The Worldviews of Muslim prisoners: Islam, Islamism and Islamist Extremism

In the previous chapters, we have described the history of Islam and of Muslims in prison, the ‘spiritual architecture’ of Islam in prison, the basic types of Muslim prisoner and the reasons why prisoners choose Islam. In this chapter, we offer the reader an overview of the types of Islamic Worldview that Muslim prisoners hold and how these types of Worldviews affect their lives in prison.

A ‘Worldview’ approach

From here on, we will describe different forms of Islam as different ‘Worldviews’. ‘Worldviews’ have been defined as ‘unified ways-of-being in the world, together with ways-of-knowing the world in which knowledge and action are knit-up together and organized into a single view of life’ (Orr, 2001: 6). In other words, by Worldview we mean ‘walking-the-talk’ and ‘talking-the-walk’, which we all do to varying degrees of consistency in order to form a coherent idea of who we are in relation to the rest of the world.

As well as this idea of individual Worldviews as an integrated way of understanding and acting consistently in the world, a second key aspect of Worldviews is that they are often shared both consciously and unconsciously by collectives, such as families and nations (McCarthy, 1978), and also by deviant and criminal ‘in-groups’, such as criminal gangs, and terrorist organisations and states.

The idea of a Worldview is also useful to us in this context because it corresponds with the Islamic idea of religion as a deen, which means an integrated combination of belief in God together with related actions and outcomes in the world.

Mapping the Worldviews of Muslim prisoners

The Worldviews of prisoners in numbers

Using variables and methods detailed in Appendix 5 across the whole sample, we identified that those prisoners whose Worldview was characterised as ‘Mainstream’ were significantly in the majority at 76 per cent, with those categorised as ‘Islamist Extremist’ representing only 4 per cent of our characteristic sample.

The breakdown was as follows:

• • 48 per cent6 (n = 133) were characterised as Mainstream, Traditional;

• • 28 per cent (n = 79) were characterised as Mainstream, Activist;

• • 19 per cent (n = 54) were characterised as Islamist;

• • 4 per cent (n = 11) were characterised as Islamist Extremist, Non-violent;

• • 0.4 per cent (n = 1) was characterised as Islamist Extremist, Violent.