In February 2018, Dr. Kecia Ali, Maytha Alhassen, and Dr. Su’ad Abdul Khabeer convened at a conference for women in Islam where they casually explored the idea of using zakat to pay bail. This gathering ultimately led to the formation of Believers Bail Out, which has bailed out over 200 muslims from pre-trial incarceration. The organizers have reasoned that zakat, an annual tax on wealth, can be used for bail under two of its eight permissible uses: helping the poor and freeing slaves or captives. The bail system punishes the poor by placing a dollar value on their freedom while they wait to stand trial, with complete disregard for the presumption of innocence in our criminal legal system. Thus they are unjustly held in captivity by the system.
Believers Bail Out (BBO) was inspired by the work of the National Bailout Collective which would host a Black Mama’s Bailout annually, so that Black mothers could be bailed out of pre-trial incarceration in time for Mother’s Day. The co-founders wondered if a similar model could be adopted to bail Muslims out during Ramadan in time for Eid Al-Adha.
I spoke with University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Professor Maryam Kashani and University of Chicago PhD candidate Alla Alaghbri, two members of BBO’s national leadership collective. We discussed the process of starting BBO, the spiritual underpinnings of this project, navigating issues of race and class in the Muslim community, and the ongoing work of supporting formerly incarcerated folks post-release.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
MARYAM KASHANI
We originally envisioned this to be a one-off fundraiser. We would raise all this money, then we would bail out a bunch of people and that would be it. We also didn't anticipate raising that much money. We were very cognizant that Muslims might have some qualms about their zakat going to people who were “criminals,” that there might be this idea that they had done something wrong, so they must not be good Muslims.
But thankfully we were really heartened by the community's donations to our cause and their ability to see the logic and rationality of the blatant injustice of the money bond system and its form of incarcerating people….that money bail was a form of ransom, that only because they couldn't afford to pay they were being held in pre-trial incarceration.
The actual criminal punishment system can't handle everyone going to trial…. the money bail system really facilitates that. Thankfully, our community saw the injustice of it and we got a lot of support.
HIRA AHMED
What was the logic behind starting this in Chicago, specifically?
MARYAM KASHANI
Su’ad (Abdul-Khabeer, Professor at University of Michigan) was in Chicago and she recruited a number of us in Chicago to be involved in that first year. Chicago is still perhaps the site of the single largest county jail, the Cook County Jail. Also, Chicago was the location where the Chicago Community Bond Fund was operating already.
Another reason we chose Chicago was because there were a number of Muslim organizations that we thought we could introduce people to that would help with a lot of the post-release support. There was a very good infrastructure in Chicago amongst the different masjids and organizations.
HIRA AHMED
How do you ascertain who is Muslim and wants to receive zakat for their bail?
MARYAM KASHANI
We work with a number of chaplains and actually brother Khalid Bilal was a chaplain at Cook County Jail and was also one of our first recruits and someone we consulted, like does this seem like a good idea? And he was so enthusiastic and was so appreciative that folks were paying attention. So initially, he connected us with folks at the jail who had lists of people who self-identified as Muslim. We were able to get those lists and write letters to people who were incarcerated.
The main way we found out about Muslims who were incarcerated at Cook County was through the Chicago Community Bond Fund. They were already a known entity. They started a few years before us. Through their intake process, they were able to refer us to Muslims who were being incarcerated.
HIRA AHMED
BBO posts bail and provides post-release support. How do you conceive of post-release support in the zakat framework?
MARYAM KASHANI
Zakat is only used by BBO to pay the bails and any minor costs associated with that bail or the process of that bailout. That would include putting money on people's books so that they could either call someone or mail a letter to us.
Everything else that we pay for comes out of sadaqah. That comprises grant funds or funds that folks didn't restrict to zakat when they donated it.
HIRA AHMED
What is the scope of your post-release support?
I met a brother when I visited Tayba Foundation back before even BBO and he talked about how the first time he ever prayed alone was after he was released from years of incarceration.
ALLA ALAGHBRI
We started out with post-release support on a one-on-one basis. So people would have kind of a buddy system in which if somebody is bailed out, there's one person that would be their point person. That person would be the first point of contact for any emergency needs. That person would remind them about their court dates, provide them with rides if they can, provide spiritual and communal support, and would check if it’s possible to apply for them to get a movement exception so they can go to pray Jumah.
I can speak a bit more about what it means to practice Islam in this afterlife of incarceration... A lot of our folks even after they're bailed out, they're still in electronic monitoring and under house arrest. That’s still a form of incarceration. It’s not in jail but in the confines of their own homes and that poses a lot of restrictions materially, spiritually, psychologically…
Since our expansion over the last couple of years, we learned that housing is a huge problem post-release. So if a person is at risk of being homeless there is money that is allocated towards their housing. We try to also contact sister organizations that do some sort of housing work. Masjid Farouk on the South Side of Chicago has some housing but it often houses a lot of refugees so they are at capacity.
HIRA AHMED
You mentioned the spiritual challenges of life after incarceration. Can you elaborate on that?
ALLA ALAGHBRI
The prison industrial complex’s violence is inflicted on entire communities. They are broken because of the system. And so oftentimes the religious community is a place where people can reconnect and regain a sense of support. For folks with ankle monitoring on house arrest, they often aren’t granted a movement exception to pray Jumah; that restricts peoples’ ability to practice their faith and their access to their community.
HIRA AHMED
What has coalition building been like with other muslim organizations?
MARYAM KASHANI
What was so unique about when we first started was that we brought together a lot of different Muslims and Muslim organizations that didn't agree on other things, but could agree on this issue. We had a very inclusive masjid with queer and trans Muslims as well as the Nation of Islam all involved when we first started. This specific issue of money bail paying the Zakat and the issues with the criminal punishment system were things that we all agreed on and wanted to address. I think that was a really important aspect of what Believers Bail Out was able to do.
ALLA ALAGHBRI
Even on our campus where I live in Hyde Park, Chicago; oftentimes students who come from suburban wealthy communities are encountering these injustices for the first time. For our post-release work which includes visiting formerly incarcerated people in their homes, these students would not know that there are Muslims very close to them [geographically] especially on the southside of Chicago that are experiencing these things (poverty, homelessness and incarceration).
The ability of BBO's work to draw in or expose Muslims to the day-to-day realities of other Muslims in their own cities is very important.
HIRA AHMED
How do you navigate the reality that some Muslim communities or organizations might not want to be involved in this work?
MARYAM KASHANI
I think it's not that they don't want to be involved, but they don't respond to the call, perhaps. I think people have a lot of reasons why they might not respond. One of the things that we are trying to raise consciousness about is that, regardless of whether you've been exposed to unjust and violent policing or incarceration, you're already implicated in the system.
HIRA AHMED
The backlash to Stop Cop City and the criminalization of bail funds is terrifying. What are the implications of that for your work? We’re also in a “tough on crime,” political climate. How are you navigating where the bail reform movement is at this moment?
MARYAM KASHANI
To try to criminalize the work that bail funds are doing speaks to the importance of our work, to demonstrate that we are in community with people who are being overpoliced and criminalized. And we're not going to let them languish.
We were able to benefit from the fact that bail bonds people are no longer legal in Illinois. So we don't have to deal with them. But in a lot of states that's the only way to get someone out of jail because the bail amounts are so high. The system has built bail bonds people into it (entities that charge a nonrefundable premium to the incarcerated person who is borrowing the money for bail; bails are set so high that even a 10 percent premium can be prohibitive for low income defendants). I think that's something that bail funds are really attuned to is at what point do we become incorporated into the criminal punishment system? Some bail funds have sunsetted precisely because of that, because they saw how they were being incorporated into the system and that's a constant question for us in terms of how we deal with the sheriffs and such.
HIRA AHMED
Ummah is such a powerful concept, but in your work, has it been able to overcome some of the socioeconomic and racial prejudices that exist in our community?
MARYAM KASHANI
One of the things that might surprise people is that we've received and bailed out Muslims from every ethnic racial group. Our bailouts reflect the ummah at large. Of course, because of the way the PIC works, the majority of people we bailout are Black Muslim men.
ALLA ALAGHBRI
I think the most dangerous thing is apathy. The thing that we are trying to work against is the idea that you’re not necessarily under obligation to play a part in eradicating this injustice. Part of our rhetoric has been about what it means to have communal obligations, that you're communally obligated to play some part in ensuring that people are not in the conditions that they are in. Muslims with experiences of incarceration do not only face incarceration, but [also] poverty, homelessness, lack of access to education, jobs, religious services —all these are basic needs that everyone should have a fair share of.
MARYAM KASHANI
Another thing that I learned in the process of doing this work….There are Muslim scholars who believe that if the community itself isn't ensuring that everyone has their basic needs met, then a person is not responsible if, for example, they steal food in order to survive. It's actually a failure of our communal obligations to each other that people are in these conditions in the first place. There's also work that we've been trying to do more of articulating particular ideas within our tradition that are abolitionist.
The inspiration when we first started was the National Bailout Collective, but it was also our own tradition: the abolitionist traditions from our first days in which Muslims were freeing each other from slavery and captivity, the West African Muslims who were fighting slavery, those who were kidnapped —who were abolitionists right here in the United States — and then also a lot of our Black majority Muslim communities who've been doing this prison work for decades that has often gone unacknowledged.
HIRA AHMED
What scholars have been helpful to you in developing these abolitionist frameworks?
MARYAM KASHANI
Sylvianne Diouf's work, Servants of Allah, speaks a lot about how Muslims were able to maintain their traditions through the period of enslavement in the Americas. Rudolph Bilal Ware's book on West African Islam (The Walking Qur’an) has a chapter on abolition. Imam Ghazali is important for me — his book on zakat (The Mysteries of Zakat and Its Important Elements) talks about how some scholars believe you're supposed to pay every category of zakat annually, not just one or two. We rely upon the Tayba Foundation (a non-profit dedicated to serving individuals and families affected by incarceration). They've helped us a lot in terms of thinking about the zakat and bail.
(Legal scholar) Intisar Raab’s work has been really useful too. She has a book, Doubt In Islamic Law, that talks about how even though we have the hudood punishments, scholars more often than not would avoid giving a full punishment. There's hadith traditions about the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) avoiding punishment. Then there's a scholarly tradition of avoiding punishment really and instead focussing on a person's own tawba (repentance) and communal reconciliation. As an abolitionist organization we know that even if we eradicated police and jails and prisons it wouldn't stop people from harming each other because we're human... but what are alternative responses to the kind of interpersonal harm that we do to each other? That actually opens this topic up to everybody.
What does it mean that mercy and compassion are the attributes of God that we speak of most often? And how is the carceral system fulfilling that? Folks who revert to Islam while incarcerated oftentimes will have a thriving jamaat in their jails and prisons and then come out and show up at a mosque and not receive a welcome.
I met a brother when I visited Tayba Foundation back before even BBO and he talked about how the first time he ever prayed alone was after he was released from years of incarceration.
HIRA AHMED
Do you have a call to action for our readers?
MARYAM KASHANI
One of the big things that incarcerated Muslims need is connection to the Muslim communities in their local areas, especially the rural ones. A lot of prisons are in rural areas. So if you're within two hours of a jail or federal state prison, reach out, see what services Muslims actually get in those prisons, ask if an imam ever goes in? Is there a Muslim chaplain? Are Muslims able to gather for Jamaat? Are they being provided dates for Ramadan?
But then also they put pressure on the prison officials. They [should know] we're aware, we're watching and are you actually giving Muslim prisoners their rights?
How can people actually connect with the incarcerated Muslims who are essentially a part of their local community that they have not been in relationship with? If people start doing this, they actually learn from incarcerated Muslims about Islam in a lot of ways.
