IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH of the atrocities of September 11, 2001, Islamist influence in U.S. federal and state prisons came under scrutiny from the Justice Department’s Bureau of Prisons (BOP). Officials were informed of pre-9/11 complaints by inmates whose Islam (mainly acquired by conversion) was counterposed to a jailhouse infiltration campaign promoting Saudi-financed Wahhabism.

The discontented convicts charged that Wahhabi-trained Muslim chaplains had acquired a monopoly in the correctional system and were busily imposing their ultra-fundamentalist religious interpretation in the vulnerable atmosphere of the prisons. The Wahhabi imams, it was said, had confiscated non-Wahhabi literature from Muslim prisoners, ostracizing and even physically threatening those who contradicted them.