said, “Come here!” He pantomimes picking a guy up and pulling him into an embrace. And that’s the story of how by means of righteous vengeance Teddy saved an innocent from being raped, and at the same time managed to overcome the impulse to commit righteous vengeance.

With a squint and a pout, I evince my incredulity about Teddy’s story. The moral clarity, courage, and mercy described strike me as an unlikely combination, especially when the purported hero happens to be the narrator. Teddy waves off my skepticism.

I tell Teddy how my heart broke a little bit yesterday during Liberty Ministries when I realized that he hadn’t had mayonnaise in years. He has no clue what I’m talking about. “Jay and the sandwiches?” I try.

He bursts out laughing. “Nah, I was just messing with him.” Apparently, he loves messing with Jay. “That guy is so serious. Like a sandwich is gonna save a homeless guy … please!” Only via a sucker’s pity, it would seem, does mayonnaise become a coveted delicacy.

I ask Kaz if the Imam’s khutbah hit him hard today. I know from Teddy that some Muslims—Kazi and Sayyid among them, I can only presume—criticize the Imam for passing judgment on guys for things like violating parole, when he’s never had to walk in their shoes.

“Well, you know,” Kaz says, chuckling in deflection, “I’m used to his jawns.” Jawns is Philly for joint, an all-purpose nominal stand-in.

“Ah, let him duck it,” I say, trying to respect Kazi’s reluctance to talk shit.

We jump to the less precarious topic of illicit contraband. “These dudes is crazy,” Teddy says. “You know there’re dudes have cell phones up in here? I’m telling you, these dudes is crazy. Some of these guys talk to their lady every day. But what are you gonna say?” Teddy’s voice deepens its pitch: “Yeah, baby, I’m lying here in my cell…”

Khalifa arrives with a plastic-wrapped brick of tea bags. Teddy puts up the kettle, and when prompted, I pull a tower of Styrofoam cups from Al’s desk drawer.

The water is boiled and poured. The tea bags are dropped and steeped. Sugar packets are torn, emptied, and the resulting mixture is poured back and forth between two Styrofoam cups. Refusing their offer of tea, I accept a cup of steaming water, which I cradle beneath my chin for warmth.

Once again, Teddy shepherds conversation to the topic of conjugal visits. This time he wants to know what the chaplains think.

Wondering if this is perhaps not for me to report, I say, simply, “We all agree.”

“That when you suppress basic human drives, they’re gonna squeeze out in some other way.”

Khalifa seems satisfied by my answer. “It just doesn’t make any sense from a management perspective,” he says. “Driving dudes crazy like that.”

“It’s not motivated by a desire to manage,” I say. “It’s motivated by a desire to punish.” I ask if whether, in spite of the lack of lawful opportunity, men nonetheless manage to have sex with their wives.

Teddy has, he says, in the visiting room once. He got sent to the hole for it, though. This was in 2000, back when his mom was dying. Even after his ninety days, he was barred from receiving visitors for six months, so he didn’t get to see her before she died. When the probationary period ended, his brothers and sisters came to see him. Teddy told them: “Look, the one who held us all together, she’s gone now. I don’t want to see none of y’all anymore. I’ll see y’all when I’m out of here.” And he hasn’t seen any of them since.

We talk further nonsense. Sex, contraband, fighting. Khalifa and Teddy trade allusions to their bygone youths during the era that was theirs, before they were drawn into this crazy time warp where, according to Teddy, old heads argue endlessly about how things are when what they’re really arguing about is how things were in 1975.

They reminisce about the “schools” they got sentenced to. Khalifa didn’t enter the system until he was pushing eighteen, but Teddy was fourteen when he first got sentenced to a youth facility. That place, he says, was far worse than this jail is now. Much more violent. Unlike this place, rape was prevalent there, and the only way to survive was to fight. So Teddy learned to fight. What he didn’t learn to do was read. It was only later on, well into adulthood, when he’d been in Graterford for some time, that he learned how to do that. He’d always passed like he could, but the shame was beginning to wear him down. His wife would beg him to write her cards, and he wanted to, but he couldn’t. So one day he told his wife: “I have a secret that only God knows.” He showed her a letter he’d started, which demonstrated his illiteracy. “I’m so sorry, baby!” Lily said, and took him in her arms. And ashamed as he was, he hauled his ass down to the school and got himself some help. But more than from the tutoring, he learned to read in his cell, from his Bible. And then one day he finally got it. Able to read with some proficiency, he finally understood what Jesus was saying. After that he was able to participate in Bible studies—participate for real, not just like another faker who comes down and gives a bunch of testimony to cover up the fact that he can’t read what the Word says.

Of course, Teddy says, that’s what testimonies are for. So that guys who can’t read can have a Bible study of their own. He used to be the same way, he says. And now look at him—he knows the Bible practically by heart. And even though he’s only got a GED, Teddy’s told me, the administration respects him, and the other guys look up to him.

So they didn’t learn how to read, but they did learn how to fight. They would fight in closets the size of Baumgartner’s bathroom, fewer than three foot square. So he learned to fight like this, he demonstrates, ducking in and under, springing up and jabbing tight. Amid the punches, Teddy again references the vigilante justice he was forced to exact in support of the kid who’d nearly been raped. Once again I play like I know better. This time, seeking to tip the balance, I try to enlist Khalifa in my skepticism, but Khalifa is having none of it.

“Look,” Khalifa says, “I lied when I was back on the street, but as soon as I got life in prison, I didn’t have to lie anymore.” To counter the idea that as a “jailhouse Muslim” he’s merely faking his faith, Mamduh once said something similar: “I don’t know who we’re trying to impress,” he said, looking from side to side. “Ain’t nobody round here to impress.”

Feeling rebuked, I try to roll with it. “I never learned how to fight,” I say. “It’s different when you’re Jewish. When I was a kid, all I was taught about fighting was that if I was mugged I ought to give the muggers whatever they asked for. That’s what Jews are taught.”

Khalifa looks at me cross-eyed. “All parents teach their kids that. That’s not a Jewish thing. That’s just common sense.”

Just to have something to say, I ask, “So did you guys know any Jews growing up?”

“Yeah, there was one Jew,” Teddy says. Once, he explains, the neighborhood had lots of them, but by the time he and ’Lifa were coming up, there was only one left. “He was the grocer, and your mom bought insurance from him, and before school started in the fall, you’d buy your school clothes from him. And then, on the last Friday of the month, after he made his rounds to collect his insurance checks, he was the guy you would rob!” Teddy cracks up and solicits from me a five of medium height.

“Huh,” I say, referring back to Tuesday’s conversation. “And you don’t think that maybe the muggings had something to do with why the Jews left the neighborhood?”

Now it’s their turn to be incredulous—incredulous that I would so blatantly mistake an effect for a cause.

“Nah,” Khalifa says, “they left because they finished taking all the money out.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Teddy says, “it’s Friday.” Generally, when I take my leave, Teddy complains that I spend all my time with the Jews and the Muslims, but tonight he raises no protest.

In the bustling vestibule, I happen upon Damon, the Rastafarian, and Rudy, the prisoner leader of St. Dismas. Both are here for rehearsal, Damon for Sunday choir practice in the chapel, and Rudy for his group the Mighty Way, which uses the conference room. The two middle-aged men cut quite the Afrocentric pair—Damon with his dreadlocks, wooden bead necklace, and black leather Africa medallion, and Rudy with his long braids and thick beard. In addition to a romantic commitment to a promised land lost, at one time such symbols must have also signaled fiery youth. No longer.

“You think a lot’s going on now?” Damon asks. “You should have seen it before ’95. We had Bible studies every day of the week.”

“It wasn’t just the Christians that were affected by the raid,” Rudy adds. “They took away the beautiful Muslim space downstairs, too. They let the Jews keep their place upstairs as a study, but they moved their services to the annex. That was the compromise.”

“The COs try to snuff them out,” Damon says. “Whenever they come upon three or four of us together.”

“What they’re really concerned about,” Rudy adds candidly, “is that if they let four or five Christians meet, then the Muslims will want to meet, too, and then suddenly you’ll have ten Muslims meeting.”

Damon recalls the best Bible study from back in the day. It took place in the school, and “the teacher would do hermeneutics.” I ask Damon what he means.

“I mean going back to the original word,” he explains. “Because the original word in the ancient Hebrew can mean so many different things.” Among those here who’ve experimented with such methods, biblical Hebrew seems endowed with an inordinate amount of linguistic play. Rather than seeing the elasticity of meaning they encounter in Hebrew as a property of language as such, they appear to regard Hebrew, specifically, as some sort of Ursprache, with a unique mystical openness. An analogous Hebraic exception is found in allusions to the Hebrew “culture” of the Old Testament. For while Teddy and Al are quick to identify the prohibition against eating shellfish as a “custom of the people,” they would never think to historicize similarly, say, Paul’s attitudes toward homosexuality. And so, the fact that a man’s access to God is circumscribed by his culture remains, in the chapel, more or less, a Jewish problem.

“Shabbat shalom,” Damon shouts over my shoulder at—I turn to find—the matronly Steinberg sisters, tonight’s Jewish volunteers. Damon, as I know from past conversation, grew up a half generation prior to Teddy and Khalifa, when the Jews were still around. His best friend was Jewish and the friend’s mother was like Damon’s second mom. “I may be goyim,” Damon likes to say, “but I’m not meshugannah. I’m mishpachah.”

Damon excuses himself for choir practice, and I follow him into the chapel. I ask how the choir is faring under Santana’s renewed watch. It’s coming together, he says, but now he’s got to step up and solo, which he doesn’t like to do. Pulling on his dreads and fingering his Africa medallion, Damon reminds me that he used to be choir director. While as far as I know Damon’s dual religious allegiance doesn’t garner him too much grief, Reverend Baumgartner drew the line at having an avowed Rastafarian serve as the Sunday service choral director.

“Excuse me, Josh,” Santana snipes. “We’ve got to get to work.” I apologize, and beat it.

In Classroom A, in what must be an ad hoc Baptism class, Keita is pressing eight men to weigh the importance of faith versus that of actions.

“How does one know faith?” he asks me directly. Having heard this formula enough times over the past year, I believe I know the right answer.

Keita laughs, though whether what’s funny is that I’m in the know or that I remain outside of it, I can’t judge. Without settling my uncertainty, Keita introduces a hypothetical. Say you’re living next to a crack dealer—do you turn him in? “What,” he asks, “is the Christian thing to do?” Though I long to hear the answer, to hear Keita’s students wrestle not between good and evil but between two goods pitted tragically in mutual exclusion, I feel bound by my date upstairs.

Brian is arguing about Collins, this time with Eugene, a half-black, half-Jewish Vietnam vet. What Collins means, Eugene says, is that the federal court recognizes that a “Sixth Amendment violation deserves a merit-based analysis if you can get past the gatekeeper.”

“No, that’s not it at all,” Brian corrects him. “Collins will be instrumental because if you have a Brady claim, the system is more apt to grant a Sixth Amendment ineffective-assistance-of-counsel claim than to implicate their own for having committed errors.”

Brian asks me what I think. I say that it’s all over my head, which it is. Brian rolls his eyes but explains nonetheless. “Let’s say you assert a Brady violation, that being that the prosecution withheld, willfully or otherwise, potentially exculpatory evidence. What I submit to you is that what Collins does is give the court a way to grant relief without implicating its own. Collins allows them to reverse not because the DA lied and cheated, but because the defense attorney was an ass. My contention to you is that for the court, this is a far more palatable proposition.”

For Eugene, paramount is Collins’s potential payoff. So as he did this week for Baraka and Teddy, among countless others, surely, Brian shifts from legal interpreter into dream crusher, informing Eugene that Collins does not mean that you’ll automatically get back into court just because you had a Brady claim. “Look, if the court already ruled on you, then whether it addressed your Brady claim or not, you’re done.”

Having seemingly honored his other extracurricular obligations, Lenny arrives earlier than usual. He circles the table and extends an affectionate hand to both Steinberg sisters and, upon sitting down, makes inquiries into family and health.

He says, “I’ve started reading Forster’s A Passage to India, and to be quite honest, I don’t see what all the fuss is about.” He shrugs and disappears into the kitchenette, presumably to make coffee.

The seven of us continue to warm each other up with small side conversations, which, absent the Rabbi’s stewardship (the Rabbi comes in Saturday mornings instead), forms—along with candles and coffee—the substance of Kabbalat Shabbat services. As a bunch of people talking over one another with a mixture of rudeness and affection, Friday-night service is an unmistakably Jewish species, and its patter makes me feel unselfconsciously myself in a way unique for the chapel week.

The headline that has everybody’s attention is Hamas’s victory. Staking out the Darwinian right, Lenny declares that “the history of the world is people conquering one another”—meaning, it’s time for the Palestinians to get over it. With a commensurate escalation of pitch, David lends his support. “Stalin took this swath of Poland”—he gesticulates over here—“this swath of Germany”—he gesticulates over there. “Twenty-five million people moved, and nobody did a thing! Israel conquers a piece of the Arab world half the size of Delaware and suddenly it’s the greatest injustice the world has ever seen? I mean, come on!”

“The Jews came to the desert and made it flow with milk and honey!” someone shouts, a founding cliché drowned out in the emerging tumult between David and Brian.

Though hardly the dove that the Rabbi is, with David sounding the alarm about Hamas, Brian is forced to the center. “David,” he says in that way that naming one’s interlocutor signals a muted assault, “it’s not the end of the world. It’s just like with the Irgun. With legitimacy, they will become more moderate in time.”

David rejects the comparison between Mandate-era Jewish militants and Hamas, and offers a litany of factual distinctions between them. “Come on, they’re Nazis,” he says of Hamas. “They’re very clear about their desire to push the Jews into the sea.”

Perhaps feeling impelled to represent leftist orthodoxy in the Rabbi’s stead, or perhaps yelling simply because it’s what I know how to do, I decry David’s double standard, and the carte blanche it issues Israel to lob bombs, assassinate, and bulldoze homes. Lenny defends Israel’s behavior as the necessary outcome of the Arab states’ unwillingness to repatriate refugees after ’48 and ’67—they exploit Israel as a wedge issue to curry the world’s sympathy at the expense of their own people.

“Sure,” I shout back, “and the Arab media sensationalizes Palestinian suffering to justify retaliatory violence—just as I’m sure there are Iraqi factions that torture people. But oughtn’t we to hold our own to a higher standard?”

“At this point?” I say. “Black hats from Brooklyn, Baruch Goldstein…” I refer to the ultraorthodox settler who murdered twenty-nine Palestinians in Hebron in 1994.

Righteous Lenny is easy prey for my exceptionalist “higher standards” argument. “Look,” he says, “we ought to give Hamas a shot. Either we’ll get peace or, more likely, they’ll continue with the terror, and then we’ll have the right to go in and kick the shit out of them.” Running with my allusion to torture, Lenny segues into a rant on the criminal immorality of our current regime—the wanton destruction that has been wrought in democracy’s name. “It’s a shanda,” he shrieks—it’s shameful.

With utmost moral seriousness, I muse on my feelings of complicity in our country’s military excesses. David looks at me like I’m crazy.

In David’s bemusement, I’m made suddenly cognizant of the radical distance between his citizenship and mine. “Huh,” I say. “I guess you don’t necessarily feel part of all this. Or maybe you’re not part of this, you being this weird class also subject to the repressive apparatus of American imperial power, and without a voice in the process.” Realizing that I needn’t speculate, I ask, “I mean, how exactly do you feel?”

“What do you mean?” David asks, spit flying from his lips. “Of course I want to overthrow the government!” If at Graterford a Salafi Muslim must be exceedingly vigilant as to what he says to whom in his desire to see the Union destroyed, a white man enjoys significantly more freedom to sound off.

“Sure,” I say, unsure as to how to navigate the escalation. “Don’t we all?”

“Fine,” he says, “we’re all implicated”—he overenunciates mockingly. “And what are you doing about it?”

“What do you mean?” I ask, taking faux affront. “I’m sitting right here talking about it, aren’t I?” Which is to concede David’s point.

As frequently happens, David links the subject matter at hand to his personal history, his reported experience of state negligence and persecution, first when his daughter was being abused, and then again, when prosecuted for going after the animal who was doing it to her.

“Okay, okay,” Lenny pleads. “You’re a professional victim. We understand, already!” Nothing aligns Lenny and Brian quite like David discussing his case. An unfamiliar CO cautiously pokes his head in—“to check on the ladies”—declines a cup of coffee, and leaves.

“Why don’t you tell them”—the Steinberg sisters, that is—“about your project?” which, despite his great curiosity, he professes to know next to nothing about. I try to beg off. He insists. I resist. He insists again. No one else makes a move. With a mildly malevolent smile, Brian pleads: “You never debrief me!”

“Well,” I say, hoping to move on to something else, “based on my careful study, it appears as if religion at Graterford provides a super-interesting set of phenomena and that the guys who live here are, in fact, human beings.”

Brian tells me not to be obtuse, so I talk about pluralism, about how I was early on struck by the range of religious practices here, and how due to a set of historical contingencies—some of which I recount—Graterford’s chapel ranks among the world’s most religiously diverse places. Simultaneously, however, the chapel remains, I argue, a thoroughly Protestant space, both in the sense that the vast majority of groups practicing here have emerged from that tradition, and also in the sense that the rules of the game by which religion is regulated, rules that conceive of religion foremost as a matter of individual belief, are residually Protestant rules. That said, I acknowledge what, all things considered, is an extraordinary amicability among the chapel’s many groups. Noting the discriminatory and divisive place that the chapel, in more sectarian hands, could be, I give some credit for this tolerant mood to Reverend Baumgartner. “But,” I add, “I am not to be trusted on this.”

“Because Baumgartner has had a large role in shaping my thinking about this place. Plus, I like him quite a bit and suspect I might be something of his booster.”

“What?” I say. “Am I talking to Teddy here? I didn’t know I was required to give yes or no answers.” It’s Teddy who most often harangues me for my alleged evasiveness, when what I’m being, I believe, is nuanced.

“What?” I plead. “I can’t answer a question with a question? I mean, aren’t we all Jews here?”

One of the sisters interjects. “But how do you know that what you’re seeing here is representative? Aren’t you going to compare your findings with other jails?” It’s a reasonable objection.

“No,” I say. “Certainly I’d be curious to someday compare Graterford to other prisons, but for the time being I’m content to simply treat Graterford in the full splendor of its particularity. I mean, in this jail alone, there’s far too much going on to be captured in one book. In places, I would hope to indicate what’s Graterford-specific and what might be indicative of things one might find across the system. But, quite honestly, I’m more than happy to give a partial representation of what the practice of religion is like at one particular prison at one particular moment in time. In fact, I very much want to interrupt the reader’s desire to know what ‘religion in prison,’ as such, is all about.”

While it’s been some time since an ethnographer could unselfconsciously presume that by scrutinizing a single African or Indonesian village, he might unearth the social logic by which primitive peoples live always and everywhere, in the project at hand I am exceedingly wary of this temptation of overgeneralization. As was once true of the “primitive,” the “prisoner” is a fantastical persona, a figure shrouded by distance, an object of curiosity and desire. Because prisoners are largely rendered silent and invisible, it is easy enough to let one small set stand in for them all. Such, anyway, was the standard operating procedure during prison ethnography’s mid-century heyday. Through observation at one Southern Illinois state penitentiary (the proclaimed “Middletown” of American prisons), sociologist Donald Clemmer could abstract “prisonization” as the force through which members of The Prison Community became socialized into a particular set of attitudes. And by interviewing prisoners at New Jersey’s Trenton State, Gresham Sykes could theorize subcultural identification as a prisoner’s sole means for surviving The Society of Captives.38

Claims of this size and scope have their place, but I have long suspected myself, in the present case at least, to be constitutionally unwilling to make them. As I maintained going in, Graterford is no more just “a prison” (and therefore all prisons) than Philadelphia is just “a city.” Idiosyncrasies—of locality, of history, and of personality—matter too much to be rubbed away. (If Graterford were simply a run-of-the-mill maximum-security prison, one could well ask, would I really be on hand to see it?) If I was cognizant of some of my limits, I was a bit shakier as to what precisely I was up to. Before I’d found my way to the office, I started with the chapel’s formal rituals. Primarily because mixing it up came to me more naturally than did quietly watching and writing it down, I found my footing in dialogue. And so, when in the course of introducing myself, people would ask me what it was I was writing about, I would say that this was precisely what I was hoping they would tell me.

Some months into my time at Graterford, I arrived in the chapel to find Baraka in Chaplain Keita’s office with a stocky, white-bearded Muslim I’d never met. The two of them were sampling some VHS recordings of the Masjid Warith Deen Muhammad community in its heyday. In the video, silent at least in this playback, a couple dozen men are gathered in the garden that used to lie outside the chapel’s southeast corner. They are executing some sort of military-style drill; a cut, and now the men are milling about. Riveted by these images, I was distracted when the white-bearded Muslim called me slowly by name. I asked him his. Musa, he said. He had a grounded presence and a mischievous eye. I asked Musa how long he’d been at Graterford. Since the seventies, he told me. What I needed to understand, Musa instructed me, half-watching the video, was that back in the day, they hadn’t had any of this; that before the agitations of his Muslim community, prayer rugs, kufis, and all religious literature up to and including the Qur’an had been contraband.

I asked Musa whether he’d been in the Nation back then or whether he’d been a Sunni. Two questions was fine, Musa said, but three was an interrogation. He asked me what exactly I was planning to write about religion in prison. I explained, as I was in the habit of doing, that I wasn’t testing out a theory per se. Instead, I was trying to get a sense of how Graterford’s prisoners themselves conceptualized their religion; as I figured it, the insights of those who thought about it and lived it here would prove both more surprising and more revealing than the scholarly frameworks I was coming out of. Musa looked at me without speaking. I continued, rattling on about how while I was for sure curious about how people at Graterford might generalize about “prison religion,” in my perspective a given prison was a particularity, socially contingent in time and space. At this point it would have been polite (in my world, anyhow) to respond with a question, an objection, or at the very least an “uh-huh” to signal engagement, but Musa just kept looking at me unblinkingly. Struggling to fill the silence, I asked him if he got what I was saying. He shrugged the question off like there was nothing to get.

“In my judgment,” I say, back at shabbos, “the impulse to generalize broadly about a class of people often accompanies an unwillingness to see that class of people as people.” Consequently, I explain, I’m reluctant to compress the men of Graterford into one conceptual box. “People are simply too interesting to be reduced down to one or two generalizations.”

Eugene nods, but the Steinberg sisters seem unmoved. I try again: “Look, the landscape of religious practice in this place now is radically different than it was pre-raid, right?”

“Right,” Eugene says. “And religion at Graterford is way different than religion at Dallas. They’ve got so many things going on up there.”

“Right,” I say. “Dallas is a medium-security institution. It’s in the mountains. Different prisoners, different chaplains, different COs, different culture. That is to say, it’s different up there from down here, right?”

Brian seems predictably annoyed. “And that’s it?” he says. “Your advisors up at Princeton are going to be satisfied with a dissertation that says that? That says that religion at Graterford is … different?”

“It’s true,” I concede. “It will require a wee bit more obfuscation than that if it’s gonna pass.”

“Why are you interested in prisons at all?” Brian shifts. “Why do you care about what we lowlifes are doing in here?”

I recount how when I was small, my mother worked at Rikers Island and how, from adult dinner table discussions, I became horrified and transfixed by emergent American mass incarceration. Later, when I began to think about what to do with my life, prisons seemed like a place to make some sort of intervention.

I explain that upon graduating from college, I went down south to work for an organization that provides legal representation to people on death row. How, I wondered at the time, could anyone do anything else? Had I been slightly more self-aware, I might have acknowledged such reasoned righteousness as only part of the call. Another was the ecstatic American imperative to go forth and experience the world for oneself, to see it, touch it, and feel it; to override, that is, a competing injunction: how for a Jew, as my father has put it without a shred of shame, “primary experience is reading about it.”

Brian leans over to the sisters and—loud enough for me to hear—says, “Quite simply, religion here, like everything else, is a game. Guys do it for the privileges, for the power it gives them in this place and the power it gives them over other prisoners. That and for protection.”

“Oh, come on,” I object. “That’s the sort of thing they say on the outside. And that way of thinking exhibits a profound lack of sympathy for the very real struggles one engages in here, physically, psychologically, emotionally, as well as spiritually. And while I’m somewhat skeptical of discussions of religion that overemphasize religion’s meaning-making function, this place is something of an existential boot camp, and guys’ involvement with whatever religious discipline they’re involved with certainly addresses those needs, too.”

Lenny asks me what I mean. To a certain extent, I say, I can only project my own experience as one who wrestles with bad thoughts. “And if I have thoughts out there that I can’t shake, I can only imagine what it’s like to be in here for sixteen hours a day locked in a bathroom.”

“In a cage,” Brian corrects me, even though by calling cells bathrooms, I’m parroting back his words.

I press Brian on his suggestion that folks only get involved with religion for the purposes of protection—meaning that the chapel regulars are little more than bottom-feeding bad men. “Let’s say that one becomes religious only for ‘protection.’ How different is that from folks on the outside going to church for a sense of ‘community’? Is the desire for community merely a game? Protection: that’s a discourse that is dominant about prisoners’ religion because it’s not generally acknowledged that men in here have needs above and beyond physical protection. But of course you have those needs! Who doesn’t? And folks in here disproportionately turn to religion to fill them. Why? Well, for one, because of the accidents of the First Amendment, the prisoners’-rights movement, the waning of the rehabilitative ideal in the eighties, and the legislative push to promote free religious exercise for all (this time around, largely from the right), religion is by now one of the few games left. I mean, where else are you gonna go? Furthermore, the suggestion that protection can be opposed to something like authentic religion strikes me as patently absurd. As if the desire to stay alive isn’t sincere enough!”

What I really ought to write about, David says, is “that Todorov thing.” He’s referring to philosopher Tzvetan Todorov’s Facing the Extreme, which makes the case, as David has explained before, for the perseverance, even in the inhuman hell of the concentration camps, of an inextinguishable moral sensibility among the inmates. In David’s view, if acts of generosity and kindness could survive ultra-efficient German evil, then half-assed Pennsylvanian ineptitude has little chance to eradicate them either.40

Eugene draws the express link between the practice of religion and the survival of one’s soul. “More than anything else, though,” he says, “what religion in here is about is that they can have this”—he touches his body—“but they can’t have this”—he points to his head. “They can’t have my mind. Spirituality is a way to keep a part of you in reserve that’s not caught up by the system. The unfortunate thing is that at the same time, this thing that helps keep you free is also the thing that divides us. Why do there have to be factions?” Eugene continues. “I say this as someone who’s white and black, and Jewish. Religion is from the Latin, meaning ‘to tie,’ and it’s supposed to be something that ties us together, not something that drives us apart. Can’t we just see the humanity in each other that religion helps us maintain, the humanity that cannot be snuffed out by this system around us?”

I want to engage Eugene, to question his presumption of an inherent humanism that religious factionalism serves to undermine, and to probe him directly on what precisely religion does to preserve within captivity a sort of freedom, but I’m distracted by what Brian is saying to Vickie Steinberg.

“Nothing is real here,” Brian says to the volunteer. “Nothing is authentic. Everything is a ruse, a game. I always have to debrief Josh on this.”

I take for granted that Brian has far greater intimacy than I do with the darker sides of the human animal, part of which—in spite of what Teddy and Khalifa might claim about lifers and truth-telling—is undoubtedly people’s capacity for bald-faced deception. Nonetheless, I am, in this regard, only half as naïve as Brian thinks. From a theoretical standpoint, I take little issue with Brian’s characterization of religion as a “game.” Contrary, however, to his intimation that gamesmanship entails insincerity, as I see it, for all of us game players—and, in this view, we all are—there is no more effective way to play the game than to suspend disbelief and actually effect the interior state corresponding to the requisite moves.41 And while, methodologically, I do presume the sincerity of those with whom I am talking, this is less because I take them all to be engaged in plainspoken earnest speech (what a tedious world that would be!) and more because I believe that instead of acting as a corrective, an alternative presumption would only add another layer of distortion.42

“I think you both have good points,” Vickie says to Brian. “Josh has a point—that religion fulfills needs. And you have a point—that it’s not real religion.”

Brian watches me watch him. “So tell me,” he says, “why be Jewish? What do we get from it?”

The day has primed me with a readymade answer. “Look,” I say. “Among the African-American prisoners in the jail, there is an abiding sense that the collective experience of slavery stole their identity from them, and that much of the trouble they find themselves in stems from the fact that they don’t know who or what they are. It is this profound sense of having lost their culture that is the driving impetus for groups like the Nation of Islam and the Moorish Science Temple. From guys in the Nation to the Salafi Muslims, they’re all trying to fill that perceived gap, that sense of absence that haunts their identities.” I look around the room. “None of us in this room is similarly troubled. As Jews, we know all too well who we are. Such is the nature of what my good Italian friend calls our cumbersome inheritance.”

At the mention of the Nation of Islam, David pipes in, “Oh, do you mean Poolism?”

“As in Elijah Poole,” he says. “Elijah Muhammad was really Elijah Poole.”

“Sure,” I say, “but by that logic,” in which the prophet and God are made one and used to define the faith, “Islam becomes Mohammedanism,” as in the nineteenth century it was indeed called.43 “Trying to make other religious traditions conform to a Christian template often obscures more than it reveals.”

“Look, Josh,” Brian says, fully exasperated. “I want you to give me one straight answer.”

I consider my answer only so long as to correctly anticipate Brian’s reaction.

I rehearse a genealogy of the category “religion.” Playing for them what is by now a religious-studies standard, I explain that while the notion of religion may be traced back toward Athens and Jerusalem, in its contemporary form, “religion” is a child of Protestant theology. For in contrast to the medieval Church’s premium on ceremony, sacrament, and deed, it was the Reformation that made personal belief the essence of Christianity. The modern concept of religion, then, emerges from a polemic against the Church’s empty forms, a charge that recapitulates the Apostle Paul’s beef with the Pharisees 1,500 years earlier. As is the case with all descriptions of how things are, the distillation of religion to a condition of interiority—to faith, to conscience—takes a strong, normative stance on how things ought to be.

In its ongoing life as a concept, I argue, bona fide faith depends in part on how it excludes its others. If in the authenticity of their beliefs, Protestants have been credited with having true religion, in their ritualism, Catholics and Jews have been thought of as doing something that falls just a bit shy. While for conservative Protestants like most of the guys downstairs, personal salvation remains predicated on faithful belief in biblical doctrines, over the last hundred and fifty years, the liberal wing of the Protestant intellectual tradition, in scouring its ever more pluralizing surroundings for common ground, has extrapolated from the particular case of Christianity a universal rule. At the core of each “world religion” was placed the individual and his relationship to his God, which is how we got the categories of Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and Mohammedanism.44 If, after further study, the presumed object of faith proved somewhat misplaced, faith as the defining characteristic of religion has nonetheless been preserved. In asking whether chapel men are people of faith or, alternatively, whether or not they really believe, I argue, Brian is unwittingly applying precisely this Protestant standard.

“Well, I don’t know about you,” I say with one finger to my head and another to my heart, “but my insides are a lot more garbled than that. Sometimes I go to shul”—synagogue—“to pray; sometimes I go to shul to be with my family; sometimes I go to shul because I feel like I have to. I feel as though we must historicize and deconstruct the insistence that in order to be authentic, religion has to be about the relationship between the individual and the divine. As an alleged universal, religion as a condition of belief strikes me as far too restrictive. At the very least, it in no way jibes with my own experience.”

As an enterprise of personal meaning-making, the recitation of a liturgy may be direct, but more often it is oblique, or even askew. Words alienate, or lead one astray, or pass by unnoticed. From time to time they hit their mark. In the day-to-day, religious meanings may be critically important, but not solely as the substance of creed or conviction. Religious language also gives us food for thinking through history, people, and ethics, and furnishes resources for ritual, argument, and play. To conclude, I refer back to David’s comment. “It’s a Christian logic that makes the Nation Poolism. But by that same logic wouldn’t we call Judaism Mosesism and drastically miss the point as a result?”

No longer suspicious of his fellow prisoners’ religious surfaces, Brian comes at me again; he now seeks to describe the depths of us all.45 “But aren’t we innately religious?” he asks. “As human beings, do we not inherently have the need to connect with that which created us? Do you not believe that?”

Homo religiosus is what, in a more confident era for the study of religion, historian of religion Mircea Eliade famously dubbed this purported human condition. As I’ve been schooled to see it, however, to posit in each man and woman something that clamors for the Creator is to mistake an affective consequence of one religious tradition for the cause of them all.46

“I don’t care what you are!” Brian shouts. “Do you not believe that we are?”

“No, I don’t necessarily believe that we necessarily are, Brian,” I say. “Certainly not in any kind of simple way.”

Calmly, Brian asks: “So if it’s not about the individual and God, then why do you study religion?”

It is, admittedly, an odd vocation. I recount my background, how I grew up in a home of agnostic observant Jews. “Where I’m from,” I explain, “we’re shomer shabbos and keep kosher and my father puts on tefillin every day, but nobody believes in God in any literal sort of way.” 47 Somehow, it took me until I was eighteen to figure this out. Though unnerved, I was also quite intrigued. As a college freshman, I took some religion classes. When provoked by William James’s suggestion that one might—for the sake of a healthy psyche—will belief, my father pointed out that in Hebrew, the word for belief, ma’amin, exists only in the causative form, meaning: I will myself to believe.48

While this portrait of my family’s agnostic observance strikes most of those around the table as nonsensical, to Lenny it’s not unfamiliar. “My grandparents were the same way,” he says. “Kosher, shabbos, the whole nine. It wasn’t until later that I realized they didn’t believe in God.”

For Brian, however, who favors clean and orderly distinctions, the model remains distasteful. “So why be Jewish? Why your father? Why does he do that? Why does he waste his time?”

“Because it works,” I explain. According to my father, the moment in the morning that he finishes davening and puts away his tefillin offers him his day’s greatest peace (he calls it “relief”). “But more important are all the other moments. My father is a very contented individual. And while he might simply be temperamentally inclined toward contentment on the one hand, or full of grace on the other, I can only assume that his practical relationship with Judaism is part of what makes his life work so well.”

I want to tell him about Paul on contentment, about the perils of visceral reaction, about the optimism of rebirth, about gratitude, but as is often the case, by the time I’ve gotten three words out, Brian has had enough: “Please answer the question at hand! Are the Christians here people of faith?”

Outscreaming him, I demonstrate my position with the example of the Native Americans. “Let’s take the Native Americans,” I say. At the mention of these notorious fakers, David laughs derisively. Undeterred, I continue: “Do the Native Americans believe in all the spirits that inhabit the yard and in the Great Spirit in the sky? I would assume that of those who come down on Thursday nights, some do, some don’t, and some enjoy entertaining such a notion as a metaphysical possibility. However, of the Natives who come down, do I believe that each and every one of them believes in sitting for an hour on the frozen ground on a winter’s night in order to feel the feelings and think the thoughts that such a practice evokes? Meaning, do they believe in sitting on the freezing ground for an hour for its own sake? For those who attend, the answer evidently is yes. It is this conviction, to come sit on the freezing ground, rather than their presumed conviction in the literal reality of the spirit world they describe, that is of paramount interest to me.”

“So what you’re saying is that religion is essentially activity,” David deduces.

“Could be,” I say. “Religion could be any of a number of things, depending on what we ask of it.”

As I will later write in one of this book’s many discarded introductions: “Inasmuch as rich texts are always elastic texts, whatever religion at Graterford might be said to be depends largely on the eyes one brings to it. In the chapel’s fellowship, a Christian might well see the power of the Lord at work; a Muslim, the transformative effect of righteous submission. A humanist might see how the men at Graterford employ religious practices to live meaningful lives in spite of the soul-crushing weight of their surroundings. A suspicious secularist, by contrast, might see how religious discourses at Graterford use these men, enlisting them to accept their gratuitous suffering as requisite. A bit more mutedly, a liberal might see in the chapel’s vibrancy the lamentable absence of other opportunities for intellectual and spiritual development. An anthropologist might notice the ways that religion fosters tribal identities, an essential function in this atomizing and dangerous environment, while a psychologist might see how through religion, men who have struggled with controlling their impulses gain a handle on them. An ethicist might see the role played by spiritual practices in the formation of character, while a reader sensitive to gender might note how religion allows formerly aggressive men to transvalue the brutal masculinity of the streets into one that celebrates self-sacrifice. An idealist might see how religion allows these men to live in a world within yet somehow outside state power, while the unsentimental might see in chapel activity merely a flimsy bulwark against boredom. None of these encapsulations is without its truth. Rather than commit myself to any one of them, however, my hope in this book is to inhabit the space vacated after such abstractions have been given a chance to temporarily thaw, a space of novelistic indeterminacy and, just maybe, of ethical possibility too.”

That religion at Graterford is an entity as variable as the perspectives from which it may be described is perhaps Brian’s least favorite formulation yet. “Come on!” he says. “What do you think religion is?”

Not merely out of a lack of conviction or so as to rile Brian am I reluctant to characterize religion too neatly. As I see it, rather than in the discretely mapped forest, it is in the territorial mess of trees and shrubs, undergrowth and earth, where the stuff of religion takes place. And if religion might be cleanly designated in theory, in practice it is a messy glut of particulars, with overarching conceptualization being just one of these many burls. As I fear, any attempt to sum up what religion at Graterford is about would necessitate sacrificing the unruly breadth and depth of the chapel’s religious practices for the overdetermined subset of elements that lend themselves to expedient summation. Quite simply, the world as it unfolds in time is far more extravagant and intricate than scholarly argument can possibly allow.49 If not theological per se, the devotion to describe this reality justly is arguably as close as I get.

Nonetheless, conditioned by a ritual sense to know that the hour for resolution is at hand, I succumb, and offer up for Brian a watery, secular Jewish twist on liberal Protestant universalism. “If forced to argue, al regel achat”—meaning “on one leg,” I say, referring no doubt obscurely to the Mishnaic story of Rabbi Hillel, who when asked if he could recite the entire Torah while standing on one leg, said simply, Love thy neighbor as thyself—“religion would be this.”50 I sweep my arm around the table. “Religion would be something like eating food and drinking coffee with one’s friends, with one’s people. The Creator would be more than welcome but his attendance would be in no way compulsory. And this”—I gesture again—“is a beautiful, meaningful activity. And no scholar of religion and no court of law should be able to suggest that as far as religion goes, this activity somehow falls short. And,” I add with complete candor, “I’m tremendously grateful that you’re all willing to share it with me.”

When David has cleared the coffee and Brian has choked out the candles, we descend to the vestibule to await the sisters’ escort.

David, who has been known to call Brian “Little Hitler” for his tightfisted manner, whirls around. “You don’t say!” He performs epiphany. “Do you really think so?”

“Nothing,” I say. “I was just saying that you’re a goddamn fundamentalist. But don’t worry about it. I’m one, too. Just of a different stripe.” Brian’s smile doesn’t waver.

Having locked up the office, Keita joins us in the vestibule. When the escort arrives, we traverse the empty corridor, our soles kicking up squeaks from the freshly washed floor. At B Block—“Bagel Boulevard,” as it was known back in days of denser Yiddishkeit—we bid the remaining prisoners goodbye.

Keita, the sisters, and I sign out and pass through the gate. To the right of the double doors separating us from the cold, Keita pushes the dispenser and dollops his hands with a puff of soapy foam. He rubs his hands, front-to-front, circles one in the other, and then the other in the one. I do the same.