Sweaty handshakes and bare-chested inmates with rocky biceps reach out to the imam in the gym on his way to Friday prayers. Clanging iron weights, smacking basketballs, even the tinny racket of a large-screen TV can't drown their voices.
"Assalamu alaikum!"
Peace, brother Imam.
Imam Wali Uqdah does not want to see some of their sweltering faces. Inmates who track him down at the Baltimore jail and say "I am Muslim" draw his skeptical gaze.
"You are Muslim in name only," he thinks. "The faith has not entered your soul."
If he has seen them here before, he does not want to fool with them again. Men like these, he complains, tarnish the religion.
Still, more than 200 inmates sign up for his Friday, or Ju'mah, prayers every week. And if he preached the radical racial message that ministers from the Nation of Islam did 40 or 50 years ago, he thinks nearly every inmate in the system would want to come.
But Wali Uqdah does not want racists clamoring around him. White men are not devils. Islam has evolved in America, and at age 58, the jailhouse imam comes here to work every week declaring Islam's all-American power, not selling it like a cheap fix for the criminal mind.
"God has blessed me with this situation," he says, stepping out of his shoes in a multipurpose room where he will lead worship. "God has put me in this environment for a purpose."
"Allah-u-Akhbar!" an inmate cries. The call floods the room. Prisoners swarm in, and soon they are silently practicing the prostrations of prayer.
For 17 years, Wali Uqdah's "congregation" has met behind the gates of the city's detention center. His cramped pastoral office lies off a maze of hallways stiffly scented by disinfectants, separated by steel doors and armed guards. His workplace is so secluded his wife and children have never even seen him lead this service. Because prison rules prohibit tape recordings, no one other than the regular crowd of transients awaiting trial ever hears his bracing message.
It is hard for Wali Uqdah to know what other Muslim leaders think about this kind of religious mission anymore. They know little about the large numbers of jailed men who have embraced the Prophet Muhammad through him. Some who never regarded him as being near the center of the Islamic mission in Baltimore also have never been to his Ju'mah, or visited his office, decorated with photographs of the imam standing next to Muhammad Ali, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and former Gov. Parris N. Glendening.
This kind of grim venue, where many men have accepted a home-grown brand of Islam -- where Malcolm X found the transcendental spark that helped ignite black nationalism and blew open an alternative path to salvation -- has never vanished from the landscape of Islam in America. But the prision mission is widely considered a part of the old myth, as faded history. Wali Uqdah is left to bear the responsibility of carrying it on, faithfully, in this most desperate of places, an unhappy environment where a holy man must rise above his own occasional doubts and ambivalence.
"Years ago, we used to involve ourselves in these institutions," he says. "Now there's not so much of an emphasis. Why? Because people have seen Muslims as a group of people who only worked in places like rehab centers. It's left a stigma. We are not jailbirds. We're educated people. Today, Muslims are judges, doctors, you name it. The majority are educated, professional people. We want to get away from that idea that all we're good for is reforming drug addicts."
When he goes to the front of the room, he turns his back to the prisoners. Then the handsome, dark-skinned imam in his sparkling white shirt and white knit kufi cap bows and kneels, joining them in prayer, too.
Although researchers and religious scholars now believe that prison conversions of African-American men have been a significant source of recruitment to Islam for almost 50 years -- the Religion News Service has reported that as many as one of every 10 African-American Muslims today may have come to the faith through a prison conversion -- Imam Uqdah hesitates to discuss that part of his ministry.
He prefers to talk about the flowering of Islam in America, the evolution of a native sect that is now staunchly pro-democracy, pro-capitalist and pro-American, themes advanced by the religious figure he admires most, W. Deen Mohammed.
As leader of one of the largest Muslim groups in the country, the American Society of Muslims, W. Deen Mohammed heads a mostly African-American sect with membership estimated between 1 million and 2 million. In a country where African-Americans constitute close to 40 percent of all Muslims, Imam Mohammed's influence spreads wider among his followers than perhaps any other imam, further even than Louis Farrakhan, whose Nation of Islam has far fewer members.
