The book I didn’t want to read nor review

The latest offering from Dr. Walaa Quisay and Dr. Asim Qureshi took me a long time to purchase. And it sat for even longer on my bedside table.

It lay there, almost silently judging me for not having the nerve to open it up. You know some reads are going to be hard, what you’re going to face is heavy and you’re likely going to be taken to places darker than the banality of our daily routines allow.

And yet, I took a deep sigh and opened to page one.

Straight into the darkness

Immediately, I thought about dark spaces and how maybe this is where we should all work to get a bit more comfortable in.

When the veneer of material comfort, good health, security, safety, and enjoyable days lull us into a sleepwalk, maybe the truth that this is not how the majority of the world lives needs to hit harder.

When what’s described in the book is going on right now, maybe we shouldn’t have to peel back that many layers to confront it.

Should we not be aware enough of these dark spaces that it is, at least, no longer shocking, no longer so distant and not so otherworldly?

Should we not normalise learning about the abnormal, if this is the space so many believers have occupied and do occupy?

When everything is taken away

The thematically organised sections of the book help us to consider the different faces of an ever-evolving beast.

Stories of Muslim political prisoners shouldn’t be framed as “the dark underbelly of power gone rogue”, but a reflection of the excesses that are routinely meted out by the state apparatus.

Whether that’s torture, custody and imprisonment, or the betrayal of your “own”.

And they focus specifically on how acts of worship are directly impacted by the removal of the privilege of access to water, knowing what time it is, having space, being in clean environments, and not being actively tortured.

• What do you do when, one by one, all the conditions of prayer are denied to you?
• What do you do when Ramadan approaches and you have no food for suhūr or iftār?
• What do you do when prison authorities roll out “scholars” to dissuade you from acts of defiance?

If you are operating on the maxim that “when conditions become hard, the Law becomes easy”, how “easy” is easy?

What’s the bare minimum you can offer up as a prayer or a fast, when you are in a reality rarely documented in any canonical books of Fiqh?

Suffering isn’t romanticised

For me, one of the greatest strengths of this book may have been an entirely unintentional one.

When it comes to belief and a crisis of faith, this book does nothing to romanticise the struggle. And — controversial opinion alert (!) — I have long felt uncomfortable with how personal suffering is given a hero narrative in Muslim activist circles.

The survivors may well be heroes no doubt. However, they are also flesh and bone like you and me. They also have families they love and children they want to hold.

Often when we sit and listen to their stories, we want so badly to “hero-wash” their narrative so we are left with a starry-eyed īmān boost rather than an honest understanding of their incarceration experience, even if it is uncomfortable.

Scratch that, especially if it is uncomfortable.

Remember what I said about sitting in a dark space? We need to tackle sitting in uncomfortable places too. And this book facilitates the journey there with no apologies.

In fact, we hear about prisoners who clean lost their minds altogether, because of the torture they went through. Some became informants and turned on their brothers and sisters. Some declared takfīr and excommunicated others with relish. Some collaborated for personal gain.

Others harboured such an intense level of anger that they questioned God and His Power, and didn’t return with any satisfactory answers.

Humans are humans are humans, and nobody is burdened with the expectation of being a hero.

A beautifully humanising triumph

The prisoners in the book, too, are not a monolith, and certainly aren’t symbols of rock solid faith.

Some found themselves in Gitmo as non-practising Muslims who did not even pray and considered Islam to be the least important part of their identity.

Among the haphazard mishmash of prisoners from numerous countries and personal backgrounds, the book foregrounds Egyptian prisons where political prisoners found themselves sharing jail cells with “criminal” prisoners (gin’ai in Egyptian Arabic).

This marriage of different “criminalities” birthed genuinely intriguing, comical, awkward, and often painful interactions. The blunt “not all prisoners are the same” truth showcased is one of the beautifully humanising triumphs of the book.

Likewise, one of the saddest accounts for me personally had to do with the self-image of the prisoner.

When a “criminal” (i.e. not a political) prisoner became close to a female activist sharing the same cell, she wrestled with deep shame, self-loathing, and worthlessness.

Questions like “Am I allowed to recite the Qur’ān?” and statements like “I’m not pure enough to pray” say everything about the mindset of those who have been treated and viewed as the absolute dregs of society.

When the Unseen becomes unavoidable

The book also does not shy away from reporting on any aspect of Muslim belief, including what is so ghayb-y that it risks not making sense to other audiences.

Yes, I’m talking about black magic, jinn, and sihr.

When prison authorities got desperate, they had to reach into the Unseen to terrify the prisoners into submission.

This included — but was not limited to — the simulation of screams, literal blood-like fluid being poured down cell walls, and prisoners being made to stand inside hand-drawn pentagrams.

Muslim male prisoners were forced to watch images of extreme pornographic violence, dismembered children with ear-bursting volumes of heavy metal music played at them.

I do love so much that none of this was omitted, as I can see the case for those who shy away from ghayb/supernatural topics in books like these, mistakenly believing this may jeopardise their credibility or leave them open to ridicule.

Instead, the topic of sihr takes up a good portion of the latter of the book and offers us intimate insights into how believing prisoners interacted with the Unseen world.

One particular dialogue remained with me when prisoners found out that the prison structure they were in was built directly on top of jinn habitats, thus displacing and angering the original inhabitants. What the prisoners failed to do, however, was convince their jinn counterparts that they were there against their will and wanted to leave their jail cells just as much as the jinn wanted them gone!

More of the authors’ own feelings would be great

The grit, realism, and comprehensive take on how Muslim political prisoners navigate their faith while incarcerated was delivered without reservation.

The sheer research that it must have taken to collect the data and then thematically organise it with such thought and sensitivity is what makes me so grateful to benefit from such gifted authors as Dr. Walaa and Dr. Asim.

If there is one thing I felt I’d like to see more of, it would be more of the authors’ own personal investment, feelings, and experiences in the process of collating everything that had to be gathered for a book like this to come to fruition.

Authors are never benign vessels merely reflecting a reality, but fuse every part of their aims, aspirations, and selves into the work they create.

Work like this, more than most, could not have been done without a heavy investment of the “self”, simply because of the harrowing, conflicting, and complex nature of the stories within, and I’d love to learn more about that too.

This is a book which, despite my first reservations, I know I will be returning back to. It is a grounding and a centring. And though it focuses on particular times and places, the content will unfortunately remain evergreen for the times that the global Ummah has ahead in the years and decades to come.

Also, no review is complete without a special shoutout to the ridiculously talented Safia Latif, whose artwork adorned the front cover. Her image does not just paint a thousand words, but invites a thousand moments of reflection too.

Source: Islam21c

Notes

When Only God Can See — The Faith of Muslim Political Prisoners by Dr. Asim Qureshi and Dr. Walaa Quisay is available at Pluto Press as well as Amazon, in eBook and paperback format.