As the year draws to an end we would like to remind and raise awareness of the struggles of those who have been unjustly imprisoned. Scroll down to see news, announcements and recommended books related to prisoners.
Little Heroes, Big Voices: Poems for Palestine Workshop
Join us for an interactive poetry workshop with Anika Wadood, to explore your creativity and emotions through the art of poetry.
WHEN: Friday, 3 January 2025, 1pm to 3pm
WHERE: IHRC Bookshop (202 Preston Road, Wembley, HA9 8PA)
TICKETS: BOOK HERE
For ages 9-14 only; parents are welcome to attend.
About the event:
In this special poetry workshop, we invite young minds to discover the power of words to share stories of resilience and hope for Palestine. Through poems, storytelling, and creative activities, our special guests will learn about expressing empathy, unity, and compassion; how poetry can be a powerful way to stand in solidarity, share personal feelings, and create change. This workshop is a warm, supportive space for kids to celebrate Palestinian culture, learn about perseverance, and turn their thoughts into meaningful poetry.
About Anika Wadood:
Anika Wadood is a writer, poet, founder of Resham Collective, and Advocacy and Campaigns fellow at Asylum Reform Initiative. Based in London, she hosts poetry nights, exhibitions, and workshops. In her poetry she explores themes of social injustice and cultural identity through her experiences, while amplifying silenced voices from marginalised communities.
Disclaimer and Refund Policy
Please note that by signing up for this event, you will be added to IHRC’s Children’s Events mailing list for communications about the event as well as upcoming children’s events. There will be photos and videos taken on the day, but we will edit and blur out faces.
Tickets are non-refundable. If you are no longer able to attend, please cancel your tickets as soon as conveniently possible. We understand that unforeseen circumstances may arise, preventing you from attending. Your prompt action in cancelling your tickets allows us to accommodate other families, but also demonstrates respect for the time and effort invested by the author. Please see instructions on cancelling tickets here.
If you encounter any difficulties or have any questions regarding the cancellation process, please do not hesitate to reach out at events@ihrc.org. IHRC are not responsible for Eventbrite fees.
Enrolment Call: Granada Critical Muslim Studies Summer School 2025
Critical Muslim Studies is inspired by a need for opening up a space for intellectually rigorous and socially committed explorations between decolonial thinking and studies of Muslims, Islam and the Islamicate. Critical Muslim Studies does not take Islam as only a spiritual tradition, or a civilization, but also as a possibility of a decolonial epistemic perspective that suggests contributions and responses to the problems facing humankind today. It offers an opportunity to interpret and understand Muslim phenomena in ways that does not reproduce Eurocentrism, Islamophobia or takfiri exclusivism.
DATE: June 23-28, 2025
Application Deadline: February 1, 2025
The Granada Summer School began in 2011 as a means of acknowledging the linkages between the conquest of Granada (Al-Andalus) and the conquest of the ‘Americas.’ Towards the end of 1491, Granada, the last independent Islamicate polity in Iberia, was conquered.
Granada is the site not only of the processes that led to the establishment of a Western world order but also to the displacement of the Muslim world system. As such, it is a natural venue for the development of Critical Muslim Studies, which sets out to explore the consequences of placing Muslims, Islam and the Islamicate within the context of a “modern/colonial capitalist/patriarchal western-centric/Christian-centric world-system.”
The summer school, now in its twelfth year, has established itself as the primary centre in the world for Critical Muslim Studies. The school welcomes participations from Muslim and non-Muslim heritages and associations. The seminar will be held in the Escuela de Estudios Arabes.
WEBSITE: http://www.dialogoglobal.com/granada
Any questions: CIT@dialogoglobal.com
Online application form: http://www.dialogoglobal.com/granada/application.php
This program includes:
1) Intensive academic lectures
2) Guided tours to the Alhambra Palace, the Cordoba Mosque, Medina de Sahara, Andalusi House, Museum of Al-Andalus, Albaizin and surrounding areas related to Al-Andalus.
3) Islamic spirituality
Affiliated Faculty:
- Joseph Massad
- Ella Shohat
- Hatem Bazian
- Suhaib Will Webb
- Ramón Grosfoguel
- Chaimaa Boukharsa
- Houria Bouteldja
- Muhammad Asi
- Farid Esack
- Amina Teslima
- Ashraf Kunnummal
- Mohamed Mathee
- Santiago Slabodsky
- Nelson Maldonado-Torres
- Arzu Merali
- Asma Barlas
- Nadia Fadil
- Jasmin Zine
- Iskander Abbasi
Donate prison packs to Muslim prisoners
“And feed with food the needy, the orphan and the prisoner, for love of Him.” Quran 76:8
Muslim prisoners face significant challenges in practising their faith due to isolation from their community and loved ones. Reports highlight discrimination within the criminal justice system, which is often amplified for Muslim inmates. Issues such as lack of halal food, inadequate prayer spaces, difficulties with fasting, and discrimination from other prisoners are common. Many also encounter racism and Islamophobia, including abuse or exploitation by prison staff. Some prisoners report being unfairly denied the right to attend Friday prayers, treated as though their religious practice is a privilege rather than a right.
IHRC is supporting Muslim prisoners in the UK by supplying them with Ramadan packs to assist them to make the most of the holy month. We see it as our duty to support them in their isolation and help them gain the benefits of Ramadan.
This years pack will include the following items:
• Tasbih/prayer beads
• Sweets
• Ramadan/Eid card with a message of support
• Will include either of these books: ‘The Power of Du’a’ by Aliyah Umm Raiyaan or ‘A Handbook of Accepted Prayers’ by Ibn Daud
Each pack costs approximately £20 and this is a Zakat eligible project. Click below if you would like to donate.
Free Imam Jamil!Veteran black rights campaigner Imam Jamil Al-Amin (formerly known as H. Rap Brown) has been imprisoned in the US since 2000 under allegations of shooting two Fulton County deputies, despite someone else allegedly confessing to the crime to the FBI.
IHRC has campaigned for Imam Jamil to have a new fair trial for many years, and we are alarmed to hear that the 81-year-old former Black Panther has had various health issues including serious swelling, trouble swallowing, loss of weight, strokes and cancer. However, IHRC has recently received reports that Imam Jamil has now got a potentially life-threatening growth on the side of his face. He is in desperate need of medical treatment.
We therefore call upon the public to contact The Designation and Sentence Computation Center (DSCC) and demand that Imam Jamil is transferred to the Federal Medical Centre in Butner, to receive immediate treatment. If you wish to call or write to the DSCC, details of their address and phone number can be found if you click on the link here.
WATCH: Justice Denied: The Case of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui with Clive Stafford Smith
Watch a discussion that took place 6 months ago with Clive Stafford Smith, lawyer and founder of the Justice League, who discusses the injustice that followed Pakistani neuroscientist, Dr. Aafia Siddiqui. This event will be chaired by Raza Kazim. Click below to watch the recording of the event.
Clive Stafford Smith is a British attorney who specialises in the areas of civil rights and working against the death penalty in the United States of America. He co-founded the human rights organisation, Reprieve, and is the author of two books short-listed for the Orwell Prize (Bad Men, about Guantanámo Bay; and Injustice, the story of Krishna Maharaj, a British man sentenced to death in Florida).
About Dr Aafia Sidduiqui
Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, an exceptionally talented individual, graduated from MIT on a full scholarship and later pursued postgraduate studies in cognitive neuroscience at Brandeis University. A devout Muslim, she actively engaged in Islamic outreach during her university years and memorized the entire Quran at a young age. She co-founded the Institute of Islamic Research and Training with her husband after marriage. However, on March 28, 2003, Dr. Aafia and her three children were abducted near their home in Pakistan by secret agents. Reports allege that her youngest son, Suleman, was killed during the abduction, and she was separated from her surviving children. Her location remained undisclosed for years, during which she was reportedly subjected to torture, abuse, and forced confessions before being handed over to U.S. authorities as part of the “War on Terror.”
Dr. Aafia reappeared in August 2008, detained in Afghanistan and accused of attempting to shoot U.S. personnel, charges she consistently denied. Despite a lack of physical evidence and conflicting testimonies, she was convicted in a controversial trial that omitted details of her alleged abduction, torture, and missing children. Statements made under duress during her detention were used as evidence, raising concerns about the fairness of her trial. In 2010, she was sentenced to 86 years in prison and has since been held at the Federal Medical Center in Carswell, Texas, where reports of mistreatment persist. Dr. Aafia’s case remains a point of contention, with ongoing debates about her treatment, trial, and the broader implications of her ordeal.
Since her arrest, Dr Aafia’s sister, Dr Fawzia Siddiqui, who is a neurologist based in Karachi, Pakistan, has been campaigning for her release and has successfully managed to track down Dr Aafia’s two elder children and win custody of them. At the moment there is no news regarding the status of her younger son, Suleman.
For several years IHRC have been campaigning for the release and repatriation of Dr Aafia. We urgently request all campaigners to write to the foreign secretary of their respective countries and urge them to make strong efforts to raise Aafia’s case in the UN for her immediate release from US detention and return to Pakistan to be reunited with her children and family. Click below for more details and for a template letter that you could send.
Below are a list of recommended books available at IHRC Bookshop:
The Prisoners’ Diaries: Palestinian Voices from the Israeli Gulag – Norma Hashim
This book is a compilation of first hand experiences of 22 Palestinian prisoners released from prison by Israel as part of the prisoner exchange for the release of Gilad Shalit. The prisoners were interviewed by journalists and their accounts, their diaries, were compiled into a book by Norma Hashim. These autobiographical texts offer a rare opportunity to comprehend the inhumane indignities endured by tens of thousands of Palestinians prisoners throughout the decades of this long painful conflict.
A Brief History of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria – Zeenah Ibraheem
As a senior member of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria, Zeenah Ibraheem’s history of it is a first-hand account, not just of its ideas, and their fruition, but some of the many turmoil’s and persecutions it has faced in the last four decades. This books covers some of the key incidents in the movement’s history, including the Funtua Declaration, as well as the Zaria Massacres of 2014 and 2015.
IHRC has been involved in advocating for the release of Shaykh Ibraheem Zakzaky, the leader of the Islamic movement in Nigeria, his wife, Zeenah Ibraheem, the author of this book, as well as his followers. The results of the campaign were Shaykh Zakzaky and Zeenah Ibraheem being released from prison in 2021. We continue to campaign for his followers whenever they are imprisoned.
All profits go to IHRC Trust’s Nigeria Fund that assists victims of the violence who need medical assistance, and the families of those killed by the security services.
Enemy Combatant: My Imprisonment at Guantanamo, Bagram and Kandahar – Moazzam Begg
Moazzam Begg is an ordinary man who has endured an extraordinary fate – imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit and whose precise nature has never been determined. As far as the US government was concerned, it was enough to label him an ‘enemy combatant’.
Moazzam was arrested in Pakistan, where he was helping set up education programmes for children, in the panic-stricken months after the 9/11 attacks. He spent three years in prison, much of it in solitary confinement, and was subjected to over three hundred interrogations, death threats and torture, witnessing the killings of two detainees. He was released early in 2005 without explanation or apology.
Enemy Combatant is his riveting story. Not just an instant classic of incarceration literature, it reveals for the first time what it means to be an intelligent, politically engaged Muslim living in the West after 9/11, by someone who finds common ground with fellow Muslims enduring oppression around the world, and who has recently emerged as an influential voice in the Muslim community, against both acts of terrorism and the demonising of Islam
Guantanamo Voices: True Accounts from the World’s Most Infamous Prison – Sarah Mirk
In January 2002, the United States sent a group of Muslim men they suspected of terrorism to a prison in Guantánamo Bay. They were the first of roughly 780 prisoners who would be held there—and forty inmates still remain. Eighteen years later, very few of them have been ever charged with a crime.
In Guantánamo Voices, journalist Sarah Mirk and her team of diverse, talented graphic novel artists tell the stories of ten people whose lives have been shaped and affected by the prison, including former prisoners, lawyers, social workers, and service members. This collection of illustrated interviews explores the history of Guantánamo and the world post-9/11, presenting this complicated partisan issue through a new lens.
Hu Feng’s Prison Years – Mei Zhi
Hu Feng, the ‘counterrevolutionary’ leader of a banned literary school, spent twenty-five years in Chinese Communist Party prison system. But back in the early days of Communist China he was among the party’s chief literary theoreticians and critics – at least until factional infighting, and his short fuse, made him persona non grata among the establishment. His wife, Mei Zhi, shared his incarceration for many years. F is her account of that time, beginning ten years after Hu Feng’s initial arrest, as she navigates the party’s Byzantine prison bureaucracy, searching for his whereabouts.
Eventually imprisoned then released, she cares for her husband in his rage and suffering, watching his descent into madness as the excesses of the Cultural Revolution take their toll. Both an intimate portrait of Mei Zhi’s life with Hu Feng and a stark account of the prison system and life under Mao, F is at once beautiful and harrowing.
No Bread For Mandela: Memoirs of Ahmed Kathrada, Prisoner No. 468/64 – Ahmed Kathrada
Like many South Africans Ahmed Kathrada was outraged by the inequities of apartheid and unwilling to concede defeat even when he was imprisoned alongside his friend Nelson Mandela on Robben Island. In these memoirs we see how he never lost faith in his nations struggle for justice and equality. Detailing his years in prison as well as those in government, this book serves as a remarkable example of dedication to activism.
