By Tasmiha Khan

Shaykh Rami Nsour was interviewed by Ms Khan from Vox. Below is an excerpt of the full article that can be found here.

~~~~

“Rami Nsour, founding director of the Tayba Foundation, a nonprofit that aims to provide services to those incarcerated, says that providing incarcerated Muslims with the basics necessary to practice their faith is extremely low priority for most prisons.

“If not all basic necessities of hygiene are not afforded to prisoners, and that is not high on the budget list, then religious material is also not going to be high,” said Nsour.

Nsour explains that federal prisons allot a certain amount of money to buy books for the chapel. That means that the cost of practicing one’s religion falls on inmates, who are forced to use money from their prison wages, which can be as low as 5 cents an hour. He explained that a Quran can run $20 in prison. “For some, that might be their whole monthly paycheck. This is for the people who don’t have family or friends on the outside who can purchase a book for them. That is one hurdle,” Nsour adds. In many prisons, Bibles are far more abundant.”

The full article can be found here.