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In the years following the military coup in Egypt, there has been a dramatic upsurge in the state’s carceral practices. Indeed, political prisons in Egypt serve a central role in the state’s organization of both political and religious life through its disciplinary power. The carceral experience, however, is as generative as it is disciplinary. Still, studies on prisoners’ political and religious lives continue to be analyzed through the wider rubric of the ‘War on Terror’. In this paper, I show that, beyond securitized narratives on prison population, the religious experiences of prisoners are intrinsic foremost to their personhood, formations of popular theology and hermeneutics, and even to ethereal beliefs. Muslim prisoners are regularly confronted with issues that are unique to their situation – such as maintaining ritual purity when there is little access to clean water, maintaining communal prayers in isolation or discerning prayer times and Qibla when knowledge of time and space is unattainable. In doing so, I pose a central question: what does the adaption of religious practices and popular carceral theologies indicate about religious subjectivities and intersubjectivities of the prison population?

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