Seminar I: Prisons

Seminar I: Prisons generated a wide-ranging reflection on themes of captivity and carcerality by way of the theory and lived experience of the Africana Muslim. From local jails to military black sites, prisons function as the limit of freedom and use punishment as a technology of power - take for example the recent election results where voters in California have voted against Proposition 6 which would have banned slavery - force labor in the states prisons. Indeed Prisons are where the biopolitical and the necropolitical reinforce national and imperial objectives and desires. While Muslims are only 1% of the US population, Muslim, primarily of African descent, constitute 10% of the state and federal prison population, not counting secret detention sites. And within these spaces of domination and death, Africana Muslim captives have developed forms of self-determination, self-development, and the production of intellectual theory.

Jihad Abdulmumit, Jericho Movements to Free Political Prisoners

This two-part session will explore plantations as a site constructive of the economic, political, social, and affective orders that define modernity. What happens to this site and the modernity it represents when we examine it as a space in which the Muslim, the African, and the Africana Muslim were racialized and resisted that racialization by imagining worlds otherwise?

Panelists: Iman AbdoulKarim, Daryl Li, and Walaa Quisay Respondents: Jihad Abdulmumit and Kareemah Hanifa

Watch the entire lecture series on YouTube

Keynote Speaker, Seminar I: Prisons

Jihad Abdulmumit (he/him) is the Chairperson of the National Jericho Movement, which supports political prisoners in the United States and campaigns to win their freedom. He is a community activist, motivational speaker, playwright, and retired health care provider. Jihad was a domestic political prisoner and prisoner of war and served 23 years of his life in prison for his involvement in the Black Liberation Movement.

Panelist, Seminar I: Prisons

Kareemah Hanifa is a Muslim native from Charleston, South Carolina, but spent most of her life in the state of Georgia. She was sentenced to life imprisonment as a juvenile and she was released from prison in 2019. Kareemah has advocated alongside Georgia state lawmakers in the fight against felony disenfranchisement and rights restoration. Kareemah is a board member for the Georgia Coalition for Higher Education in Prison and is focused on building educational equity by utilizing her lived, professional, and academic experience to see a world where all have access to education.

Panelist, Seminar I: Prisons

Walaa Quisay is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh. She is the author of Neo-Traditionalism in Islam in the West: Orthodoxy, Spirituality, and Politics and co-author of When Only God can See: The Faith of Muslim Political Prisoners. She worked at numerous academic institutions, including the University of Manchester, the University of Birmingham, and Istanbul Sehir University. In 2019, she received her DPhil from the University of Oxford at the Faculty of Oriental Studies. Her research interests include the anthropology of religion, the study of Muslim political and religious subjectivities, carceral theology, theodicy, necropolitics, and traditionalism and modernism in contemporary Islamic thought.

Panelist, Seminar I: Prisons

Darryl Li is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago and an attorney licensed in New York and illinois. He has participated in litigation arising from the "War on Terror" in various capacities, including on legal teams defending Muslims held captive at Guantánamo Bay. He is the author of The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire, and the Challenge of Solidarity (Stanford University Press, 2020), an ethnographic history of Muslims who traveled for jihad to Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Panelist, Seminar I: Prisons

Iman AbdoulKarim is a Predoctoral Fellow with the Africana Muslim and Genealogies of White Supremacy Mellon Sawyer Seminar and a PhD candidate in African American Studies and Religious Studies at Yale University. She is currently working on her dissertation, tentatively titled Knowing Otherwise, an intellectual history of twentieth-century Black Muslima thinkers who drew on spiritual intellectualism and Black nationalist visions to reimagine U.S. Black life.