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Abstract

Scholarship about Muslims in prison has been overwhelmingly dominated by security studies’ radicalization thesis and by a superficial reading of incarcerated Muslims’ “religious resilience.” Such approaches caricature the force of Islam in prison and indeed in Muslim prison narratives. This essay draws on interviews with survivors of prisons in Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Syria in order to develop other terms for analysis. Across our textual and ethnographic engagements, we read for varied permutations of carceral space, formations of religious authority, and an intimate (witnessing) relation between speech and violence. Muslim prison narratives see a broad emphasis on the mutability of these themes, as demonstrated in motifs such as prison dreams and their interpretation. Beyond establishing that Islam offers solace to the imprisoned, we observe how our interviewees draw on a common theological archive; we demonstrate the ethnographic complexity of these religious archetypes; and we develop terms of analysis that are specific without exceptionalizing Muslim prison narratives.

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