Sajad Shakoor brings hope and halal meals to California prisoners

A go to to the mosque was not the one factor on Shakoor’s thoughts after he received his freedom again.

Like many previously incarcerated folks re-entering society, there was an extended record of must attend to, many difficult by his standing as an individual with a felony conviction: securing housing, catching up with family members, discovering work.

He fared higher than most, getting a job at a Bay Space Center Jap restaurant referred to as Falafel Nook a number of weeks after his launch. The talents he had fine-tuned with makeshift scorching plates in his cell and jail kitchens had been now put to work constructing a brand new profession, and he shortly moved as much as managing the restaurant.

In 2016, the restaurant opened a second location in Sacramento, and in 2018, Shakoor purchased out the previous proprietor. He says the enterprise now has greater than 30 franchises round northern California.

If cooking was one talent that Shakoor continued to construct after leaving jail, his curiosity in felony justice reform work was one other.

In 2014, Shakoor, who had remotely obtained a level from Ohio College whereas incarcerated, testified on the State Senate in assist of SB 1391, which expanded entry to school schooling for folks incarcerated in California’s prisons. The invoice was handed and signed into legislation in September 2014.

In 2023, he additionally turned a vocal supporter of SB 309, which created common requirements making use of to spiritual grooming and headwear throughout California’s detention services.

He drew on his personal experiences of harassment for expression of spiritual devotion behind bars, recalling an incident in 2002 when he was despatched to solitary confinement for seven days for refusing to take away his chitrali cap, vital to his identification as a Muslim of Pakistani heritage.

However maybe his favorite kind of activism has come within the type of sharing meals and worship with fellow Muslims in prisons throughout the state, a observe he started in 2017.

He says he sometimes does about 5 such visits per 12 months, generally as many as 10. They’re no small process, requiring hours of cooking and the much more strenuous ordeal of navigating the exhausting forms of the jail system.

However Shakoor sees the occasions as a supply of fellowship and optimism for the prisoners in a state of affairs that may in any other case really feel oppressively hopeless.

Throughout his time in San Quentin, when he nonetheless believed he would spend the remainder of his life behind bars, he remembers changing into enamoured with a pair of flowers that had managed to sprout up from a crag of inhospitable rock.

“We will not at all times change our environment, simply as that flower could not,” he says. “However we will study to rise above the issues holding us down and use our environment to domesticate us.”

Again within the room in Solano embellished with vibrant murals, Kali, the 69-year-old man savouring his burrito, whom Shakoor has identified since they had been each incarcerated in Nice Valley State Jail, talks concerning the objective and sense of peace that he has discovered by means of Islam.

He first transformed in 1992, throughout a stint in solitary confinement, the place he took what he referred to as a “ethical stock” of himself by diving into the Bible and the Quran.

For a lot of condemned to life in jail, faith presents a way of resisting, if by no means completely escaping, the downward strain of despair that comes with a life that’s eternally confined.

The bodily proximity of the free world, typically seen simply past a window or a concertina fence, solely provides to the tantalising sense of foreclosed risk. In such circumstances, it appears miraculous that sources of heat, creativity, and fellowship emerge in any respect.

It’s a feeling that Shakoor deeply understands, and that Kali says he now helps others attempt to stay with by main anger administration lessons in Solano.

He quotes his favorite verse from the Quran: “Verily, with the hardship, there comes ease.”