ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author plays a fundamental role in how people make sense of the environment and both themselves and others, and form, through the processes that form the self, identities. He discusses first how emotions, faith and identity can be understood from the tenets and how this has consequences on how the readers can see Muslim prisoners and their engagement with ‘an idea of Islam’. Only after clarifying these points can the readers concentrate on how respondents have ‘rediscovered’ or ‘discovered’ Islam as a personal faith, as an act of identity or as a fusion of both. People think differently and make sense of reality differently, and similarly, the experience of rediscovering, or conversion to, Islam in prison is ultimately a unique and personal experience. Islam became an ‘act of faith’ which could link their autobiographical-self to their experience of prison, which in many cases became eschatological.
