On Openings in Confinement: When Only God Can See

What does it look like for a prisoner when their relationship to the world is defined by a knowledge of another existence—that this world is not in its finality?

by Asim Qureshi and Walaa Quisay

Behind the long confines that house prisoners, time and space are buffered and enclosed. The structures that prisoners face are sprawling labyrinths of seemingly inescapable dead-ends. It is not just the cell itself, but also the high walls, the barbed wire, and the gun-turrets manned by guards with assault rifles—the muzzle pointing from the periphery into the prison, reminding them that the bullet is always there to keep them in their place. Then there are the far more psychological forms of confinement, the ones that exist solely in the mind. To write of openings in such a context is perhaps oxymoronic.

Still, we must ask: What does it look like for a prisoner when their relationship to the world is defined by a knowledge of another existence—that this world is not in its finality and that the relationship with an omniscient God informs one’s existence? This is one of the key questions we attempt to tackle in our new book, When Only God Can See: The Faith of Muslim Political Prisoners (Pluto Press, 2024). Based on writings and interviews conducted with released prisoners under the custody of Egypt and the United States, we seek to tell the stories of the men, women, and children who experience their faith within environments that seek to regulate, domesticate, control, or deny them any form of spiritual relationship. In this essay, we share some of these stories and separate them through different experiences of time that in part define the experience of imprisonment, and in part engender openings beyond the temporal.

Temporality 1

Beginnings are marked with opacity—neither an opening nor an end. It is a middle space in which three distinct temporalities and three distinct realities coexist, compete, or fight to the death. The first is a temporality in which the prison authorities institute and enforce a peculiar form of time. An elaborate structure of torturers, judges, doctors, chaplains, and sympathetic guards only there “to do their job” are all tasked with upholding a fraught temporality in which everything is routinely organized yet marked by a sense of endlessness. A prisoner is a body to be acted upon and a soul to be reformed.

It is befitting, then, that the beginning of imprisonment is marked with rituals of humiliation and violence. Prison guards and soldiers have become adept at splitting open skulls, cutting open skin, and opening parts of bodies for extreme cavity searches, the direct purpose of which is humiliation. It goes to remind one that “they” are no longer a person, but a prisoner. “They” must adhere to a ridged time of sleeping, waking, cleaning, urinating, eating, and drinking, but this is a time they have no access to. And, often, “they” have no way of determining the precise time—whether it is eight o’clock and not six or seven.

In Egypt, these opening acts of abuse and humiliation are called the tashrifa—the so-called welcoming party that begins at the moment the prisoner arrives at their first site of incarceration and before any line of police inquiry begins. Layla (pseudonym), was only thirteen when she was detained by security forces for participating in the 2013 Rabaa protests. Her experience of the tashrifa came in the form of a strip search, ordered by officers to be conducted by a female inmate:

I was 13, and I was on my period at the time. She stripped me naked and started to search me. One of my friends was there with me – a guy I went to school with since kindergarten. They made him stand behind me while they were searching me. The woman saw my pad and said, ‘What is this?’ I told her I was on my period. She said, ‘Show me.’ I looked at the officer in terror. I asked her ‘What exactly do you want to see?’ The officer looked at me and smirked. He said to me, ‘She has to see every bit of you!’ I was so scared but I just said, ‘What do you want me to do?’ The woman then asked me how old I was. I told her that I was only 13. She said, ‘Oh my God, you’re just a baby. Just go to the toilet and show me there.’ There were about twenty girls in the toilet. I took off my pad and showed it to her. She then went to the officer and said, ‘She is okay, Pasha.’¹

While the tashrifa is an Egyptian term, it aptly captures a transnational phenomenon. In Afghanistan, enforced nudity became the opening act in a litany of abuses for the masses of men who were imprisoned by U.S. and allied forces in the name of the War on Terror. The opening of their clothes did not merely mark the beginning of their detention. It was a tearing and ripping that left them completely naked, to be opened up and searched in every part of their body, with the ultimate aim of exacting suffering and humiliation. Like Layla, Mansoor Adayfi was a teenager when he was detained by American forces in Afghanistan and sent to Guantanamo Bay. Rather than treating him as a young man who might not understand the situation he was in, he was stripped naked and left hanging by his wrists from a ceiling as they electrocuted him on different parts of his body. In those moments, he could only think of time as something he had lost, and of those he had left behind. He thought of his mother and wished that he could see her one more time.

Temporality 2

The second temporality is the most fraught—it is the prisoner’s time, through which they act and are acted upon. In the grander scheme, prisoners do not know when their ordeal will be over. Their imprisonment exists in perpetuity. They do not know whether they might be released in the next day, in twenty years, or whether death would meet them in prison. The prison’s time intrudes and attempts to fashion the everyday. When the cell walls are enclosed, and the prisoners have no access to the sun, they cannot tell if it is morning or night.

Mona (pseudonym) represents the challenges of this unknowing in the second temporality of incarceration. Imprisoned in Egypt after joining a protest in 2013, she was put in solitary confinement for months after her initial arrest. Slowly, she began to gauge time through the prison routine. The guards would wake the prisoners up at 7:00 a.m. to clean; this act indicated that morning had arrived. Visitations began at 6:00 p.m., and so maghrib (the post-sunset prayer) was assumed to be around the corner, at roughly 6:30 p.m. Visitations ended at 9:00 p.m., and that is when isha (the final night prayer) was fulfilled.

For Mohemdou Ould Slahi, the Mauritanian former Guantanamo Bay prisoner, being placed on one rendition flight to the next by his American captors in 2002 meant that he was always disorientated when it came to days of the week or the time of day. This temporal black hole Slahi lived in was intentional. On one Friday, he was able to figure out which day of the week it was, and from that moment used the Qur’an as a means of tracking each day by reciting ten pages at a time. This allowed him to know that he would complete the Qur’an every sixty days.

Solitary confinement is used endemically across the U.S. carceral regime. When Babar Ahmad found himself being detained in a Supermax facility in the United States, he had one specific problem at night: not having any means of knowing when to wake up for his fajr (dawn) prayer. By titrating the amount of water he drunk the previous night, he was able to use this “water trick” to naturally wake up for fajr at the right time due to his need to urinate.

These stories show how, in circumstances of extreme difficulty, the prisoners found ways to keep in touch with time through the practices of their faith, making sense of their conditions through ritual worship. Their confinement, however, opened deeper questions on a far more existential level.

For some prisoners, time took on different meanings as they pondered the condition of their suffering. They found that they were able to open themselves to a cosmic understanding of their abuse by connecting with figures from the past. For Sami Alhaj, the Sudanese Al Jazeera cameraman detained in 2001 at the Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan by American soldiers, he infused his “spirit with tremendous energy”² by thinking about the heroes of Islam. In particular, he would recall the examples of Bilal ibn Rabah, who would cry “The One! The One!” as he was being crushed by rocks, or Mus’ab ibn Umayr, who continued to carry the flag of the Muslims even while both his hands had been cut off. Sami turned to the examples of these men as a way of fortifying his own heart, opening himself to experiences that would help him make sense of his torture. The past, thus, became an opening to his present. Like many others, he would ponder upon these words of the Qur’an:

Or do you think that you will enter Paradise while such [trial] has not yet come to you as came to those who passed on before you? They were touched by poverty and hardship and were shaken until [even their] messenger and those who believed with him said, “When is the help of Allah?” Unquestionably, the help of Allah is near. (2:214)

In the first three years of Bilal’s (pseudonym) imprisonment in Egypt after 2013, as much as he tried, he could not escape the question, “Why me?” It was, at first, “Why is this happening, God?” Then it became, “When will this end, God?” He had been sentenced to twenty-five years in prison with no end in sight. But, eventually, a glimmer of hope seemed to appear as his appeal for release was accepted and his name appeared in the presidential pardon. Still, it meant that he would have to spend an additional two years in prison before he was free. This broke something inside of him, which he described as his lowest point in his life. Following the news of his extended imprisonment, he went to sleep reciting the supplication of the Prophet Ayyub from the Qur’an: And remember Our servant, Ayyub, when he called his Lord saying, “Satan has inflicted weariness and pain upon me” (38:41). When he woke from a dream that the judge in his case had been humiliated and was asking him for forgiveness, it was if he had been unshackled from the intense sadness he had been feeling. Bilal reached a resolute conclusion about the nature of tribulation in his encounters with the Qur’an:

The one thing that enlightened my path was Surah Maryam. The verse said: And, when the pains of childbirth drove her to [cling to] the trunk of a palm tree, she exclaimed, “I wish I had been dead and forgotten long before all this!” (19:23). This verse was about her giving birth to Jesus. She was scared they would call her a whore for giving birth out of wedlock. How did God respond to her? She said something (I wish I had been dead and forgotten long before all this) that if I had said in prison, people might say I lost faith in God. But God responded to her: And shake to you the trunk of the palm-tree [and] it will let fall ripe dates down on you, readily reaped. So eat and drink and comfort your eye (19:25–26). It was like He was comforting her. It was like He was telling her, I know it’s tough, but here just eat something, have a chocolate, have a date and try to forget. It was like God was telling her this had to happen. This is on me but I am sorry … It is tough but the young have to grow old, the egg has to become a chick and the chick has to become a chicken. There need to be a series of events that has to happen for something to occur, and we don’t know what that something is because we are limited as humans. How God comforted Maryam just opened my eyes. Just as there is difficulty in childbirth, you have to go through a particular ordeal, but while you’re in the ordeal, in the fire, you don’t know, you can’t know there is a more beautiful thing forming—gold is forming. Someone might come and change the course of history. I might get out at that time to meet this one person to have that one child so she can be my daughter.³

Temporality 3

The third temporality is the enigmatic time of God. It is not self-evident but obscured by trials and tribulations. It eclipses the control of the prison authorities and relays the prisoners’ truths about their being, capacity, and humanity. It appears in the slow realization of experiential truths, the Qur’an, and in dreams.

For Mohamed Soltan, the former Egyptian political prisoner, dreaming encapsulated blessings, even if it would not foretell release. The material conditions of the prisoners did not change, but for a fleeting moment they were able to transcend the walls of the prison to a place that made them forget the bleak surroundings that made up the environment:

Dreams are a divine function of prison; they allow you to escape. By God’s mercy, they take you to an alternate reality, one where you are free. You’re out and about with your family; you are with your loved ones; you’re meeting people that you have not seen or met in forever. You are remembering people that you have forgotten … When you start waking up, you’re halfway between your reality and your alternate reality. It is the worst moment in prison; it was like a curse every day. It is a daily renewal of your detention.⁴

Omar (pseudonym) was imprisoned in Egypt in 2015. Like Mohamed Soltan, he believed in the fundamental power of dreams in prison and the divine temporality they indicate. This temporality, he points out, is outlined in the Qur’an, in Surah Yusuf. Surah Yusuf, for Omar, perfectly encapsulates the temporal discrepancies between God’s promises and human expectations. The internal symmetry in the Surah indicates a divine promise that is eventually fulfilled. It begins with Yusuf ’s vision: As Yusuf said to his father, “O my father, surely I saw [in a dream] eleven planets and the sun and the moon; I saw them prostrating to me” (12:4). It then ends with the fulfilment of that vision: They all bowed down before him and he said, “Father, this is the fulfilment of that dream I had long ago. My Lord has made it come true and has been gracious to me; He released me from prison and He brought you here from the desert after Satan sowed discord between me and my brothers. My Lord is most subtle in achieving what He wills; He is the All Knowing, the Truly Wise” (12:100). Despite this fulfilment of divine promises, the issue of temporality persists as central to Omar’s view of divine temporality. The dreams he had were not just a banal experiential reality; he felt something could be deduced from his dreams as he pondered on the Prophet Yusuf in prison. As Omar notes:

I see that there are two stations in the Surah that reflect the reality of prison life. The first station is mention me in the presence of your lord (12:42), and the second station is return to your Lord and so ask Him (12:50). The first station indicates the pressures and the difficulty of prison life that makes it unbearable, and the second station shows certitude in divine retribution. In time, you can train yourself to move from one station to the other, where there is certainty in God and serenity in His decree. Meaning, the first station is one where you are in a hurry to leave prison, and the second is acting through conviction and trust in God. For that reason, we used to recite the du’a (supplication): “Allah release us as you have released Yusuf.”⁵

For others, dreams took on the value of direct advice being given to them by God, especially during times when they felt at an impasse in their cases. Dreams thus functioned as an opening through which they were able to step through. This was the case for Dr. Sami Al-Arian, who was detained in the United States at the female unit of the Hillsborough County Jail in Florida.

During his imprisonment, Al-Arian often came into conflict with his lawyers over how to handle his case. He was under extreme stress as his solitary confinement existed under the deliberate gaze of his female prison guard. His placement in the female unit of the prison was a deliberate act intended to break his spirit—to inhibit him from being able to focus on his case through conditions that were humiliating to him as a Muslim man. Deprived of privacy by the female guards who would peer into his cell, this stress led to arguments with his lawyers over case strategy, until he had a dream of a man coming to crush his head with a rock:

Of course, you think this is reality and you are about to die. So, you have one of two reactions that come to mind. I thought, either I try and stand up and wrestle with that person and defend myself, or just accept my fate and pray. And then whatever happens, happens.

It was only three steps between me and that person. And during this moment I remembered a very long du’aactually, but I didn’t have time to say it, so I took a very small part it and repeated: “God is Great, God is Great, God is Great. I seek refuge from bad things to happen.” So, this person is coming now and I see the footsteps, and I feel the fear and I hear the breathing, and they are right there on top of my head about to crush my head with that rock. And I continue my prayer when suddenly the breathing stops and I open my eyes and see the door is open and the lights are out.

This is when I wake up and see exactly the same thing, but this time with the door shut. So I tried to make sense of what that meant, and I was guided to the fact that the message I was getting was “do not fight, just pray.” From that moment on, I decided not to fight my lawyers; let them defend the case the way they see it; I will just pray. So I concentrated on just praying.⁶

For Al-Arian and the many prisoners who experienced dreams that had a similar, prescient quality, their dreams became a form of opening to escape the squalor of their surroundings. They did not know for certain if their dreams would come true, or when they might come true, but they were sure that their dreams opened a window to the knowledge that God was directly involved in their affairs—that His plan for them would be the one that would ultimately come to fruition.

Closures

The prison environment is conditioned to produce closures of every sort. Confinement in its essence is a closing, not only of the world, but also the spirit. As Angela Davis writes in Are Prisons Obsolete (Seven Stories Press, 2003), the very nature of the carceral systems of the world have become punitive in multitudes. They exist for the mass warehousing of human beings, often for nothing other than slave labor and, perhaps even worse, sometimes purely as a gratuitous exercise in control and humiliation. The tashrifa that greeted Egyptian prisoners on arrival at the prison, or the ritual stripping of Muslim men of their clothes at the detention sites of Bagram and Kandahar in Afghanistan, served no purpose except as a notice that the very bodies of these Muslim men, women, and children were always subject to the control of authorities. These abuses would be replicated throughout by prison authorities in manifold ways, all with the intention to destroy any form of personal or spiritual agency these prisoners attempted to exert.

Sometimes, something happens in the stories of faith we gathered, like a crack in the structure of the prison that cannot be caged by any human walls, bars, or bullets. There are, at times, openings that cannot be controlled by any human attempt, as they take place in the heart. Prisoners, often on extreme journeys of highs and lows, are able to peer through the constriction of the prison environment, and hold firmly onto an experience that is transcendental, even in the depths of solitary confinement. It is a relationship to God and their faith that is at times an opening significant enough for them to take succor in a cosmic plan greater than they could conceive. In these moments, whether long lasting or fleeting, these openings are capable of restructuring the power dynamics that exist within the prison. The bars of jail cells are no longer the final say on how entrapped the prisoner feels.

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Notes

1. Walaa Quisay and Asim Qureshi, When Only God Can See: The Faith of Muslim Political Prisoners (London: Pluto Press, 2024), 38.

2. Ibid., 101.

3. Ibid., 112.

4. Ibid., 137.

5. Ibid., 128.

6. Ibid., 135.