ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author starts from some of my respondents’ experiences and after-prison life stories. He discusses the challenges that, as former prisoners and Muslims, they face both within the mainstream society and their religious community. Although reactions to the often dystopian experience of life after prison are varied, of those former prisoners who adhered to either the doctrinal or imagistic modes of Islamic religiosity, both would be equally likely to ‘[turn their] back on everything which would shake [their] belief or paralyse [their] desire to change things’. Some former Muslim prisoners, who had found a stable post-prison Muslim identity, revealed during interviews that they were approached by an individual who befriended them and then tried to introduce them to the ideas and groups which praised ‘resistance’, advocated retaliation and accused other Muslims of being complacent with the ‘crusaders’.
