A consult with to the mosque used to be now not the one factor on Shakoor’s thoughts nearest he were given his sovereignty again.
Like many previously incarcerated population re-entering population, there used to be a protracted listing of wishes to wait to, many sophisticated by way of his situation as an individual with a prison conviction: securing housing, catching up with family members, discovering paintings.
He fared higher than maximum, getting a task at a Bay Segment Center Japanese eating place known as Falafel Nook a number of weeks nearest his drop. The talents he had fine-tuned with makeshift sizzling plates in his cellular and jail kitchens had been now put to paintings construction a unused profession, and he briefly moved as much as managing the eating place.
In 2016, the eating place opened a 2nd location in Sacramento, and in 2018, Shakoor purchased out the previous proprietor. He says the industry now has greater than 30 franchises round northern California.
If cooking used to be one ability that Shakoor persisted to create nearest retirement jail, his passion in legal justice reform paintings used to be any other.
In 2014, Shakoor, who had remotely bought a point from Ohio College past incarcerated, testified on the Atmosphere Senate in help of SB 1391, which expanded get admission to to university training for population incarcerated in California’s prisons. The invoice used to be handed and signed into legislation in September 2014.
In 2023, he additionally become a vocal supporter of SB 309, which created common requirements making use of to non secular grooming and headwear throughout California’s detention amenities.
He drew on his personal stories of harassment for resonance of non secular worship in the back of bars, recalling an incident in 2002 when he used to be despatched to solitary confinement for seven days for refusing to take away his chitrali cap, impressive to his id as a Muslim of Pakistani heritage.
However most likely his favorite form of activism has come within the mode of sharing meals and prayer with fellow Muslims in prisons around the shape, a convention he started in 2017.
He says he generally does about 5 such visits in line with 12 months, every now and then as many as 10. They’re deny petite process, requiring hours of cooking and the much more complicated ordeal of navigating the laborious paperwork of the jail gadget.
However Shakoor sees the occasions as a supply of fellowship and optimism for the prisoners in a status that may in a different way really feel oppressively hopeless.
Right through his while in San Quentin, when he nonetheless believed he would spend the extra of his past in the back of bars, he recollects changing into enamoured with a couple of flora that had controlled to sprout up from a crag of inhospitable rock.
“We can’t always change our surroundings, just as that flower couldn’t,” he says. “But we can learn to rise above the things holding us down and use our surroundings to cultivate us.”
Again within the room in Solano embellished with vibrant work of art, Kali, the 69-year-old guy savouring his burrito, whom Shakoor has identified since they had been each incarcerated in Delightful Valley Atmosphere Jail, talks concerning the objective and sense of diversion that he has discovered via Islam.
He first transformed in 1992, throughout a stint in solitary confinement, the place he took what he known as a “moral inventory” of himself by way of diving into the Bible and the Quran.
For plenty of condemned to past in jail, faith deals a way of resisting, if by no means totally escaping, the downward power of melancholy that incorporates a past this is endlessly confined.
The bodily proximity of the distant global, ceaselessly perceptible simply past a window or a concertina fence, handiest provides to the tantalising sense of foreclosed risk. In such instances, it kind of feels miraculous that assets of heat, creativity, and fellowship emerge in any respect.
This can be a feeling that Shakoor deeply understands, and that Kali says he now is helping others attempt to reside with by way of eminent enrage control categories in Solano.
He quotes his favorite verse from the Quran: “Verily, with the hardship, there comes ease.”