A father’s imprisonment deepened both his and his son’s Islamic faith

Evidence

For the evening visits, Passaic County Jail would often allow visitors to stay for a while longer, and they would sit together, separated by Plexiglas and speaking into a phone, and talk for two hours about everything. During this time father and son became very close. They talked about Rami’s school, about his father’s case, about what Rami should say to his mother and what his future plans should be. They talked about his father’s health—he was having heart trouble since entering prison—and also about the people incarcerated with him. Abu Rami told Rami stories about other immigration detainees and how their detentions were tearing their families apart. And they discoursed about Islam. Since his incarceration Rami’s father also found his own faith growing. The Muslim inmates in Passaic were a large group who were very organized and devout. They leaned on one another, and Rami’s father began praying regularly with them. Father and son both became more religious around the same time, even if they followed two different paths. They compared notes on Islam. — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 851

Categorization

• XREF: The prison religious community as a transformative social structure echoes the organized, devout inmate communities described in prison sociology literature and in A Midwife’s Tale’s attention to community religious practice as cohesion.