Author: Paul Barrett
Publication: The Wall Street Journal
Date: February 5, 2003
Over a quiet dinner at an Indian
restaurant in upstate New York, Warith Deen Umar offered his views of Islam
and the Sept. 11 attacks. The hijackers should be honored as martyrs, he
said. The U.S. risks further terrorism attacks because it oppresses Muslims
around the world. "Without justice, there will be warfare, and it can come
to this country, too," he said. The natural candidates to help press such
an attack, in his view: African-Americans who embraced Islam in prison.
During a long and extraordinary
career, he has had an unusual opportunity to spread these ideas. For about
20 years until he retired in 2000, Imam Umar -- the title means prayer
leader -- helped run New York's growing Islamic prison program, recruiting
and training dozens of chaplains, and ministering to thousands of inmates
himself. With help from the Saudi government, he traveled to Saudi Arabia
and brought that country's harsh form of Islam to New York's expanding
ranks of Muslim prisoners.
The 58-year-old cleric remains influential
with many of the chaplains he helped select as well as the inmates they
work with. He continues to visit New York state prisons as a volunteer
chaplain. Until Tuesday, he also worked part-time counseling inmates for
the U.S. Bureau of Prisons.
"Even Muslims who say they are against
terrorism secretly admire and applaud" the hijackers, he wrote in an unpublished
memoir. The Quran, he said, does not condemn terrorism against oppressors
of Muslims, even if innocent people die. "This is the sort of teaching
they don't want in prison," he said. "But this is what I'm doing."
Prison officials in New York and
many other states long have welcomed Muslim imams and clergy of other faiths.
Religion provides structured activity that reduces security problems in
prison, they say. It encourages inmates to accept responsibility for their
actions and turn their backs on crime upon their release.
But there is another side to Islam
behind bars. While Imam Umar says the focus of his preaching usually "is
on work, family and getting an education," he also says that prison "is
the perfect recruitment and training grounds for radicalism and the Islamic
religion."
A prison chaplain since 1975, he
has seen Islam grow among inmates, mirroring the vast increase in the incarceration
of African-Americans, some of whom adopt the religion as inmates. As the
most influential Muslim prison chaplain in New York, which has the fourth-largest
state system in the nation, he and some of his trainees adopted the fundamentalist
offshoot of Sunni Islam known as Wahhabism. Rooted in Saudi Arabia, it
stresses a literal reading of the Quran and intolerance for people and
sects that don't follow its absolutist teaching. The chaplains have operated
with little supervision from state prison officials, who say the constitutional
protection of religious freedom prevents them from closely monitoring religious
services.
Imam Umar -- born Wallace Gene Marks
and later known as Wallace 10X -- twice has traveled to Saudi Arabia for
worship and study at the expense of the Saudi government and its affiliated
charities, part of an extensive program aimed at spreading Islam in U.S.
prisons. He and other prison chaplains also have studied and attended conferences
at an Islamic school in Virginia that U.S. officials raided last year in
a probe of organizations suspected of helping move Saudi money to Middle
Eastern terrorists. Although New York state officials knew that a few chaplains
were making pilgrimages to Saudi Arabia, the state's prison commissioner
said last week that he did not know a large group had traveled at the Saudi
government's expense.
Imam Umar and some of his colleagues
have brought some of Wahhabism's harshest prejudices to their captive flock.
On Sept. 11, 2001, the chaplain at the men's prison in remote Cape Vincent,
N.Y., preached that God had inflicted his punishment on the wicked and
the victims deserved what they got, according to a labor arbitrator's subsequent
ruling upholding his firing. Shocked officials at the prison didn't intervene
for fear of sparking a riot. About six weeks later, the chaplain at the
Albion Correctional Facility for women told inmates that Osama bin Laden
"is a soldier of Allah, a hero of Allah," prison officials say.
New York also has seen a rash of
complaints from inmates who adhere to the minority Shiite sect of Islam.
The tension reflects a centuries-old split between Shiites and the Sunni
majority. Imam Umar and other chaplains have imported into New York prisons
Sunni absolutist perspectives, some inmates say, including a bias against
Shiites. Nearly all the chaplains he helped hire are Sunni.
Anthony Cook, a Shiite inmate in
New York, has been in protective custody since 2001, when other Muslim
inmates threatened his life, prison records show. Shiite inmates charge
that some chaplains encourage this kind of animosity by delivering sermons
that repeat a centuries-old slur that Shiaism began as a Jewish conspiracy
to contaminate Islam. Chaplains have handed out religious literature to
inmates calling Shiites "charlatans," "deviants" and enemies of genuine
Islam, inmates say.
Imam Umar says he has always preached
that "the Prophet said we are all Muslims, not Shiite, not Sunni, just
Muslims." He says it was "stupid" for his colleagues to speak out so frankly
in the aftermath of Sept. 11 but that they were punished too harshly. Fear
of this kind of official reaction is why more Muslims don't speak their
minds, he says.
Glenn S. Goord, New York's prison
commissioner, says that he was unaware of Imam Umar's extremist ideas.
"Those are political views he expressed after 9/11. He retired way before
9/11 and didn't express those views before, that I know of." He says he
did not know that Imam Umar continues to visit state prisons as a volunteer
chaplain. "It sounds like he shouldn't," he adds.
James B. Flateau, the prison department's
chief spokesman, says that Imam Umar "misrepresents and distorts" the meaning
of the Quran. Other Muslim chaplains "in their hearts may agree," he adds,
"but they are expected to conform to recognized views of their religion
while functioning within the prison."
The Making of a Militant
Imam Umar helped pioneer government-paid
Muslim prison ministry in the 1970s, but his earliest experiences behind
bars were as a teenage criminal. He says he spent his 15th and 16th birthdays
in Illinois jails for purse snatchings and drug crimes. "I went to jail
too many times to count," he says.
Wallace Gene Marks, as he was then
known, moved to New York in the late 1960s and befriended a group of fledgling
militants in Harlem. He and his friends talked "about taking off pigs [police
officers] and spreading guns and weapons to people," he says. They were
overheard by two undercover police officers.
He and four others, dubbed the Harlem
Five, were tried on conspiracy-to-murder charges in 1971. "We only had
my 9mm handgun, another defendant's 30-30 rifle and some crude hand-made
bombs, fashioned with gun powder and nails," he says. The Harlem Five argued
that their talk had been just bravado and beat the conspiracy charges.
Wallace Marks, however, was sent to prison for possessing weapons. "If
it happened today, I would have been called a terrorist," he says.
Before beginning his two-year prison
term, he visited Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who promised that
Allah would protect him. Mr. Marks became a Nation of Islam leader in prison
and later changed his name to Wallace 10X. In 1975, shortly after he was
released, New York put the 30-year-old parolee on its payroll as one of
the state's first two Muslim chaplains. Some of the other early Muslim
chaplains also were ex-convicts. Eventually he moved to the more orthodox
Sunni school of Islam and changed his name to Warith Deen Umar. (Warith
Deen means "inheritor of the religion"; Umar was an early Muslim leader.)
There are now 200,000 to 340,000
Muslim inmates nationwide, making up 10% to 17% of the prison and jail
population, according to estimates by corrections officials and Muslim
organizations. Prisons in most states with large Muslim populations, including
New York and California, have to varying degrees allowed for Friday group
prayer, Muslim-approved meals and special schedules during the Ramadan
month of fasting and worship.
To serve its 13,000 Muslim inmates,
New York employs 45 Muslim chaplains, most of whom were hired under Imam
Umar's supervision before he retired in August 2000. California, which
doesn't keep a tally of Muslim inmates, employs 18 full-time Muslim chaplains.
The federal Bureau of Prisons, with 12,000 Muslims among its 164,000 prisoners,
employs 10 full-time Muslim chaplains. That number does not include part-time
chaplains, such as Imam Umar, who until Tuesday worked for the bureau at
its prison in Otisville, N.Y., on a contractual basis.
After receiving questions about
Imam Umar from The Wall Street Journal, the federal prison agency said
in a statement Tuesday, "For the convenience of the government, the Bureau
of Prisons has terminated the contract for services with Imam Umar." The
bureau added that it "does not tolerate chaplains, or other staff, condoning
or endorsing violence in their communications with inmates." Imam Umar
said late Tuesday that he will "not sit back and accept this."
Imam Umar exercised wide influence
through the National Association of Muslim Chaplains, an advocacy group
he helped found in the late 1970s. New York officials say they deferred
to the association in selecting new chaplains. "We kind of never knew how
we got the people," says Mr. Goord, a 26-year corrections-department veteran
who became New York's prison commissioner in 1996.
Religious staffing issues are "maddening,"
says the 51-year-old official. "It's why I'm bald." He explains that choosing
Muslim chaplains is particularly tricky because Islam doesn't have centralized
administrative institutions, like Catholic archdioceses. Still, Mr. Goord
says, "the Muslim chaplains have been very, very positive for us, educating
me, educating my employees, educating the inmates."
But in the days and weeks after
Sept. 11, he and his corrections staffers say they were surprised to learn
what some inmates were hearing from the spiritual leaders that Imam Umar
had helped hire and train. When news of the attacks reached the men's prison
in isolated Cape Vincent on the Canadian border, all scheduled activities
at the medium-security prison ceased. Inmates, mostly from New York City,
were permitted to gather around televisions reporting the news.
Prison officials sought out their
Muslim chaplain, Sufwan El Hadi, to say something soothing to inmates.
The 31-year-old imam, who studied from a young age at Islamic schools in
Brooklyn and New Jersey, had worked for the corrections department for
more than five years and had a reputation for being mild-mannered.
But when he spoke at the collection
of low-slung buildings surrounded by chain-link fences that day, he was
anything but that. In a loud, angry voice, he addressed about 90 inmates
and a group of officials in the prison gymnasium, according to a labor
arbitrator's subsequent ruling. Spicing his English delivery with Arabic
prayer, Imam El Hadi said that God had inflicted his punishment on the
wicked. The victims deserved what they got, he said, and America deserved
what it got.
Some inmates became visibly agitated.
"What is this bulls -- ?" several were heard saying after Imam El Hadi's
talk, according to a deputy superintendent of the prison. But "many people,
inmates, came up to him and said, 'good job, good job,' " says the imam's
attorney, Amin Khalil Hussain-El.
The next day, Sept. 12, Muslim prisoners
at Cape Vincent didn't wear their distinctive kufis, or skull caps, afraid
to be identified with their religion. But at the nearby Watertown prison,
where Imam El Hadi also worked, a different scene unfolded. Imam El Hadi
ran out into the prison yard, pumping his arms above his head and chanting,
while a group of Muslim inmates crowded around him, smiling and laughing
and patting each other on the back, according to a guard's account cited
in arbitrator Paul S. Zonderman's ruling. On Sept. 13, officials told the
imam he was a security risk and put him on leave. He later was fired from
his $55,000-a-year job.
Imam El Hadi contested the dismissal.
He told a state investigator that he had said to inmates that " 'God punishes
wrongdoers and the disobedient,' but did not mean that the victims were
evil. I do not agree with the attacks and do not believe in violence towards
innocent people."
Mr. Hussain-El, the imam's lawyer,
says the Watertown incident was misinterpreted. He says Imam El Hadi had
merely shouted a standard Muslim greeting in Arabic and that inmates had
responded enthusiastically because, having heard of the controversy at
Cape Vincent, "they were happy he was OK."
Stressing the scene in the Watertown
prison yard, the arbitrator concluded last March that Imam El Hadi "has
no place within a correctional facility" and deserved to be fired.
About six weeks after the Sept.
11 attacks, Aminah Akbar, a veteran female chaplain, told a crowd of 100
inmates at the Albion Correctional Facility for women that Osama bin Laden
"is a soldier of Allah," and added, "I am not an American, I just live
here," prison officials say. She was booed by some inmates, and officials
feared her talk would exacerbate tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims
at the prison.
Mr. Zonderman, who also arbitrated
her case after she was fired, ruled that Ms. Akbar, then about 60 years
old, instead should have been suspended for three months. He noted that
her speech to inmates also included laudable advice about education, jobs
and demanding more respect from their men.
A union representative for Ms. Akbar
told the arbitrator that her words had been twisted by biased officials,
and that she didn't assert Mr. bin Laden's innocence. Ms. Akbar later retired,
according to prison officials. She didn't respond to faxed requests for
comment.
Mr. Goord, the prison commissioner,
says the two inflammatory incidents in the wake of Sept. 11 were rare and
dealt with swiftly. Most chaplains worked to calm inmates and maintain
order after Sept. 11, he says.
After Imam Umar retired in 2000,
Mr. Goord says he decided to turn to committees of imams in New York City
and Syracuse for advice on hiring Muslim clerics, instead of relying on
the National Association of Muslim Chaplains. "Umar did a great job," Mr.
Goord says. "I wanted to open the process." So far, four chaplains have
been hired under the year-old system.
'Prison Outreach'
Prison dawa, or the spreading of
the faith, has become a priority for many Muslim groups in the U.S. and
the Saudi Arabian government, which runs what spokesman Nail Al-Jubeir
calls a "prison outreach" program. The Islamic Affairs Department of its
Washington embassy ships out hundreds of copies of the Quran each month,
as well as religious pamphlets and videos, to prison chaplains and Islamic
groups who then pass them along to inmates.
The Saudi government also pays for
prison chaplains, along with many other American Muslims, to travel to
Saudi Arabia for worship and study during the hajj, the traditional winter
pilgrimage to Mecca that all Muslims are supposed to make at least once
in their lives. The trips typically cost $3,000 a person and last several
weeks, says Mr. Al-Jubeir, the Saudi spokesman.
Since 1978, Imam Umar has made the
pilgrimage to Mecca four times. In 1998 and 2000, he was a member of groups
whose travel was financed by the Saudi government and affiliated organizations.
On the 2000 trip, Imam Umar was among 17 prison chaplains and their wives
from the U.S.
Taha Jabir Alalwani, the president
of the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences in Leesburg, Va.,
helped arrange the trip in 2000 for the prison-chaplain contingent. He
made contacts on their behalf with Saudi government offices and government-funded
charities, he says. Mr. Alalwani had gotten to know Imam Umar and other
New York prison chaplains in the 1990s, when they studied at his school
and attended conferences there. The school awarded Imam Umar a masters
degree in 2001.
Mr. Alalwani, a well-known Iraqi-born
scholar, recalls warning the chaplains before they left for Saudi Arabia
in 2000: "Be careful. You may encounter certain people, religious leaders
with extremist attitudes and opinions that wouldn't work here." The scholar
says his Islamic school is a force for moderation among Muslims in the
U.S. The Kuwaiti and Malaysian governments have paid for students to attend
the school, but it doesn't take money from Saudi Arabia, he says.
The U.S. government uses the school
to help select chaplains for its prisons and for the military.
Last March, a federal task force
led by Customs Service agents raided the graduate school and Mr. Alalwani's
Virginia home, trucking away documents and computer files. The search was
part of a broad investigation of Islamic organizations and charities in
Virginia suspected by federal agents of helping to move Saudi money to
foreign terrorist groups, including al Qaeda and Hamas.
Many American Muslim leaders have
condemned the Customs Service task force, known as Operation Green Quest,
saying its mission reflects anti-Islam prejudice. Mr. Alalwani strongly
denies any association with terrorism. The government hasn't brought any
charges against him or his school or any other of the Virginia-based organizations.
Other investigations by Operation Green Quest have resulted in 70 indictments,
mostly on charges related to money laundering, currency smuggling and fraud,
a Customs Service spokesman says. He denies the service is motivated by
any bias against Muslims.
In its statement, the Bureau of
Prisons declined to comment on the investigation but added, "We would certainly
take appropriate action with respect to any school or organization that
has ties to terrorist groups."
A Pentagon spokeswoman say the Department
of Defense is aware of the investigation and confirms that the military
uses the school as an "ecclesiastical certifying organization."
Imam Umar criticizes the Customs
Service investigation as religiously motivated intimidation. As for Mr.
Alalwani's advice about Saudi Islam, Imam Umar says he has found nothing
objectionable about the views of Saudi religious figures or scholars, with
whom he has consulted periodically over the years.
He says the Saudis should share
more of their oil wealth with poor Muslims, but he praises the kingdom's
ruling family for promoting the ideas of Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab, an
18th-century religious puritan. The Saudis "kept the religion in force,"
he says. "They follow the ways of the Prophet."
Mr. Al-Jubeir, the Saudi spokesman,
says that his countrymen don't use the term Wahhabism, and consider it
a crude epithet. But, he says, "we believe in a strict interpretation of
the Quran. ... If it's not in the Quran, it's suspect."
"There are certain differences among
Muslims, and those are important," Mr. Al-Jubeir continues. For example,
he says, some Shiites worship at the grave of the Prophet Muhammad in Medina.
"We don't believe that's right," he says. "You pray to God, not the prophet.
You can't bring in your cultural ideas."
The split between the Sunni and
Shiite sects has its roots in the seventh-century struggle between Muslims
over who would succeed Muhammad. The minority Shiites declared allegiance
to members of Muhammad's family and their descendents, whom they considered
to be semidivine. Leaders of the Sunni majority adopted a more flexible
approach of following new leaders drawn from the larger Muslim population.
Bloody conflict ensued and has erupted periodically ever since. In its
most recent human-rights report, the U.S. Department of State said, "There
is institutionalized discrimination against adherents of the Shia branch
of Islam" in Saudi Arabia.
Sunni antagonism to Shiites has
become a problem in U.S. prisons as well. Some imams, the vast majority
of whom are Sunni, encourage the persecution of Shiite prisoners, according
to current and former inmates and some Muslim groups. Muhsin M.R. Alidina,
an official with the Imam Al-Khoei Islamic Center in Queens, N.Y., says
the large Shiite mosque has received letters from hundreds of Shiite inmates
in a half-dozen states complaining of mistreatment.
Imam Salahuddin M. Muhammad, now
the chaplain at Fishkill Correctional Facility, the medium-security prison
in Beacon, N.Y., met Imam Umar in the late 1970s while serving 12 years
for robbery. Like Imam Umar, Imam Muhammad says he embraced Sunni Islam.
Shiite prisoners at Fishkill have
accused Imam Muhammad of calling them "infiltrators and snitches" during
Friday sermons. They say Sunni inmates have circulated a pamphlet, "The
Difference Between the Shiites and the Majority of Muslim Scholars," which
recounts an ancient smear that Shiaism grew out of a seventh-century conspiracy
orchestrated by a Yemeni Jew, who sought "to create discord among Muslims
by agitating the trible [sic] and racial differences and hostilities."
The 32-page booklet was published by the World Assembly of Muslim Youth,
an organization based in Riyadh and backed by the Saudi government.
Imam Muhammad says he promotes Islam
as a "path of rectitude" and calls the Shiite allegations lies. Asked about
his views on Shiites, he says, "I don't want to get into name calling,
but they are the minority." He adds that he is concerned about Shiite inmates
who "have done a lot to try to influence Sunni to become Shia." The chaplain
stresses that he disagrees with Imam Umar's views on the Quran and terrorism.
An Unspecified 'Mission'
Some Shiite prisoners have filed
grievances and lawsuits seeking separate religious services, their own
chaplains, and other accommodations. In July 1999, Frankie Cancel, a Shiite
then serving a 10-year prison term for manslaughter, won a New York state
court ruling that Shiites were entitled to their own prayer services.
After the judge's ruling, Imam Umar
visited the Fishkill prison, where Mr. Cancel was held, and addressed Muslim
inmates at a Friday afternoon prayer service. Standing on a platform in
the prison's basement mosque, the chaplain began with prayers in Arabic.
Then he turned his attention to the recent court decision, according to
Mr. Cancel.
The ruling favoring Shiites was
a threat, he told his audience of about 100 inmates, most sitting cross-legged
on the floor. The Imam said that Mr. Cancel and other Shiites were part
of a Jewish conspiracy to undermine Islam, according to Mr. Cancel. He
spoke of the need to protect the Muslim community against enemies, and
pointed out that the judge who had rendered the decision was Jewish, Mr.
Cancel says.
Imam Umar told his listeners to
prepare themselves for an unspecified "mission," Mr. Cancel recalls, adding
that he and other inmates interpreted this as a threat against Shiites.
The chaplain said he himself had his "guns ready," according to Mr. Cancel.
The closest guard was in an adjacent hallway, out of earshot.
In May 2001, after Imam Umar had
officially retired as a New York state employee, he gave a guest sermon
to Muslim inmates at the Wyoming prison in Attica, N.Y., where Mr. Cancel
had been transferred. He told the inmates that Mr. Cancel was being paid
off by a Jewish conspiracy to undermine the Muslim prison community, Mr.
Cancel says.
Imam Umar says that he did give
talks at the Fishkill and Wyoming facilities at about the times Mr. Cancel
says he did, but that he didn't comment about a Jewish conspiracy, Sunnis
getting ready for a "mission," or having his own "guns ready."
"Even if I thought those thoughts,
I wouldn't come out and say that in front of a group that typically has
not just Muslims but other prisoners too, and a guard listening at the
door," the imam says. He says that he preaches unity among Muslims, not
division.
In Mr. Cancel's case, an appeals
court has ruled that Shiites must be accommodated, but the ruling leaves
much to the discretion of prison officials. Those officials have granted
Shiites separate religious classes and formally warned chaplains not to
"disparage" Shiite inmates or their views.
Mr. Cancel in 2001 filed a new suit
in federal court in Manhattan against various state officials, seeking
monetary damages for violations of his constitutional right to religious
freedom. A federal judge has dismissed his claims against most of the defendants,
but not against Imam Umar, who is represented by the state attorney general's
office. Mr. Cancel, now 30, was released from prison last year.
Shiite inmates say that hostile
sermons and literature sometimes incite threats of violence by Sunnis.
Anthony Cook says that in 1999 in the Great Meadow state prison, Imam Abdulkadir
Elmi distributed religious literature that condemned Shiites as "charlatans,
reeking with the stench of chicken-heartedness, insincerity, greed, cowardice
and equivocation." A senior prison official in New York later determined
that the literature was "inappropriate," prison records show. Mr. Cook
was transferred to another prison in 2001. He was placed in protective
custody after officials received warnings from other inmates that Mr. Cook's
life was in jeopardy from other Muslims, according to prison records.
Mr. Cook, now 43 and serving 15
years to life for manslaughter, is a plaintiff in a separate suit involving
the rights of Shiite inmates pending in federal court in Syracuse, N.Y.
Sitting on a blue metal folding chair in the dingy visitors' area in the
prison in Auburn, N.Y., he shrugs his shoulders over the death threats.
"If it happens, it happens," he says.
The religious literature at issue
in Mr. Cook's case was removed and the imam was "told not to do it again,"
says Mr. Flateau, the prison department spokesman. "It does show the process
works."
Antwon Dennis, a Shiite serving
50 years to life for second-degree murder and assault, said in a declaration
in another lawsuit that last year Imam Elmi attended a Friday prayer gathering
during which a Sunni inmate leader said that anyone who disagreed with
Sunni teachings should keep quiet or risk getting "jumped." Imam Elmi,
who is from Somalia, "did not say anything after these statements," Mr.
Dennis said. From November 2001 through February 2002, "about four Shiites
have been attacked by Sunni inmates" following disagreements at religious
classes or services at the Great Meadow prison, he said in his statement.
The suit, filed in federal court in Manhattan, was dismissed and the plaintiffs
have appealed. Imam Elmi declined to comment. Mr. Flateau says the four
attacks "cannot be substantiated."
New York prison officials say that
in most cases, Sunni and Shiite inmates worshipping together does not lead
to problems. As an example, they point to Mount McGregor, north of Albany,
where Imam Muhammad S. Ahmed, an immigrant from Ghana, ministers to about
100 Muslims inmates.
The Mount McGregor mosque offers
inmates a haven from the clamor and stench encountered elsewhere in drab
buildings of stone and concrete. On a frigid winter day, an inmate in a
green uniform, his shoes removed, intoned the traditional plaintive call
to midday prayer. A dozen inmates gathered under the eaves in a clean attic
room decorated with Arabic spiritual messages in cobalt, gold and crimson.
The men faced east toward Mecca, prostrated themselves on a blue carpet
and prayed. The closest guard sat out of sight, two rooms away.
In an interview before the service
began, Imam Ahmed addressed the Shiite issue. Some Sunni inmates, although
not in his prison, have suggested that Shiites are not good Muslims, he
said.
"You will find inmates who will
attack, and you will find Imams who egg them on," he said, adding that
he does not do so. "You will find inmates with hate literature. That you
cannot help. Religious literature comes from the outside. There is no proof
that imams bring that material into the facility. It is against department
policy."
New York prison officials say they
are looking into hiring their first Shiite chaplain. But most Shiites who
want to worship with others will have to continue to attend Sunni services,
the officials say.
Imam Umar says he considered trying
to defuse the Shiite issue by hiring a Shiite chaplain in 1993, but he
dropped the idea because other Sunni chaplains opposed it. Now, he sees
far greater dangers eclipsing sectarian hostility among inmates. "There
is more happening in this country than most people know about," he says:
Muslim anger is quietly building behind bars and on the outside. "Prisons
are a powder keg," he says. "The question is the ignition."
