In the documentary, Hana Baba walks us through the stories of four Americans who have chosen Islam and the joys and challenges of their lives after conversion. This is a great episode to share and we hope you will. 

Read More

Did enslaved Africans bring Islam to America? Or did they sail with Christopher Columbus first? How did Islam spread in the United States and who spread it? Host Hana Baba dives into the history of Islam in America with Dr. Edward E. Curtis IV, a scholar of Muslim American, African American, and Arab American history and life.

Read More

Aaron Siebert-Llera and Raul Gonzalez both live in the Chicago area and both converted to Islam twenty years ago. And both have been trying to answer the question of how to reconcile their identity as Latinos — and Muslims — ever since.

Read More

Sofie Lovern is a Latina convert and comedienne who learned the difficulty of trying to merge two very different cultures in a marriage, even when their religions were the same. Her struggle with marriage is not uncommon with new convert women who are often rushed into marriage. Her marriage fails, but her comedy brings her through it all. She emerges unmarried but still Muslim.

Read More

Tyson Amir’s family knew he would become Muslim from a young age. He was influenced by the revolutionary example of Malcolm X. And also by the legacy of resistance embodied by his great-great-great-grandfather, an enslaved man who was Muslim, according to family lore.

Read More

Convicted of first-degree murder and sent to Folsom State Prison, Wendell El-Amin James gravitated towards the Muslim prisoners out of a need for protection. But ultimately his conversion restructured his life to one of education and purpose.

Read More

As a student and basketball player at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1960s, Abdul Raoof Nasir joined the Nation of Islam. In the years that followed, he was forced to make a choice: stay with the Nation or go with one of the groups that splintered away from it.

Read More

Rabi’a Keeble has been fighting discrimination and pushing boundaries her whole life as she searched for a faith and spiritual home that felt just right. She’s an innovator, which led her to found a women-led mosque that sparked a powerful backlash.

Read More

Searching for the “real” Islam. Diana Demchemko spent her young adulthood learning to become Muslim, but it was while on a journey to Cairo to study the Quran that she looked for answers to some of her deepest questions.

Read More

We explore the motivations and challenges of converts as they carve out a uniquely American path for being Muslim in the United States. Over seven episodes, we profile eight individuals from various cultural backgrounds. Each offers a different window into this diverse and complex religion. In a religion that’s often partitioned by nationality and culture, how do these new Muslims fit in?

Read More

Women don’t always feel welcome in American mosques. They’re sometimes turned away, sent to basements to pray, or discouraged from serving on the boards of directors. Aisha al-Adawiya has devoted her life to changing that. She’s inspired a national campaign — and a fatwa — that’s persuading the men who control mosques to share space and power.

Read More

Independent producer Maria Martin offers this remembrance of the late Sister Dianna Ortiz, who survived torture in Guatemala during the 1980s. She and went on to fight for human rights and to speak out about the use of torture globally. She did so until her death in February 2021, even while still suffering from the trauma of her experience.

Read More

The Central American country of Guatemala promotes its indigenous heritage to tourists. At the same time, its government has historically marginalized and discriminated against the Maya, many of whom endured terrible violence during a decades-long civil war. Twenty five years after the war’s end, human rights leader Rosalina Tuyuc is promoting healing for her people based on ancient Maya wisdom.

Read More

California reports more cases of human tracking than any state In Oakland, most sex trafficking victims are Black girls under the age 18. Regina Evans is an activist and artist using her creative gifts to call attention to this crisis and rescue girls.

Read More

Caroline Yongue runs a small green burial cemetery in Western North Carolina.  It’s part of a larger project to change how Americans approach death and grief — creating new ways to live with loss, from the ground up. 

Read More

Mehool Sanghrajka isn’t your typical tech CEO. To start with, his worldview is grounded in ancient Indian philosophy, one which inspires him to serve not just his close-knit religious community, but extends to people he’s never met.

Read More

COVID-19 prison lockdowns prevented family and friends from visiting the nation’s nearly two million prisoners. They also shut down education programs. However, at a maximum security prison near Chicago, one trail-blazing instructor managed to keep reaching inside.

Read More

Former President Trump labeled COVID-19 the “China Virus” and “Kung Flu.” Since then, violence targeting Asian Americans has surged. Russell Jeung, the co-founder of the Stop AAPI Hate coalition, is determined to make this reality known.

Read More

When people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo confronted a deadly and highly contagious disease. mental health counselor Noe Kasali recognized a problem. In the face of so many losses, survivors had no way to grieve.

Read More

A new generation of anti-poverty activists are looking to end poverty in the United States. They want to build on the movement started by Martin Luther King. Shailly Gupta Barnes grounds her commitment to economic justice in her family’s Hindu traditions.

Read More

Most religions teach people to help those in need. But what happens when that mandate clashes with how the government views the law? After federal prosecutors cracked down on volunteers providing aid on the border, Scott Warren faced decades in prison for following his conscience.

Read More

A Honduran Catholic priest fondly known as Padre Melo risks his life to speak up on behalf of his country’s most vulnerable people.

Read More

After decades of work with immigrant detainees, Sisters JoAnn Persch and Pat Murphy still aren’t slowing down. They say their age is irrelevant when there is so much need.

Read More

Al and Andi Tauber are taking their ministry and music to the streets, where they’ve found heartbreak…and a family.

Read More

A Palestinian fighter hears a melody that becomes his touchstone for peace as he tries to walk the path of reconciliation amid one of the thorniest conflicts imaginable.

Read More

A former Israeli soldier starts to question violence towards Palestinians and finds himself under fire by his own government. He then suffers an identity crisis. What does it mean to be Jewish if he’s no longer a Zionist?

Read More

For most of her life, Neets’aii Gwich’in leader Sarah James has worked to protect her homelands, including the coastal plain of the nearby Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Read More

Sarah Byrne-Martelli, a hospital chaplain in Boston believes no one should die alone.

Read More

Season 1 of The Spiritual Edge begins with our new series, Sacred Steps: profiles of people rooted in a personal faith, and activated to look out for the wellbeing of others.

Read More

For most of her life, Neets’aii Gwich’in leader Sarah James has worked to protect her homelands, including the coastal plain of the nearby Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Under the Trump Administration, the United States government put out a call for bids on leasing some of the area for oil exploration and drilling. To the region’s longtime inhabitants, those plans threaten land they call sacred. 

More than a pristine wilderness is at stake in this conflict. The Porcupine Caribou Herd — the center of Gwich’in culture — gives birth on the coastal plain inside the refuge. Caribou are also the main food source for Gwich’in people who live in villages spanning the U.S. Canadian border. 

***

Gwichʼin Alaska Native Sarah James tosses her silver hair over her shoulders as she welcomes me into her small cabin with eyes that sparkle through black-rimmed glasses. The elder tells me she has coffee on. Even in June, it can be cool here, 100 miles above the Arctic Circle — and hot coffee is welcome year-round.

From her cabin window we can see craggy outcroppings emerging from deep green spruce forest. The view rivals that in the most spectacular national parks. Her home, atop a knoll in her hometown of Arctic Village, is situated just across a river from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. 

This is Sarah’s ancestral homeland.

Alaska Indigenous People vs. the U.S. Government

With the help of the Native American Rights Fund, two Alaska tribes, including Sarah’s, filed a lawsuit September 9 in Federal District Court against Interior Secretary David Bernhardt and the Trump Administration to protect the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil and gas development. 

The federal government has protected that land — an area about the size of South Carolina — for more than  50 years. Now the Trump Administration wants to open 1.6 Million acres of it to a lease sale, a step that would allow oil companies to drill there for the first time. The Gwich’in Athabascan indigenous people consider it sacred land. The lawsuit the Native American Rights Fund brought is one of several. The Gwich’in Steering Committee, The Audubon Society and 15 states are also suing the U.S. government.

Covid-19 has complicated the Gwich’in Nation’s efforts to protect the refuge. People in Arctic Village have been infected and the virus has limited their ability to travel. Sarah says the pandemic has made it harder to coordinate their legal battle. It has also highlighted the importance of maintaining traditions that ensure her people’s self-reliance and survival. 

Family is everything here. With pride, Sarah shows me old black and white family photos with her nine siblings. Only 150 people live in the whole town. 

The sky here is light 24/7 in summer. Most people in Arctic Village spend the season outdoors. Many of Sarah’s neighbors camp close to where they can hunt caribou. 

Caribou connect Gwich’in to the cosmos

When they’re in town, they also go to church.

Although many Gwich’in became Christians when Episcopal missionaries arrived in the 1800s, they continue to believe that spirits inhabit objects and places. Sarah shows me another photo that demonstrates how this belief system informs the steeple of the old church in Arctic Village.

“The arrows going up with the cross on it and there’s the arrow going in four directions. And in between there’s one big lump, another big lump and then, little lump. And, that means bless the whole solar system,” she says. 

Centuries before astronomers and space explorers grasped this, Sarah adds, the Gwich’in considered the cosmos. “I’m just amazed at my people – how much they know, how much they care about the whole universe.”

Sarah is in her late 70s. It takes hard work to live here. She says it’s good exercise. “We have [an] outhouse, we don’t have running water here. And I pack my treated water from a river. I still walk, I still rake my yard.”

She’s lived in Arctic Village most of her life. One of her first memories is running alongside a dogsled on a hunting trip with her family and eating fresh caribou meat roasted over an open fire.Even as the world around them has changed, the wild animals people hunt here still count for three-quarters of what they eat. 

Stories passed down through the generations tell of a time – before fur trappers arrived from Canada, when even more life thrived here. Animal mating calls and bird songs filled the air.“It was the land of the plenty, my mom calls it,” Sarah says.  In the springtime, especially. It was so noisy that people have to yell at each other to understand each other.”

The story goes that so many migratory birds arrived each spring, they cast a shadow over the land. And, there were so many fish in the streams and rivers that the water only trickled around them. Then, there was the Porcupine Caribou Herd. 

To Gwich’in people, these animals aren’t just food. Sarah says they are the culture. “We care so much for the caribou — we take care of them and in return they take care of us. We’re in their heart and they’re in our hearts.” The wildlife refuge that surrounds Sarah’s village on three sides – especially its coastal plain, where the Porcupine Caribou herd gives birth – is key to the survival of caribou and her culture. 

Outsiders came first for pelts, then for gold. Now, it’s for oil.

Alaska’s political leaders have different ideas about what the refuge is good for. That set up decades of tension between them and the Gwich’in.  Since the late 50s — before Alaska statehood — the federal government expanded that area for protection. But the prospect of oil and gas development in the refuge has glimmered like a mirage. The government has studied that possibility.

Today, Alaska is the only state that doesn’t levy income or sales taxes. Oil production in other parts of the state made that possible. Sarah and her people – the Neets’aii Gwich’in – would rather protect the wildlife refuge than allow oil drilling there. They say developing the land for oil extraction will threaten the caribou on which they depend, and they contend that the fossil fuel economy isn’t sustainable.

“Recycle, reuse, reduce and refuse and use less oil until we don’t have to use oil any more,” she says. “And that’s what Neets’aii Gwichʼin is all about. We want to teach the world why – in a good way – why we say no to oil – and that’s our mission.”

What Sarah James learned – and what she teaches

Sarah didn’t speak English until her teens, when she went to Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school in Oregon. Then the agency sent her to learn secretarial skills at a business college in San Francisco. She’d never set foot in a city that big. The rampant consumerism and litter shocked her. 

But the 1960s counterculture fascinated her. So did the convergence of young indigenous people bent on self-determination. When one of them invited Sarah on a boat ride to Alcatraz Island, she had no idea that a spur-of-the-moment sail with her new friends would make history. The American Indian Movement occupation of Alcatraz – federal land that once held a high-security prison – lasted 19 months, from November 1969 to June 1971. 

Sarah didn’t stay that long. When her father died in 1970, she returned home to Arctic Village. She brought with her a lot of what she’d absorbed in the big city — ideas from the Indian rights movement, knowledge of the laws that applied to Native Americans and strategies for resistance.

She worked in the village school and in tribal government. Sarah also became a mother. She focused her activism on saving the coastal plain of the wildlife refuge from oil drilling and pipelines. 

With reverence, she explains the Gwich’in name for the coastal plain — The Sacred Place Where Life Begins. 

Every June, for thousands of years, the porcupine caribou herd has given birth on that narrow strip of land to the north, inside the refuge. “Only place that porcupine caribou could have their calf safely, quiet, private and clean,” Sarah says, “and every birth needs that.” Everybody knows, Sarah adds, that noise from oil drilling and industrial development drives these animals away. They’re not able to deliver their offspring anywhere else. “They can’t do it on the foothills — there’s predators there. They can’t do it on the mountain — it’s too cold. So, the only place is that one small coastal area up in the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.” In this place, all the right conditions exist for caribou to thrive. 

After they give birth, they nurse and raise their calves until fall when they move south through the mountains right down to the ground beneath our feet when we go out walking. Alongside  the Chandalar River, Sarah points out light-colored lichen that covers the tundra like snow. 

“Caribou likes to eat that,” she says. It doesn’t contain a lot of nutrients, but it helps the migrating herd digest its food gradually over the long trek. “They release nutrition slowly. They’re always on the move burning up energy. So, this one helps them retain energy — in their body.” The lichen – an all-you-can-eat buffet for the herd – is one reason her ancestors chose this as the permanent location for their village. “We are in this valley. And, when caribou is on the move they tend to come through this valley.” For the lichen that allows the herd – and, ultimately, the tribe – to survive. That’s why the Gwich’in and their allies are ready to fight any federal plan that would allow oil extraction in the region. 

“We have a right to be caribou people”

Indigenous land claims are complicated, but unlike some tribes, the Gwich’in were able to gain ownership of more than a million acres – plus, Sarah says, “We got our own tribal government.”

Federal Indian Law guarantees the right to self-determination — including continued access to subsistence and cultural resources — like caribou. The Native American Rights Fund believes Sarah’s tribal government has the legal standing to sue – and keep the federal government from carrying out its plan to drill for oil. “We have a right to be caribou people,” Sarah says. We believe God put us here to take care of this part of the world — Earth and we did well with our caribou.”

Before the mid-20th century, Gwich’in migrated among seasonal foraging and hunting camps. They only settled in permanent villages as the state of Alaska was forming, because the government wanted them to register their children in schools. Sarah is Neets’aii Gwich’in. That nation is located northeast of Yukon Territory and in the Mackenzie Delta area of Northwest and Northeast of Alaska 

Sarah has to explain details like this to outsiders a lot. Every decade or so over the last half-century, the federal government has revived the prospect of drilling in the wildlife refuge. 

In the late 1980s, leaders of the Gwich’in Nation across the U.S. and Canadian border gathered for the first time in over 100 years to address the issue. They designated her as one of six people to speak on their behalf.  

During a 2011 hearing of the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee in Washington, D.C., Alaska Congressman Don Young compared the proposed drilling site in relation to the wildlife refuge to a hair on your head – pluck it out and you wouldn’t miss it. 

“The reality is, this area should be drilled. I’ve been fighting this battle for 39 years,” he testified.” It was set aside for drilling.” Alaska’s two U.S. Senators agree with him. 

At another point in the same hearing, Sarah stood her ground as she had many times before.

 “Caribou is our way of life, just like the buffalo is to the Plains Indians,” she told the committee.”It’s our song, it’s our dance, it’s our story.” 

A generous, welcoming tradition 

In her cabin, Sarah brings out an animal hide drum, places it on her lap, chants and beats out a rhythm. This is what she means when she invokes the caribou as her peoples’ song, dance and story. She knows the Caribou Skin Hut Dance Song by heart. It’s a traditional welcome song of the Neets’aii Gwich’in people. 

Sarah says it came about when the Neets’aii were starving, and a shaman shared with them his dream about the caribou. To survive, he said, the human inhabitants would need to be like the caribou: adaptable…on the move…together.

In addition to the huts the Gwich’in  built with caribou hides back in what Sarah calls the “bow and arrow days,” they used every other part of the animal to make tools, clothes and household items. They accommodated waves of newcomers — the French Canadian trappers from Hudson Bay, the Americans and others.

“We are generous people,” Sarah says. “Many times, it didn’t help us to welcome – but overall, it’s a good practice for our people. And today we have to survive together because we welcome them when they first came to our country and we have to live together, side-by-side.”

Until very recently, the Gwich’in were able to hold off outsiders’ attempts to drill in the area. Then, in 2017, Congress passed the Trump administration’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. It included a provision that required the Interior Department approve at least two lease sales for drilling in the Refuge within 10 years. That agency’s Bureau of Land Management has filed a final environmental impact statement. The Interior Department plans to hold a lease sale by the end of 2020. 

Sarah James says this makes no sense. 

“My people always said they believe in Christianity even before that they practice the same practice. It’s just that they don’t have the story behind it. The Ten Commandments — we kept that. And taking care of the environment because the creator made it good.”

Where the caribou roam

To show me this environment, Sarah revs up her four-wheel all-terrain vehicle and I hop on behind. Everybody gets around town this way. She drops me off to visit one of her neighbors, 61-year old Charlie Swaney.

 He’s a hunter who’s married to Sarah’s niece. “We built this house here from scratch” a place with a big picture window.  “Me and my wife, in 1991.” 

“I tell you the most spectacular sight I’ve seen is as far as you could see the last mountain down there,” he gestures through the pane. “From there all the way across to the entire other side of the mountain here was a line of caribou from back to back, lined up. I don’t know how many thousands that was but it lasted about eight hours straight. One straight line of caribou, tail to tail.”

On the other side of the mountains where the tundra sweeps up into the foothills from the coast, the caribou move across the calving and nursing grounds with their young. They feed on plants packed with nutrients. Thousands of female caribou gather there with their new calves, as they do each spring.

The cows grunt to call to their babies. The herd sounds and moves like a river … their hooves and foot joints make a clicking sound. It’s the longest migration of any LAND mammal on earth. Tens of thousands of caribou trek as many as 3,000 miles every year.

Charlie says people here want to rely on caribou instead of imported, store-bought food that costs two or three times what it does in Alaska’s cities.  Most people in Arctic Village earn around $20-thousand dollars a year — or less. “You might say that there’s not much money here — only seasonal jobs and all that,” he says. “Some people might think we’re poor-wise, but you look at this lifestyle — this is a rich lifestyle here. That means everything to people here.”

Farther south, along the banks of the Yukon River, other Gwich’in people also depend on the same herd. That’s why 19-year-old Araya Stoffa has joined the movement to protect the refuge. 

Over the summer, she returned from college in Iowa to work with the nonprofit Gwich’in Steering Committee Sarah founded with other leaders in the 80s. 

“Being able to subsistence hunt and go get your own food is a blessing,” Araya says.“A lot of people don’t realize it until they’re taken out of the village and have to go to the grocery store. But there is something on the inside that makes you feel so much better to harvest your own food and there is a spiritual connection.”

For young Gwich’in like her, that connection is critical. “When I left for school out of state, I felt lost.” Similar feelings of displacement contribute to high rates of substance abuse and suicide among young Alaska Natives. “If we didn’t have the Porcupine Caribou Herd anymore, I feel like that’s how everybody else would feel too — they would feel lost because our ancestors built such a strong relationship with them. And I feel like that passed down to us.”

Thinking seven generations ahead

Part of Sarah’s work is about ensuring that young people have a future here. You may have heard the indigenous idea that it’s necessary to think seven generations ahead. Sarah says with what we know about climate change and the renewable energy and technological advances on the horizon, there will be more need to preserve the ecosystem here, than to extract more oil from it. 

Sometimes, she imagines that earlier generations’ lives were better. “I can’t go back to bow and arrow like I want to. When we were healthy, strong and a lot of us, and a healthy earth. I want to go back to that but, now we’re all together and we have to do it together in order to survive.”

Sarah believes God has a plan to protect the sacredness she knows. Her tribal government does, too. For almost as long as Alaska has been a state, attorneys for the tribe have prepared for a legal showdown with the U.S. government over drilling. She concludes, “They gotta face our government now.”

Two sovereign nations will butt horns, in court.  

“Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit” – the Gwich’in name  for The Sacred Place Where Life Begins – “is a public land,” she says. ”It’s your land — It’s your kids’ future, it’s my kids’ future. 

Tell your neighbor, tell your family in the living room!”

The way Sarah James, for most of her life, has been telling everybody within earshot. 

* * *

The Sacred Steps series is a collaboration between KALW’s The Spiritual Edge and USC’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture. Funding comes from the John Templeton Foundation and the Templeton Religion Trust. The Alaska Humanities Forum also contributed funding for the reporting of this story. This story first aired on KALW Public Radio on Sept. 23, 2020.

Listen and subscribe to The Spiritual Edge wherever you listen to podcasts – Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts.

By Maria Martin

“I began to understand that it’s good not to feel defeated. That we should keep moving  forward, loving life, and our existence.”

As the COVID-19 pandemic raged and Guatemala was under lockdown, a remarkable woman told her story — one that mirrors the long history of struggle of Guatemala’s Maya, especially that of its women.

“My full name is Rosalina Tuyuc Velasquez,” she said in Spanish over the phone.

She belongs to the Kaqchikel Maya linguistic community. Tuyuc was born to a family of peasant weavers and artisans some 60 years ago, and was raised as a Catholic in San Juan Comalapa.

She heads an organization she founded in 1985 known by its Spanish acronym as CONAVIGUA, the national coordinator of Guatemalan widows.   

The organization fights for the rights of women who were raped and widowed during the country’s long civil conflict. Tuyuc says that what led her to organize this organization came out of her own experience.

“I’m still looking for the remains of my father,” she says. ”He was detained, and forcibly disappeared, along with my husband and a number of other relatives.”

Tuyuc says that what Guatemalans call “the time of the violence” — almost four decades of war that lasted from 1960 to 1996 — was very painful for her, and for countless Maya women. Especially the bloody 1980s

Her family’s pain, she says, comes from the constant search for her father’s remains and the memory of other loved ones lost to violence. Like it or not, she says, this will always be a source of anguish.

“Even after all this time,” she says, “the war officially ended more than two decades ago. It’s hard to heal the wounds of the past.”

This isn’t just the case for Tuyuc, but for thousands of other Maya women who endured similar losses.

“First there was the very real trauma of what they experienced, either the disappearances or the actual husbands being killed right in front of them. That was true in a number of cases.”

 University of Arizona anthropologist Linda Green writes about the challenges these women faced — not only emotional loss, but just trying to survive and support their children.

“For several years. there were no corn crops planted because of displacement. There was enormous food insecurity. Women didn’t have the money to buy the fertilizer. They themselves either had to work those fields or they had to hire mozos to do it for them. 

Fear and necessity drove many from their homes. Women also suffered in other ways. 

“Chronic headaches, gastritis, inability to sleep,” Green says. “As well as the physical manifestations of what we now call Post Traumatic Stress syndrome here in the United States.”

Even as Tuyuc dealt with these challenges, she came to believe that the universe also gives us a chance to find balance along with the pain.

“I’m profoundly grateful to the universe,” she says, “to have grandchildren, to fight alongside other women.”

She arrived at this understanding gradually. For more than 25 years, she’d questioned why the tragedies of the war had happened: “Why was there no father, no husband? Why did the Guatemalan army kill so many people?” 

Tuyuc found answers to these  questions in the teachings of her ancestors, passed down through the generations.

She expresses gratitude “to the many elders — men and women who told us it isn’t good to keep on suffering, because we were meant to be happy, we were meant to take care of Mother Earth, to protect all life, be it human or animal, the life of everything that lives on this planet.”

After her husband disappeared in 1980, Tuyuc says she sought out an elder. He told her, “Your husband won’t be found, nor will you hear about your father.” And, he said, “Now you have to start thinking about yourself, about your children. Now you have to live for you and for them.

“Now,” he told her, “you have to live your life’s mission.” Only then, she says, did she begin to understand that what the Maya  call “cosmovision” is not a religion.

“Many call it spirituality. it’s very complex and holistic,” she says, “encompassing everything — the cosmos and nature.” Tuyuc says that when the elder asked, “Do you know what your mission is?” the only way she could respond was that she was a woman with a desire to heal, and to help people.

Even after she sought the elders’ advice, Tuyuc discovered she had more to learn from the traditional teachings of her Kaqchikel Maya culture. 

“That’s when I began to understand that it’s good not to feel defeated,” she says. “That we should keep moving  forward, loving life, and our existence.

If it weren’t for these wise teachings, she adds, “I might be like so many women who suffered and basically stopped living because of  their pain, who died with no hope for a better life. Traditional religion had taught them to accept suffering in return for a happy afterlife. 

“I think that sometimes (conventional) religion condemns us to suffer. To not live life fully, and in balance.” 

Embracing her culture, she says, allowed her to make sense of all that had happened, and to heal.

Now she can say that, even with all these threats to life, she’s profoundly grateful to the universe to be alive, to have grandchildren, to fight alongside other women. “All this,” she says,  “has given me strength to continue with my life’s mission.” 

When she was small, Tuyuc’s father was a music teacher who did some work with the Catholic Church.

She remembers how people would call on him when they were ill, so that even at a young age, indigenous healing traditions were part of her life, although few people publicly acknowledged or valued them.

“Sadly,” she says, “the colonization of the indigenous made us believe that our knowledge and our practices weren’t worthwhile. It’s something that was ingrained in us since we were little.”

Because her family was Catholic, she didn’t realize as a child that these Maya practices were all around her.

“It’s something that one carries in one’s blood, from knowledge passed down by the grandfathers and grandmothers. My maternal grandmother was a midwife, and my paternal grandfather was a great farmer,” Tuyuc says. “He would give thanks to the earth, and salute the sun when it rose and set. He would give thanks to the rain, and to the air.

“He would ask the earth for permission to work the land,” she says. “So these are traditions not taught inside churches, but in the collective customs of a people.”

But because of her very religious upbringing, Tuyuc says that as an adult,  it was difficult at first to accept Maya cosmovision.

Eventually, it gave Tuyuc a new way of looking at the material world. It also gave direction to her human rights work.

“In 1985, when I began my work with the women, and there was also the commemoration of the 500 hundred years of colonialism,” she says, “that’s when I began to understand how Maya cosmovision connected with my social and political work.

I began to understand that this cosmovision is also about organizing, about politics, about economics.” Tuyuc says. “So I started to defend the rights of indigenous people, their way of being, of acting, of thinking.”

Her work with the widows in the late 1980s and early 90s coincided with a re-awakening of Maya identity — not only for Tuyuc, but for other indigenous leaders like her countrywoman who is a Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

“Sister Rigoberta Menchu,” Tuyuc says, “helped me understand the profound complexity of indigenous communities.”

By the time peace accords finally ended Guatemala’s conflict in 1996, the widows association Tuyuc founded, CONAVIGUA, had become one of the leading human rights organizations in the country. Four years after the war ended,  she became the first Mayan Kaqchikel to serve in the Guatemalan Congress. 

That time was key, she recalls. “Out of 80 congressmembers, six of us were indigenous. Some important legislation was passed, for example, outlawing amnesty for crimes of genocide.”

Still, she says, it was an uphill struggle being in the minority and maintaining her identity as an indigenous woman. 

Wearing her traditional traje, a woven skirt and top, Tuyuc would bring her baby to the Congress, nursing her when needed. Some people criticized her for that.

“But I would say, if the popular vote brought me to Congress, then I have to be accepted, as a mother, as a peasant, as indigenous.

“We Maya women always carry our small children with us when we’re shopping, or weaving, or working,” she says, “because that’s when the learning starts.”

Following the war, the Guatemalan government established a reparations program for war widows. Tuyuc became its director. 

During that time, she worked to dignify the memory of the dead, by leading the effort to exhume mass graves and identify the remains, and also the living, fighting to offer war widows financial and emotional support. 

“I went to one of these ceremonies when they were giving money to these women,” says Eliza Strode, an American who’s spent many years in Guatemala. “And she would just open her arms and envelop them in a hug. It was so moving. She was so totally present.

The government funded the reparations program for only a few years. With no consistent institutional support, Rosalina Tuyuc continues working with the widows, many of them elderly and dying, in whatever way she can.  

Dr. Bill Clemens is an alternative medicine practitioner working with the poor in Guatemala. He’s known Tuyuc for some 15 years. Together, they’ve conducted medical missions in neglected communities. 

Clemens described Tuyuc as “very loving and caring. 

“I remember when an 88-year-old woman came in through the rain. No shoes, no children. The cutest little grandma. I remember Rosalina dried her off, combed her hair, hugged on her to warm her up.” 

Jordán Rodas, Guatemala’s human rights ombudsman, believes Tuyuc has become an icon representing brave resistance to military brutality. “She went to congress and came out with her head held high,” he says. “She’s truly a role model to emulate.”

Although international human rights groups have recognized Tuyuc for her work, she says she doesn’t do it for awards. 

“When I was growing up, we were taught that the Maya had disappeared, and the only thing that remained of them were tourist attractions,” she says.

“We grew up being taught we were just worthless Indians.”

Despite some social progress, Guatemala’s Maya still strive to achieve parity and respect in their own country, where opponents feel increasingly free to attack indigenous human rights defenders and  practitioners of maya spirituality.

In June 2020, witnesses watched in horror as members of an evangelical sect dragged the internationally recognized Maya healer and plant medicine expert Domingo Choc into a field, doused him with gasoline and set him on fire.  

His attackers accused Choc of witchcraft. His death called attention to continuing discrimination in guatemala against those who practice traditional Maya religion.

So Rosalina Tuyuc says she has a renewed commitment to vindicate her culture and its spiritual traditions, and to honor those who’ve perished to keep it alive.

“It’s a revindication,” she says, “Not only of art and culture, but of rights and history.

“And it’s not a gift. it has a cost. And so, we have to continue to struggle to maintain our culture,” Tuyuc adds, “especially in memory of those who shed their blood on this sacred land.” 

***

Maria Martin is an independent journalist based in Guatemala. She’s the author of “Crossing Borders, Building Bridges: A Journalist’s Heart in Latin America.”

The Sacred Steps series is a collaboration between KALW’s The Spiritual Edge and the USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture. Funding comes from the John Templeton Foundation and the Templeton Religion Trust.

In a peaceful protest, the Winnemem Wintu call out the U.S. government for its refusal to acknowledge the destruction caused by Shasta Dam. The protest at the Shasta Dam Visitor Center reveals the Winnemem Wintu’s ongoing reality. They are ignored and later a security guard threatens to forcibly remove them.

Read More

We accompany the Winnemem Wintu to sacred sites near the McCloud River. The federal government’s Shasta Dam and Reservoir Expansion Proposal threatens these sites and the Winnemem Wintu way of life.

Read More

We go to Shasta Dam and learn about the history behind its construction in the 1930s and 1940s. We hear from Chief Caleen Sisk about how the federal proposal to raise the dam another 18 and a half feet opens old wounds for the Winnemem Wintu and further threatens their tenuous survival.

Read More

An elder remembers indigenous life back before Shasta Dam was built. The legality of the proposal to raise Shasta Dam is considered. Meanwhile, Chief Caleen Sisk considers a new strategy to fight back: turning an adversary — the Westlands Water District — into an ally.

Read More

The Winnemem Wintu and supporters start a two-week Run4Salmon prayer to call salmon back to the waters above Shasta Dam. The Run follows the salmon’s migration path from the ocean to the mountains. It starts in the Bay Area where the Winnemem Wintu and supporters encounter environmental devastation first set in motion 200 years ago.

Read More

As the Run4Salmon continues to travel upstream, the Winnemem Wintu and supporters witness more obstacles faced by migrating salmon. Once a vast marshland, the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta was an important haven for juvenile salmon, but now is a gauntlet of human engineering. Chief Caleen Sisk stands up for salmon and water health at a bureaucratic meeting of Sacramento Valley water districts.

“Sinbad Avenue. This is where it started,” he tells me. 

He takes me to the neighborhood in San Jose that his parents moved to in the late seventies, just before he was born. It’s also where Tyson first encountered hip hop as a kid.

“This is where all of that began,” Tyson says. “This was where I started rapping, break dancing, all that out here.”

Tyson is wearing his usual outfit. Black pants, black shirt, black beanie. And his custom varsity jacket. The street is lined with modest bungalows with short driveways. 

“I remember seeing folks with linoleum out, like putting that on the ground and then pop — locking, breakdancing, back-spinning, all of that right here.” 

“And then the older cats here, they rapping and breakdancing. So we got it all from what we saw around us. And then we doing our little kids stuff too, running around playing,” he says.

Before they moved here, his parents were activists in Oakland. San Jose was where they chose to raise Tyson and his older sister. They were one of the only black families in a mostly Latino neighborhood. His father taught at the local school and his mother worked at a dentist office. 

Tyson and his sister spent a lot of time with the elderly neighbor across the street. It was pretty idyllic until the crack epidemic hit.

“We didn’t ask for it,” Tyson says. “This stuff came and it came into the places that we lived in. And some of us made decisions that we felt were best to survive.” 

Some of the older kids and fathers started disappearing. They were recruited by gangs, lost to violence, addiction or life in prison. And even young kids like Tyson experienced traumas that would change them forever.

He tells me about one of them: “I had a friend, I’m 10 years old.”

The friend was 10 years old too. One night he started drinking with his older siblings and ended up dead.  

“That hit me, bro,” he says. “I’m a kid. You feel me? The end of this person has just happened. I didn’t understand that. And I remember that vividly is a moment where whatever I thought was my childhood, that ending, and then having to step into a deeper understanding of the world and the consequences of decisions, and all of that.” 

Tyson remembers this as the first moment when he started to ask the bigger questions. Religious understanding, higher power, heaven, hell conversation, what’s going to happen after this life.

Not long afterwards Tyson’s parents decided to sell their home in the Storybook neighborhood and moved across town to a two story home in a cul de-sac. His parents still live there.

The Black room

Walking through the foyer I immediately notice a theme of African cultural artifacts. Tribal masks and woven farmer hats with intricate patterns hanging on the wall. 

His mom tells, “Here in San Jose, it’s not that many African-American people. And the few that we knew, we all felt the same way. Like our kids aren’t getting their information. So we would have Sunday classes and we would have lessons. We take them on field trips. And that’s how they got to understand who they were as people.”

We sit at the kitchen table, and talk about her upbringing in the South, how she came to Oakland and met her husband. He was a member of the Black Panther Party, the famous group founded there in response to police violence in 1966. She volunteered for their free breakfast program, feeding kids in black neighborhoods before school. 

Her stories reminded me of something Tyson had mentioned about the house. A special room called The Black Room.

She asks Tyson, “You want to take him to the black room?”

Tyson takes me upstairs. 

When they moved into the house, they had this extra bedroom. Tyson’s parents filled it with posters of black icons. Angela Davis, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, A picture of the famous 1968 Olympics black power salute. For Tyson, this room, similar to the book about his enslaved ancestors, had a huge impact.

“I’m seeing history and people in revolutionary struggles from all over the world in my very home,” he says.

It’s also where his journey to Islam began. He became fascinated by the life of Malcolm X.

“I decided I wanted to follow the path of Malcolm very, very early on,” Tyson says.

“So whatever I can learn about his path, what helped build him, became part of me. I remember deciding, probably like around the age of 10 or 11, I’m like, ‘Oh, Malcolm was in the nation of Islam. I know in the Nation. They don’t eat pork. I won’t eat any more pork.’ Simple as that.”

His mother remembers how intense he was even at that age. She remembers one time they were at a sports banquet.

“He was getting this award, um, before we got ready to eat. You know, the pastor wanted to do the blessing and everybody bows their heads. But my son… “

She cups her hands to simulate the way Muslims pray.

“I told my husband, oh look, there’s our little Muslim. And I said, that’s who he is.”

“So in my young mind, the most powerful image or representation that I saw of blackness and an unapologetic revolutionary approach was that of Malcolm,” Tyson says. “Malcolm was amazing and still is to this day. And so the calculus in my mind was whatever produced him, I need to be connected to.”

And that included Malcolm’s faith. 

Still, it would be years before Tyson took his Shahada and officially became Muslim. I asked about that moment many times. And every time I asked, Tyson deflected. It was clear he was trying to steer me away from telling his story that way. 

His conversion didn’t come from a period of spiritual searching – the way it does for many converts. From the beginning this was about joining the ranks of black Muslim freedom fighters that came before him. 

Tyson wanted me to understand that his conversion wasn’t about soul-searching. It was about placing himself in the struggle.

Your spirituality can be part of your political activism. They’re not, they don’t have to be separate boxes. It’s like, all right, almost step into my political activist, organizing revolutionary box, and that means I’m not in my spiritual box anymore. It’s not that. So in what I have experienced as part of the black experience, the spiritual, the political, the revolutionary, the artistic, the creative. It’s all intertwined.

When Tyson went to college at San Jose State University, he started writing poetry and rapping. He’d always been quiet and introverted but on the mic he let out a huge personality. 

He started meeting other Muslims at the mosque and at cultural events. There was a burgeoning scene of Muslim hip hop artists in the Bay Area at the time. And they were determined to not rely on the commercial music industry for their success. Tyson joined forces with a DJ and another rapper to form a group called 11:59. Their lyrics reflected a strong sense of Islamic spirituality while being true to their own experiences as Black Americans.

“We just passing through / Life is but a test / Come on let’s get free y’all / Die before your death”

The group traveled around the United States and to Muslim lands abroad. Tyson’s travels broadened his understanding of the world and his faith, as he met all kinds of people that claim a relationship to Islam.

“We thought that with this is this unifying tool of Islam that people would be able to see beyond some of the things that colonization, imperialism, just the global system of racism have thrown into each of us, regardless of where we are in the planet, he says.”

He and his band mates felt that the Black American struggle held lessons for Muslims all over the world.

They toured for years. But eventually, the band dissolved. And Tyson’s focus turned back home. His relationship to religion shifted. He became less concerned with connecting with Muslims abroad and more attuned to the struggle that brought him into the faith to begin with.

A visit to Panther territory

In February 2020, just a month before things closed down because of the coronavirus pandemic. Tyson and I driving around West Oakland, visiting old Black Panther landmarks in Oakland.

He asks me, “Have you been to West Oakland like this?” 

I tell him, not with a tour guide.

“I don’t know if I’m a tour guide, but I’ll point out a few things,” he tells me. 

“So right now, we’re at 14th and Peralta. So West Oakland is the official home of the Black Panther party.” 

I had passed these streets countless times but hadn’t known the history. I began to sense the enormity of the struggle that weighs on Tyson. 50 years ago, young black people organized on these streets to stand up to police brutality.

What we driving through. These are the streets that those brothers and sisters were on. This is where they was pulling their first recruits, and this is what produced that which produced a movement that had an impact all throughout the United States and beyond. That’s powerful man.

Teaching as revolution

These days, Tyson spends his time trying to live up to this history. He’s writing, teaching, and organizing in the black community. In a classroom where he’s teaching, the desks are arranged in a circle. The students watch him intensely.

“We’re going to break it down,” he tells them. So we gonna take this line by line. Y’all good. Y’all ready? So this is Between Huey and Malcolm.” 

Tyson starts to read one of his poems. 

“The doctor Huey P Newton had an epiphany once. And then he said, I don’t expect the white media to create positive black male images. So he wouldn’t be surprised to see how evening networks accumulate their net worth of billions off assassinating the character of our children.”

It’s from a book he published called Black Boy Poems. He uses it in a curriculum he’s developed. It’s designed to teach black students the revolutionary history of the 1960’s.

“Ain’t no revolutionary curriculum that people are being exposed to that is put out by the state of California or any other state that we’re talking about,” says Tyson. “They’re not doing it and not going to give you information that’s going to lead you to fighting for your freedom and liberation.” 

He wants the students to see themselves in that history, the way the green book about his ancestors and the black room in his house did for him as a kid. This is how Tyson described himself in our first interview. I had asked him to tell me his name and what he does. 

“Some people call me an author. Some people call me an emcee,” he said. “Some people call me a poet. Some people call me educator and activist and organizer, so many different things. Freedom fighter is first. “

He was raised seeing himself as part of the continuation of the struggle. The struggle began with the ancestors of his ancestors, who were brought in bondage and forced to labor on these lands. They lost their languages. Their traditions. And of course their religious knowledge.

Everything Tyson does today is about his connection to this community. To his forebears. To fallen leaders. It’s what informs his music. His writing. His teaching. It’s why today, if he’s not working, he’s volunteering and organizing. 

This is what Tyson wants me to understand. that his choice to be Muslim is at the heart of his revolutionary stand against a history of oppression.  

“I want to live a life that’s principled that reflects the conditions that we’re in,” he says. “And being true to those principles. And having a purpose in the way that I live my life and serving the people in the community that I come from. And standing up for the things that need to be addressed in this moment in time because that’s what my ancestors did before me.

Tyson continues. “I’m going to honor them and I’m going to carry that on because it’s the right thing to do. If you put all those pieces together, that’s what’s at the heart of what I stand on in terms of faith and spirituality and practice.”

***

Imran Ali Malik is a freelance writer and audio producer, currently pursuing a master’s at Berkeley Journalism. He is the producer of the Submitter podcast.

The Spiritual Edge is a project of KALW Public Radio. Funding for Becoming Muslim comes from the Templeton Religion Trust.

Listen and subscribe to The Spiritual Edge wherever you listen to podcasts – Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts.

By Jahd Khalil

“I really have to understand that I’m not going to get closer to God just because I’m in Damascus. I have to be able to feel close to God in Detroit, too.”

Diana Demchenko converted to Islam as a college sophomore. But since she didn’t grow up around the religion, she had to learn what the real Islam is and searched – online, in local mosques, and eventually abroad. Thousands of American students used to travel to Egypt to study religion and Quranic Arabic, and Diana was one of them.

Diana grew up always interested in religion, but her immigrant family was more traditional than religious, which gave her a degree of separation from the Christianity that dominated their new home in Michigan. Even she though went to multiple churches, read scripture, and interrogated clergy, it never really sat with her right. After a series of emails, texts, and conversations with a Saudi student in Michigan, Diana converted via text message in the college library hyped up on coffee.

Becoming Muslim was the easier part. Being Muslim was harder. Diana tried to find spiritual leaders she liked and to study scripture in translation, all while navigating the not-exactly welcoming American cultural landscape, which sometimes extended to her family. In Mosques in southern California, she found what she thought was a more authentic Islam, practiced by immigrant Muslims. 

Eventually, she found herself in Cairo with other students who came to study Arabic and the Quran. While there she found Islam to be a much more normal, daily thing in people’s lives, and less of an identity to fulfill. When she was forced to come back to the US because of the COVID pandemic, she took that new perspective with her and kept her old convictions to keep looking for answers. 

“I texted him and I’m like, ‘Okay, I’ll be Muslim!’ And we weren’t even talking or anything. Like it was just me randomly texting this guy…at like 2:00 a.m. or something… And he basically just like e-mails me the Shehada.”

***

Jahd Khalil covers Richmond and state politics for Radio IQ and Virginia Public Radio. He was based in Cairo for seven years, where he co-founded Mada Masr.

The Spiritual Edge is a project of KALW Public Radio. Funding for the Becoming Muslim series comes from the Templeton Religion Trust.

In Becoming Muslim, we explore the motivations and challenges of converts, as they carve out a uniquely American path for being Muslim in the United States. Over seven episodes, we profile eight individuals from various cultural backgrounds. Each offers a different window into this diverse and complex religion. A spiritual seeker travels to Cairo to find the “real” Islam.. A prison inmate hangs with the Muslim brothers to stay safe. A UC Berkeley basketball player is introduced to the Nation of Islam. And more. In a religion that’s often partitioned by nationality and culture, how do these new Muslims fit in?

The series begins November 12.

Listen and subscribe to The Spiritual Edge wherever you listen to podcasts – Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts.

By Natasha Haverty

“We’re completely used to breaking our fast alone, like this is something that’s not foreign to a lot of us who have come to the religion, because we don’t have Muslim families.”

Latinx Americans make up one of the fastest-growing groups of Muslim Converts in the U.S.. In 2010, Latinx Muslims made up one percent of all Muslims in the U.S.—they now make up eight percent, according to a Gallup poll.

One reason more Latinos are converting has to do with the mass exodus from the Catholic church. For others, it’s tracing heritage back 800 years to Andalusia, and the Muslim kingdom that ruled the Iberian peninsula. A lot of Latinx converts call themselves “reverts.” 

In this episode, we follow the journeys of Aaron Siebert-Llera and Raul Gonzalez, both living in the Chicago area and who both converted to Islam twenty years and half their lifetimes ago. Both have been trying to answer the question of how to reconcile their identity as Latinos—with their identity as Muslims, ever since. 

But while one has dedicated his life to helping the Latino Muslim community in his city find itself, the other still isn’t even sure being in a community as a Latino Muslim is possible.

***

Natasha Haverty is an independent journalist whose work has appeared on NPR, Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, and the New York Times. More at her website: www.natashahaverty.com

The Spiritual Edge is a project of KALW Public Radio.

Funding for Becoming Muslim comes from the Templeton Religion Trust.

Listen and subscribe to The Spiritual Edge wherever you listen to podcasts – Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts.

By Hana Baba

“Malcolm X said it himself. He said there is no audience that is more primed to hear the message of Islam than the black man in prison.”

An important part of the Black Muslim story in America has to do with incarceration. 

Scholar SpearIt is a professor at Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University and author of “American Prisons: A Critical Primer on Culture and Conversion to Islam.”

“Starting in the 1970s, we started on this turn to mass incarceration. And so the sitting demographic of people was large groups of African American men. And so they are literally a captive audience for the message,” SpearIt says.

Thirty to forty thousand prison inmates convert to Islam every year, according to SpearIt. He argues that the Black Muslim story can’t be told without looking at what’s happened in American prisons. 

Harlem of the West

Wendell El-Amin James grew up in San Francisco during the 1960s. It was a time of cultural revolution and radical ideas. For the city’s Black communities it was also a time when the jazz scene flourished in the Fillmore district, known as the Harlem of the West.

As a kid of just 11 or 12, Wendell James saw a lot on the city’s streets —pimps, drugs, clubs. Wendell didn’t learn how to read. He was classified as special ed for a speech impediment. As a teen, he would hang out in the neighborhood. He’d be in the city on Saturdays and church on Sundays. And then there was an unexpected turn of events. His girlfriend got pregnant. He got married at age 18. 

“My mom wasn’t going for that,” Wendell says. “She said, ‘You be responsible. You get a  job and you make sure this girl is taken care of.’ I got me a job in a shipyard at a young age. But then I became part of the street as well. And I had friends that were selling marijuana, weed.” 

He started dealing. He needed money to keep a house and support his new family. Weed led him to cocaine and heroin. 

“I became a dope dealer in San Francisco,” Wendell says.

This was also a time of activism and social change. It was the height of the free speech movement in Berkeley. The Black Panthers were in Oakland. Plus, the Nation of Islam had a strong presence in the lives of Black people in the Bay Area. Wendell’s older brother was a member.

“I used to go to the temple with him,” Wendell says. “And I used to like it because they marched in the drills and it was structured. You know, I liked that. I loved it!”

Wendell admired the Nation, but he was still young and he had the responsibility to care for a family before the age of 20. 

He dealt drugs for years. The money was rolling in. But by the late 1970s, he wasn’t just dealing heroin and cocaine, he was also using.

He and his wife were addicts. One day he was in San Jose and was arrested. He ended up serving six months in the county jail.

That was Wendell’s first involvement with incarceration. After he left jail, he went back to his old drug life on the outside. It was the same for a lot of people. At the time, recidivism rates were notoriously high.

In 1987, he was charged with another crime — a much more serious crime: first-degree murder.

“I was scared to death.”

Going to prison

Wendell maintains his innocence to this day. But he was convicted and sent to prison for 27 years.

While awaiting his sentence in county jail, the men inside with him gave him a reality check about what would come next. 

“I went into a holding tank with people that were older than I was,” he says. “Old Gs, so to speak. And he was telling me, ‘Youngster, you goin’ into prison. You charged with murder. You’re going to prison man.’” 

“A lot of Old G’s had been to prison and at that time it was a war going on in prison,” Wendell says. “You know, Blacks and whites and Mexicans. People were dying every day. So they said, ‘You going to old Folsom.’  And that’s where it’s really bad. I said, ‘Whoa.’” 

This was the height of Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs in the 1980s that led to prison populations swelling. A 1985 report on violence at Folsom State prison counted 120 stabbings in just six months that year. A prison guard was killed the same year Wendell was going in. So the older men Wendell was getting advice from had a big tip for him.

They told him that when he got to prison he should find the Muslims.

Wendell recalls that conversation. “‘They said, ‘You hang out with the Muslims, you’ll be okay.’ I said, ’What do you mean by that?’”

“He said, ‘Nothing will happen to the Muslims.’’

“‘What you mean about that?’”

“He said, ‘Muslims don’t play. So you hang out with the Muslims, you’ll be straight.’” 

The Muslims. Like his brother back in the 60s. However between that time and now, much had changed with Black Muslims. That change included charismatic leader Malcolm X.

Malcolm X was assassinated after splitting from the Nation of Islam. Its leader Elijah Muhammad died in 1975 and his son Warith Deen took over, moving the movement towards mainstream Sunni Islam. 

By the time Wendell went to prison in the late 1980s there were a number of different Black Muslim groups on the inside, and they were all reaching out to incarcerated men more than ever. 

“The Muslim groups are the most sophisticated and organized outreach effort groups in prison that prisons ever known,” says SpearIt, the scholar who studies Islam in prisons.

Malcolm X famously converted to Islam in prison. Like it was for Malcolm X, prison for many is a time of personal reflection, SpearIt says.

“For many, it’s the first time they’ve ever been able to sit down and concentrate on something away from the chaos of the hood and the streets and all of that,” he says. “And we have to remember, in prison, it’s traumatic. And there’s other research that suggests that trauma, the trauma of having to go to prison, and then finally getting there and having to live that experience, these are precursors to conversion as well.” 

Wendell gets to Folsom, and on the first day he’s there, he sees somebody get killed. That day, his new cell mate gave him different advice from what he heard from those county jail men.

This man said, “You have to be part of the war happening in the prison. You have to pick a side and be loyal to it.”

“He said, ‘You want to survive,’” Wendell says.

“You got to be part of this, man,” he tells Wendell. “If you don’t want to be part of this, you’re gonna die.”

Wendell had a choice to make. A choice that could mean the difference between life and death. Should he listen to this man inside prison and get involved with the gangs? Or take the advice from the men he met in the county jail? He was new, and he was conflicted with the mixed messages. But he knew he had to choose. 

Finding the Muslims

Wendell asked where the Muslims hung out. Someone pointed him in the direction of the multi-faith chapel.

“So I went over and then went inside. And it was like, wow! This is cool. I saw the brothers all together. At one section were brothers learning the prayer. And one section, they learn Arabic. And one section, they got a whiteboard where they learned stuff. And it was like, it was cool. It was quiet. Out there was the yard. A lot of noise. Inside, it was quiet. Everybody respectful.”

One of the men introduced Wendell to the others and he felt that familiar draw that he experienced as a kid going with his brother to the Nation temple.

“You know, they glow,” he remembers. “It’s a different look. Different from people in prison. You got that shine, you know?. You’re serious about what you’re doing. You know, you’ve been educated. You’ve been transformed. Everything you’re doing is different.”

And that protection the Old G’s told him about? That first day, he stayed in the chapel as long as he could. And when it was time to leave, the Muslim men walked him back to his cell. In the morning, someone would be there to get him. He was accompanied at all times. He felt safe. He felt he was with productive people. He listened as they read from the Quran. He watched their prayers.

When Ramadan came along, he fasted with them.

He remembers how impressed he was. “I wasn’t a Muslim then. But to see how you fast. That you don’t eat. You don’t drink. You don’t do nothing. No swearing, no cursing, no nothing.” 

Wendell enjoyed hanging out with the Muslims.

Scholar SpearIt says these feelings are part of the reason why Islam is such a powerful draw for men like him in prison. This strong sense of connection, the discipline. And he says there are other reasons, too.

“People just look at their existential situation and associate that with Christianity,” SpearIt says. “This is a Christian country. These were Christians who did this to me. And I’m sitting in prison because of this system that, you know — that basically Christianity has authorized. So there is that sense that by being Muslim, you are joining something that has had a glorious past of standing up to Christianity, having glorious victories. So there is this sense that Christianity is something to get away from.”

Spearit says many Black American Muslims see themselves as reverts rather than converts. Going back to the past and reclaiming powerful lost Muslim identities linked to the history of Islam in Africa and even Spain. 

For Wendell, after fasting that Ramadan in 1988, he went to the Muslims and said: “I want to become Muslim. It’s cool.”

“He said, ‘Why do I say it’s cool?’ I say, ‘Because the way that you guys are doing things is different.’”

“You know, we got dope dealers and you got dope fiends. You got everything in prison that you got on the street. You had people doing the same things they did on the streets, they’re doing in prison.”

“I said, ‘This is cool.’”

“If I’m gonna be in prison for some time. This what I want to be. I want to be a Muslim.”

He remembers the day vividly.

“When I took my shahada,” he says, “it was like a weight was lifted off me. It was like, ‘Okay, you got this. You can do this, right?’”

“’‘You don’t have to worry about nothing. You can do this.’ Whatever time they give, you can do this. You know, you just keep doing what you’re doing. You know, just keep reading this book. And the book is gonna give you direction outta this.’”

A difficult transition

Wendell was now Muslim, but he started going back to his old habit of dealing drugs again. He ended up in solitary confinement — the hole. He says the Islamic concept of God watching you at all times is what helped him through it.

“So when I got in the hole, I realized, hey, wait a minute. Allah is watching me, everything I do. Everything that I do, I’m being watched. So I got to make a promise to myself…I make a promise that: you can’t do this. You have to take control of your life and know that you’re not the only one in this.”

Scholar SpearIt says being in solitary can be instrumental for conversion and for commitment to the faith. Again, he points to the story of Malcolm X.

“His time in solitary is what really got him inspired,” he says.  “And was the trigger for his conversion. Because when you’ve got nowhere else to turn and you’re at rock bottom, you can only turn to God and only go upward from there.” 

Wendell left the hole with a new vision for himself. He cut ties with the guys who were dealing and got back in with the Muslim guys. He started going to the Friday services. And he studied. A lot.  Over the years, he slowly worked to turn his vision into reality. He spent most of his time in the chapel or in the library. He taught himself how to read and got his GED. He got a clerkship with the Muslim chaplain and earned a certificate in drug and alcohol counseling. 

New religion, new life, new goals

Wendell got out on July 2, 2015. He had been in prison for nearly 3 decades. His son and the Muslim chaplain he’d known inside were there to greet him. 

“My first thing that I did,” he says, “I hooked up with some people that was doing constructive things on the street, that had been in the system.”

“A lot of people would be going back into prison speaking to people in prison. I wanted to do that.” 

When he got out, Wendell was 63 years old. It’s a dangerous phase of life to be returning to society. Older people are more vulnerable to being un-housed, unemployed, chronically sick and lonely. 

But Wendell had a plan. He stayed with family. And he got to work. 

He started a reentry support circle as part of Taleef, a Muslim collective that works with converts and formerly incarcerated people. It’s a casual monthly gettogether where folks can just talk. Even during the pandemic, they were held — on Zoom. 

People open up about their lives transitioning back into society, their relationships and their challenges. Wendell’s former coworker, Alaa Suliman, used to run circles with him. 

“His very open and accepting personality and energy,” she says. “He just attracts people to him to be able to just share and connect. He just has a very nonjudgmental, like all is welcome. We’re in this together.”

This kind of work is critical for rehabilitation, according to scholar SpearIt. He says the Muslim version of it has a good track record. 

“There’s an entire discussion about Islam’s contribution to rehabilitation,” he says. “When you look at all the religions — and they’ve done numbers on this — Muslims have lower recidivism numbers than all the other religious groups.”

It doesn’t work for everyone though. SpearIt says sometimes people will start hanging with the Muslims out of a need for protection or to get out of the cell for extra perks.

“And so that’s one of the tests to determine if someone is a sincere convert,” he says. “ Is whether they keep the faith once they leave prison. And many don’t. I mean, that’s just a fact. And so, you know, when we talk about converts as a whole, we have to recognize that there’s a chunk of converts who weren’t converts at all seriously, but were just kind of there for the ride. And once they get out or get in a better situation, they don’t really stick with it.” 

For Wendell, there was no question. He was committed to staying Muslim. He says he’s doing exactly what he thinks he was meant to do. 

He still tells his story: “I tell people that I lived in a cesspool before going to prison. I was a dope dealer. I was one of the worst of the worst. I sold poison to everybody that wanted it. I sold it to them. The women having babies. I did that. I live with that every day. Then Allah took me from the cesspool and sent me to hell. I went into hell, literally. Literally, I’ve seen people get killed. I’ve seen grown men get raped.  I’ve seen some stuff that people are not supposed to see.”

Wendell says he felt God was giving him a choice. Go back to the cesspool or do his work. 

“And I chose to come back and do his work. I do his work today. I don’t do my work, because it’s not mine. I’m just a tool being worked.”

He wipes a tear. “It gives me a chill,” he says. “I get teary-eyed with this stuff. I know that Allah allowed me to come home for a reason.”

And the reason is to be of service. 

“It means that I can get up every morning with a purpose.”

***

Hana Baba is the host of Becoming Muslim. She also hosts KALW’s award-winning newsmagazine, Crosscurrents, and The Stoop podcast: stories from across the Black diaspora.

The Spiritual Edge is a project of KALW Public Radio. Funding for Becoming Muslim comes from the Templeton Religion Trust.