Quran

In Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s account, the Quran is more than a book: it is a forbidden object, a basis for prayer, and a means of measuring time when confinement has made ordinary measures unreliable. His descriptions trace a repeated conflict between restrictions on Islamic practice and his efforts to preserve it. The Quran’s significance lies not only in what it says, but in the acts of reciting, remembering, and counting that remain possible when access to religious life is deliberately constrained.

Prohibition and Control

Slahi describes the secret camps as places where Islamic observance was broadly prohibited. There was no sign indicating the direction of prayer; ritual prayer and recitation of the Quran were forbidden, as was possessing the text and fasting. He presents these restrictions as matters he experienced himself, rather than as hearsay. The Quran therefore appears within a wider system of control over religious practice: the restriction was not confined to a particular book, but extended to the actions and observances connected with it.

The limits reached into interrogation sessions. Slahi recounts that he continued to pray while being subjected to degrading treatment, and an interrogator angrily ordered him to stop. He refused at that moment; afterward, he says, ritual prayer was prohibited for about a year. During Ramadan in October 2003, fasting was also forbidden and he was force-fed. These events place the Quran alongside prayer and fasting as parts of a religious life that the authorities attempted to regulate. The account does not establish that Slahi possessed a physical copy of the Quran during these periods; it distinguishes the prohibition on possessing it from his continued recitation.

The memoir also describes the Quran being used to intimidate another detainee. Slahi reports that an interrogator deliberately struck the book against the floor in an effort to break the man, as well as forcing him to the ground. The episode is not presented as Slahi’s own treatment, but it shows how the text could become a target in the abuse of someone else. The Quran’s presence in this passage is thus both religious and material: an object associated with worship is subjected to deliberate disrespect as part of an attempt to exert control.

Recitation as a Practice of Resistance

When prayer was forbidden, Slahi repeatedly turned to prayer inwardly. At one point, an interrogator appeared to permit him to pray, but then mocked his religion when he began. Slahi stopped praying aloud so as not to provide another occasion for mockery, and instead prayed in his heart. In the aftermath of the so-called Birthday Party, he was disoriented and physically unable to stand or bend; he says that he could pray only while lying down. Later, after hearing voices and struggling to orient himself, he guessed the direction of prayer, knelt, and prayed for guidance. These episodes show observance adapting to the conditions imposed on it, rather than simply disappearing when outward practice was blocked.

Reciting the Quran also gave Slahi a daily structure. Once he had worked out how to distinguish day from night, he counted the days by reciting ten pages each day. After sixty days he would finish and begin again. The cycle made it possible to track the passage of days even when the routine of confinement had disrupted ordinary timekeeping. It did not give him a reliable calendar: he remained uncertain about the days of the week until he glimpsed an interrogator checking a watch. Knowing the weekday mattered to him because Friday is an important Muslim holy day. The recitation therefore supplied one measure of time, while the watch supplied another; together, they helped him recover a limited sense of sequence without restoring the freedom that confinement had removed.

A Book Under Constraint

The account does not treat recitation as easy or safe. Slahi says that a guard told him to be quiet when he heard the Quran, after which he recited softly so that others would not hear. In another passage, he explains that after being caught praying he was punished by being forbidden to use the bathroom for a time. Such details connect religious practice to the immediate conditions of detention: an act as ordinary as reciting or praying could be monitored, interrupted, and punished. His adjustment—from spoken recitation to quieter recitation, and from outward prayer to prayer in his heart—registers the narrowing of what he could do while also documenting what he continued to attempt.

This persistence should not be mistaken for freedom of access. Slahi describes the ban on possessing the Quran as part of the conditions in the secret camps, but his account does not specify how he obtained or retained the words he recited. The evidence supports the significance of his recitation and its role in keeping track of days; it does not justify filling in the practical details the narrative leaves unstated. That distinction matters because the text records both religious devotion and the limits placed on its expression, without making the prohibited book’s physical whereabouts clear.

Narrative and Evidentiary Significance

The Quran recurs at points where Slahi’s account moves between institutional rules and individual acts. One passage sets out the sweeping prohibition on Islamic observance; others return to the specific circumstances of prayer, recitation, and timekeeping. The recurrence makes the book a point of connection between experiences that might otherwise appear separate: interrogation, punishment, isolation, disorientation, and the effort to preserve a daily rhythm. Its meaning emerges through these repeated encounters, not through a single scene of possession or a complete account of the object itself.

The memoir’s censorship also places limits on what can be known from the printed text. Its editor explains that annotations respond to redactions by setting out information that seems most plausible from context and the public record, rather than reconstructing the concealed wording or claiming access to classified material. Public investigations, including the Senate Armed Services Committee inquiry and a U.S. Department of Justice review, document a special interrogation that broadly corresponds to Slahi’s description. That corroboration supports the context of the interrogation program, but it should not be treated as confirmation of every detail concerning the Quran. As an object in the memoir, the text remains caught between prohibition and testimony: its restricted use is described, its importance is made visible through repeated practice, and some surrounding facts remain beyond what the published evidence can establish.