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An Aeon of Life Behind Bars
An
Aeon
of Life
Behind
Bars
Adel has spent more time behind bars than most young adults have even lived for.
He’s spent decades imprisoned in three separate countries and continents, in different legal systems, and on different charges. With that under his belt, there are a few one-line reflections Adel can make immediately:
“In Egypt, the torture is physical. In Britain and America, it is mental. In Egypt, it is all about power and injustice. In Britain, the prisons are full of racism and loyalty to a uniform. In America, it’s a mixed bag with extremes of everything and, there, they keep you like a rat in a trap.”
In the UK, even the well-meaning guards had their hands tied within a system that was designed to exhaust a prisoner in an elaborate and opaque complaints process. Sometimes, there would be volunteers assigned to monitor prison staff and see whether the management were fulfilling the rights of the prisoners.
“They wanted to advocate for us, but would be pushed from one group to another, being told ‘Go speak to Mr. So-and-so, log the complaint in this way, apply for a meeting with that manager, the process has to go through ten stages of paperwork first…’ You’ll be dead by the time someone even reviews what you have to say.”
HMP Belmarsh was more accurately known as Hellmarsh by the prisoners. “You are treated as a terrorist straight away, no questions asked.” Many former IRA members were held there, and life was made difficult right from the beginning. When Adel was given a vegetarian meal and saw chunks of meat in it, he asked to exchange it. Six officers gathered in a semi-circle around him,
“Is the b****** asking about halal? Tell him to take it or f***ing leave it.”
“They have a good system down on paper, but they never follow it. Officers have more loyalty to their uniform, than the truth.” Things were, surprisingly perhaps, different in America. “When I was in the US, if the officer saw something wrong and their manager told them to act otherwise, they’d say “F*** the manager, we’re not doing that.”
When White officers mocked the US guards for sitting down to play board games with the Muslim prisoners, they’d say: “Mind your f***ing business, I sit with whoever I want to sit with.” Guards in America also seemed more willing to stand up to one another, too.
“In Egypt, they batter, burn, and beat your body — but your spirit is alive because you and your brothers are there for each other. You increased in love and care for each other. Everybody put the other first. In Britain and America, the torture was more sophisticated, designed to break you mentally and leave you wanting to hang yourself, and many people did. I can’t say that if I didn’t have my faith, I wouldn’t have done it too.”
“In America, the things around you are so painful to watch. You see people break down — someone is banging the door, some people are cutting themselves, others just sit and howl in their cell night and day. After showers, they leave you wet, undressed, and freezing for 1.5 hours before they collect you. You stand waiting in the dark in a room with a low ceiling and walls that seem like they’re ready to crash into you.”
In America, though you are clearly labelled a terrorist and monitored constantly, they don’t let you feel like you are. “You walk around without being escorted or cuffed. You go to your job in the morning. I used to walk on the pavement in the open grounds of the prison complex to go to the kitchen with just other prisoners.”
And in the kitchen? The “most dangerous men in the world” had access to everything: huge chef’s knives, hot oil, industrial-sized ovens, an array of bladed equipment. In the UK, a glass perfume bottle the size of Adel’s thumb was confiscated for “security reasons”.
Adel seized upon the opportunity to learn how to craft leather in prison classes. Prisoners could order different fabrics and skins — from crocodile, lizard, to kid leather. He has produced dozens of handmade bespoke bags for women: some customised as gifts and each one unique and hand-crafted.
Then there were quirks, too. The American prisoners ran their own economy inside, and the currency of choice was… Tins of mackerel and postage stamps. Each of the postage stamps were worth a dollar, those actively trading had $2-3,000 worth, the real big shots carried around 15-20,000 postage stamps with them.“
“What were they posting?”, I ask.
“Posting?” Adel is confused.
“Nobody was posting anything; it was their wealth.”
The million-dollar stamp kings.
After eight years in a New York supermax prison — and 21 years of imprisonment in total — Adel was cleared for release four years early, on compassionate grounds. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic meant Adel was at particular risk, suffering from asthma and other ailments. Reviewing his conditions for release, Judge Kaplan said:
“It is not sufficient to keep him away from his family in what could be the final period of his life.”
In October 2020, Adel was freed.
A Life After Release
A
Life
After
Release
Life post-release is not all euphoria.
Of course, relief, happiness, and gratitude all exist in abundance. They sit, however, against a canopy of questions, tensions, and issues that must now be confronted.
How does one even begin to approach the idea of rebuilding a life that has been lived in enforced absence? When Adel was imprisoned, his youngest daughter was not even born, his eldest was just 12. Now she was a woman, married, and with children of her own. He lost both his parents. His children all become adults. His wife had entered her senior years much as she lived her youth: trying to hold life together in absence of her husband.
When detained for decades,
what is life supposed to look like again?
What is routine?
What are you meant to do daily?
Who are your friends anymore?
Where is your network?
Do your family even know you?
What is “home”?
And — under the notification orders that will constrict Adel’s life post-release — how free are you really?
I ask Adel what it is like to be back with his family. He immediately, and uncharacteristically, goes silent. A long silence.
“I feel… I feel like a guest in my own home. That’s my feeling, and that’s the reality. It’s like you have to get to know everybody again, and sometimes get to know your family for the first time. My youngest was not even born when I was imprisoned, and the youngest three children I did not even spend time with, that they remember.
For the last eight years, when I was in America, we never even had a visit. It was a single phone call lasting minutes — and that’s if you managed to call at a time when the children were home. They take care of me, and we love each other, but everyone is scarred. No healing will ever remove the scars.”
And how does he feel about himself, within himself? Freedom after 21 years of imprisonment must be a Hell of a thing to navigate.
“Imagine, after two decades being away and being mostly by yourself away from everybody and everything during those years. When you come out, it’s a big change — it can be a very strange adjustment. I used to be busy 24/7 before I went to prison, I come out now and nobody I knew is there anymore. Some passed away, some have left the country, some have serious health issues.
When I last saw my daughter before prison, she was a 13-year-old teenager. I came out and she’s a young woman, married and with children. My sons grew into men. My mother passed away. The world moved on. But yes, praise to God, we are here. There’s nothing we can do. We take it with Allah’s Help. What can you say really? It is Allah who sends hardship our way, and in it is goodness for us. I have no doubt about this.
But that doesn’t mean it’s not painful, it doesn’t mean you’re happy. You accept fate as God has sent it, but that doesn’t mean your pain is automatically erased. All I know is whatever is from Him, we accept it and don’t regret it.
Though “free” now, Adel still lives under a raft of notification orders that stifle his ability to do basic things.
He is not allowed to work, study, drive, or travel abroad.
He must report to a police station once a week and, if travelling to another city, must physically sign in at a police station every third day. If he gets a new bank card or changes his phone number, he must notify the police. Any violation of any of the conditions means automatic prison time.
What’s (not so) funny about Adel is to see the versions of him that are sporadically reported in the press. Think, the Daily Mail and the Sun having a field day about “Osama bin Laden’s spokesman” enjoying life in the country he plotted against.
Here he is using the bleeding hearts of leftie liberals to procure support for his murderous jihadist intentions. All the tropes are there. The Daily Mail hangs around Maida Vale and snaps Adel like that, looking as grizzly as we like our villains to be. They mention his BMI (allude to sloth and gluttony), mention the price of his family home (ergo: scrounging terrorist parasite), and then throw in the death toll of the US Embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1991 (to cement his monstrous character).
Mercifully, Adel seems mostly unaware of the reporting. Despite this, when I ask him what he would really want the public to know about his case, he doesn’t pause for an instant:
“Don’t trust what is being said in the media. Every person has their own story, search it out and learn about it. People are more than a headline, and the headlines are often a flicker of truth mixed with a thousand lies.”
“The truth is… I have never done anything to the public in this country and I never will, and it’s not the law that stops me — it’s my beliefs and they won’t ever change.
I don’t believe in harming people. If it was only fear of the law that stopped me from hurting people, then I would have done things a long time ago, but I am not that person.
I didn’t do anything wrong when I was a young 30-year-old man, do you think you’re going to get me committing crimes as a 62-year-old?
How much taxpayers’ money have you wasted — and do you continue to waste — just to make sure you put enough fear into the public about us?
They use fear to control, and we are the monsters they throw out to the public.”
When it comes to Adel’s closest relationships, his face clouds over instantly. “Everybody’s life has painful memories. For me, every time I see my wife, honestly, I just want to cry. I struggle to give this woman what she deserves in her life. I can’t.
This is the hardest thing between me and her. She deserved so much more from me in her life.
I sometimes look at her and think, I married this young beautiful girl 40 years ago, and couldn’t give her anything. Though she stood beside me for everything. The only way I can describe it is that I feel like I’m standing in front of a high mountain and I feel so little, so powerless. You are looking up and see her at the top, seeing how high she is. There are no words to say what she has done for me and my children.
Because of this, I just want to escape with myself from this feeling.
And that feeling comes whenever I see her.
Even, sometimes, I prefer to be away for this reason.
I look at my children and see the impact on them,
and I feel like running away from them, too.
I didn’t want the pain for them that they’re feeling.”
Adel’s darkest time would always be when his wife and children would ask, “When are you going to be free? When are you coming home?” There was always so much longing in their voice. He had no idea what to say. He had no idea whether he would be sentenced to two years, five years, seven years, 20 years, or life without parole. There were no answers to give.
After America, things got even worse. There were no more visits. “I had to plead guilty to something I did not do. Every time I spoke to my wife, she would reassure me my release date would be soon. Then, when I got eight years more, I felt like we were done. My wife was done. The family was done. We were not going to see each other again. There are no words for how we survived that. We did because we had to, but we still can’t make sense of it.”
“From that, I’ve learnt that you never know what tomorrow will bring.
And whatever it brings, you can only rely on God to help you survive.
You can never rely on your own strength, intelligence, people around you, or anything.
You can’t rely on anything but Allah; otherwise, you don’t survive.”
Faith is not something memorised by rote, held academically, or explored in times of satiation: though all of those are still good. It is an internal state which provides a constancy in every external circumstance. A harbour in the tempest. For Adel, he survives because he can give meaning to what he has experienced.
“Every person has to recognise that whatever you have, hasn’t come to you by mistake. It was written a long time ago. You must see it and live it. You cannot escape from it. You cannot hide from it. You cannot rush it along. You cannot extend it. And you definitely, most definitely can’t deny it. You must believe Allah is going to make it better for you.
By God, if I didn’t have this belief, I would have hanged myself a long time ago. Why do I have to go through all of this? Why do I have to suffer? As believers, we don’t ask ourselves those questions. Believe in God and live day by day. Don’t think about the next hour, next day, or next year. Raise your hands to God and hold on to hope.”
Looking outwards, I wonder what is in store for Adel now. Rather than retiring into a quiet obscurity, Adel’s energy and zest for community is unabated. He wants to work with the youth. He wants to go into mentoring and give them something productive to work on. And it is not complicated for Adel, either.
“The best things for our world now are in the basics:
Take care of your neighbour, look after the vulnerable, show kindness.
Go play with the children, give them skills, give them a vision.
Be present for them, listen to their struggles, make them feel valued and loved.”
As for him?
“I’m going to keep learning and growing.
Learn,
grow,
do.
This is my life.”
And these are the words of Adel Abdul Bary.
Over the days with Adel, I’ve shared dozens of hours, many lunches, and endless hot drinks. I’ve met his family and had him show me images of his newborn grandchildren, with the softness of a grandfather in love. He’s advised me on the best cabbage leaves to make mahshi and how to stop your falafel falling apart in the frying pan.
He’s also been reduced to tears — the type that sting your eyes and hover over your tear ducts but don’t make it down — recalling the most painful moments of his life: his sister being killed in a car crash in her twenties, hearing his father had died alone at his kitchen table, and his infant children asking him why the bad people won’t let him come home with them.
His demeanour belies his experiences: he is soft and light when he speaks, he accepts and refuses beverages with a prayer for the person offering and he can muster unrivalled enthusiasm for the pros and cons of different needles for hand-stitching leather.
He’s got a wicked sense of humour, too, in that playful uncle way that feels safe. When he asks me about my role model, he immediately follows with, “Let me guess, is it… Rambo?” (I didn’t tell him he’s not far off.) He is, above all, not what you would expect of someone who has seen so much of the blood and the dirt and the grime of this world.
Adel is clear in his pain, and its ongoing impact on his life. He is openly vulnerable. That’s “part of being a man”, he’d tell me in his sure way. He forever carries uneasy feelings — teetering on the boundary of guilt — for the lives of his wife and children who have served as collateral. He accepts it all as being written for him by a Divine Pen, knowing that this was always meant to be his story. It could not and would not be any other way.
There is a comfort in accepting the intentionality behind what is sent your way. It means Adel knows he was meant to have his perspective sharpened by the howls of torture filling the ground above his head. He carries reflections built on years of literal isolation. His physical body tells its own tale — scarred with searing realities that can never be fully unpacked.
His kind of outlook doesn’t come every day, every year, or every decade: it is borne from the beautiful, painful, and crushing truths that he walks.
What even is life but an aggregate of moments really? What are these moments but flashes in eternity, where our temporal human existence might reveal the truths that we all desperately need to access?
What are stories but a way to make sense of this extraordinary business of living?
Adel speaks, regales, and reflects as a youthful soul of 62 years.
Today, he stands as a man whose story is still evolving, in a mighty life that started as
a boy named Justice.
End
Babar Ahmad spent eight years in prison without trial in the UK, fighting extradition to the US from 2004-2012. He was extradited in October 2012 and spent two years in solitary confinement in a US supermax prison.
Babar was released in July 2015, after 11 years of imprisonment. He was returned to the UK, where Metropolitan Police officers welcomed him at London’s Heathrow Airport and then offered to drive him home.
Talha Ahsan was arrested in July 2006, in response to a request from the United States under the US–UK Extradition Act 2003. He was detained without trial or charge for over six years, before his extradition to the United States on 5 October 2012.
The length of Talha’s detention without trial or charge is among the longest in British legal history.
Talha is now free.
