A recurrent polemical argument that is put forward particularly in some Christian apologetic circles, goes roughly as follows:

Since Islam attracts a conspicuous number of converts within Western prisons, Islam must therefore possess some peculiar affinity with criminality.

The insinuation is sometimes expressed crudely as “Islam is a religion of criminals.” Sometimes, it is presented more carefully, through forwarding the observation that Muslims are disproportionately represented in certain prison populations and that conversion to Islam appears to be unusually common behind bars.

The empirical premise does contain an important element of truth.

In February 2025, CBS News reported that “tens of thousands of inmates in the U.S. are converting to Islam while incarcerated” each year, and they also described Islam as the fastest-growing religion in American prisons. The Tayba Foundation, which provides Islamic education to incarcerated people, told CBS that it had served more than 13,000 prisoners and estimated that approximately 90 percent of those it served had converted to Islam, most while incarcerated.

There is also a substantial African-American dimension to the phenomenon, as African-American men have, for decades, been overrepresented in the American penal system. This phenomenon has frequently been summarized as the “one in three” statistic, estimated under the incarceration rates then prevailing that a Black male faced roughly a one-in-three lifetime probability of imprisonment, compared with approximately one in seventeen for a white male.

More fundamentally, however, the argument is almost backwards: if it is the case that Islam disproportionately attracts people after they have been imprisoned, the relevant question is not simply what they were before Islam but what Islam is asking them to become afterward.

A religion should hardly be embarrassed by its ability to reach those most urgently in need of guidance and moral reform. If a religion teaches repentance, self-restraint, and moral regeneration, prison would be among the least surprising of places for it to attract converts. In fact, it would be far stranger if a religion of repentance appealed exclusively to people who already considered themselves to be respectable.

Jail for the Body… Freedom for the Self?

Imprisonment creates an unusually intense environment for religious conversion because it violently interrupts ordinary life: the routines, pleasures, distractions, relationships, and social identities through which a person previously understood themself are suddenly all stripped away. A prisoner may have years in which they are forced to confront questions that ordinary life can make extremely easy to put off and ignore:

• What have I done with my life?
• Have I become a bad person?
• Can my actions ever be forgiven?
• Is suffering meaningless?
• Do I owe something to those I have harmed?
• Can a person truly change and become better?
• Is there a moral law above my personal appetites?
• What is my purpose in life?
• What happens when I die?
• If years of my life have already been squandered, what should I do with the time I have left?

This connection between confinement and moral awakening is hardly restricted to Islam. In fact, it is one of the great recurring themes of literature:

• Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment culminates in Raskolnikov’s Siberian imprisonment and the beginnings of spiritual regeneration.
• In Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Jean Valjean emerges from nineteen years of imprisonment hardened and embittered, before an encounter with mercy begins the moral transformation that defines the remainder of his life.
• In Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, imprisonment becomes the crucible in which Edmond Dantès is psychologically remade, although, significantly, his transformation initially moves toward vengeance rather than uncomplicated moral purification.

The underlying literary intuition is ancient and psychologically plausible: confinement can become a confrontation with the self, and Islam enters that confrontation with an unusually concrete program of reconstruction.

Allah does not sentimentalize serious wrongdoing. Murder and unlawful sexual intercourse appear among the grave sins condemned in Qur’an 25:68–69.

And they are the ones who do not call upon any other god with Allah. Nor do they kill a soul — which Allah has prohibited — except by right. Nor do they commit illicit sexual intercourse. For whoever does this shall meet the penalty of sin: Torment shall be multiplied on the Day of Resurrection for such a one. Thus he shall abide therein forever, disgraced —

Yet, immediately thereafter comes the qualification:

except for whoever repents, and believes, and does righteous deeds. For [the likes of] them, then, Allah will substitute their misdeeds with good deeds. And ever is Allah all-forgiving, mercy-giving. (Qur’an, 25:70)

Islamic repentance (tawbah) is not simply the proposition that God forgives whatever a person has done, as the Qur’anic formula binds repentance to faith and righteous action. The wrongdoer is therefore offered neither nihilistic despair nor cheap absolution. His past is morally real, but it is not metaphysically final.

The same logic appears with force in Qur’an 39:53:

Say, [O Prophet: God declares to humanity]: O My servants! Those [of you] who have committed [sins in great] excess against their own souls, never despond of the mercy of Allah! For, indeed, Allah forgives sins, one and all. Indeed, it is He [alone] who is the All-Forgiving, the Mercy-Giving.

Notice to whom the invitation is addressed. It is not addressed to people who have nothing serious to regret but precisely to those who have transgressed against themselves. Islam’s doctrine of divine mercy would lose much of its meaning if mercy were available only to the already virtuous.

Nor is it particularly mysterious why Islam might possess practical appeal in the environment of a prison. Islam gives the convert not only a new proposition to believe in but also a rule of life: five prayers punctuating every day; ritual purification; fasting; abstention from intoxicants; regulation of sexuality; dietary discipline; remembrance of God; charity; communal worship; brotherhood; moral accountability; and the repeated insistence that repentance manifests itself through altered conduct.

For someone whose previous existence was chaotic, Islam offers order; for someone governed by appetite, it offers restraint; for someone accustomed to intoxication, it demands sobriety; for someone consumed by guilt, it offers repentance without despair; for someone socially isolated, it offers brotherhood; for someone who has lived according to impulse, it introduces a day structured around obligations that exist whether or not he happens to feel like fulfilling them; for someone who has spent his life asking what the world owes him, it forces the more difficult question of what he owes God and other human beings; and for someone convinced that the worst thing he has done has permanently become the very definition of who he is, Islam insists upon a distinction between the sinner and the sin without trivializing either.

Before Paul the Apostle, There was Saul the Criminal

And the irony becomes particularly pronounced when this polemic is coming from Christians.

Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 6:9–11 of the sexually immoral, idolaters, adulterers, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, and swindlers, before turning to the Christians of Corinth and declaring:

And such were some of you.

Imagine a pagan critic standing outside the Corinthian church and announcing: “Christianity evidently attracts thieves, drunkards, and sexually immoral people; therefore Christianity must be the religion of thieves, drunkards, and sexual immorality!”

No serious Christian apologist would accept the inference. He would immediately point to the tense of Paul’s sentence: “such were some of you.” Their former conduct demonstrates what Christianity claimed to have rescued them from, not what Christianity instructed them to remain upon.

Indeed, the New Testament provides an even more striking example in the person of Paul himself.

Before he became Christianity’s great missionary apostle, Saul was not just a religious sceptic. Acts presents him as an active persecutor of the earliest Christian community. At Stephen’s killing, Saul “approved of his execution” (Acts 8:1). He then “ravaged the church,” entering houses, dragging away men and women, and committing them to prison (Acts 8:3). Immediately before his conversion, Acts describes him as still “breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord” (Acts 9:1).

Then Saul (supposedly) encounters Christ and converts.

RELATED: Intra-New Testament Diversity: Did Paul Deform Christianity?

No Christian reads this sequence and concludes: “How revealing it is that Christianity attracted a man associated with persecution, imprisonment, and killing.” Quite the opposite, as in the casual Christian apologetics, the enormity of Saul’s previous conduct magnifies the significance of his conversion: the persecutor becoming an apostle is presented as evidence of the reach of divine grace, “the worse the former man, the more extraordinary the transformation.”

Indeed, Paul himself makes essentially this argument. In 1 Timothy 1:13–16 he remembers himself as formerly a “blasphemer, persecutor, and insolent opponent,” and he interprets the mercy shown to him as an example for others who would later believe. The logic could hardly be clearer: the presence of a former wrongdoer within a religion does not necessitate that religion’s affinity with wrongdoing; it may very well highlight its claimed capacity to reform the wrongdoer.

This principle cannot coherently be glorious when applied to Saul of Tarsus and sinister when applied to a prisoner who becomes Muhammad Amin Anderson.

And Anderson’s case is particularly revealing. CBS profiled him in 2025 after he had completed a thirty-year sentence for participation in a gang-related murder. He had converted to Islam approximately two years into his sentence. Looking back upon the process, he described it in strikingly moral rather than exculpatory terms. He said that he had entered prison without his humanity and that he had somehow recovered it there. After release, he spoke explicitly about the life he had taken, the victim’s family and children, and his belief that his second chance imposed upon him an obligation to serve others.

So, the question to be asking is not: why does Islam attract so many criminals? It is: why does Islam appear capable of making itself intelligible and compelling to so many people at precisely the moment when they are forced to confront what their previous lives have made of them?

For a religion centred upon submission to God, repentance, discipline, accountability, and the possibility of moral return, prison is not an embarrassing place to find converts. In fact, it may be one of the places where its message is most readily understood and taken to heart.

RELATED: The Genius of Islam | Episode 1, The Modern Human Condition