Prohibition of religious practice

The prohibition of religious practice was a deliberate and recurring feature of Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s detention, reaching into prayer, Quran recitation and possession, and fasting. It made religious observance a point of control: Slahi was punished or threatened for trying to pray, barred from fasting during Ramadan, and eventually found ways to preserve prayer inwardly when he could not practice openly. His account also sets these restrictions against the signs of religious accommodation he recalls from a different, unidentified detention setting.

Scope and Contrasting Settings

In a passage headed September through December 2003, Slahi contrasts an earlier place, whose name is redacted, with the secret camps. In the earlier setting, he recalls, each cell had an arrow indicating the direction of the Qibla, and the call to prayer could be heard five times a day. The location remains obscured in the manuscript, so the contrast cannot safely be assigned to a named facility. Its importance is in the change Slahi describes: the basic conditions that had made Islamic practice possible were absent in the secret camps.

There, he says, detainees were not given a sign pointing toward Mecca, and ritual prayer, Quran recitation, possession of the Quran, and fasting were all forbidden. He presents these not as rumors about detention but as restrictions he personally experienced. The account therefore moves from a setting where the direction of prayer and its daily call were perceptible parts of the environment to one where even private religious observance could provoke intervention. The contrast gives the prohibition a practical, lived measure without requiring the obscured place to be identified.

Slahi frames the restrictions against repeated U.S. statements that the war was not directed at Islam. He acknowledges that such a position made strategic sense, then argues that the practices in the secret camps contradicted it. His distinction is important: he does not attribute an anti-Islamic purpose to ordinary Americans, but says that people within government had a serious problem with the religion. That is his interpretation of the conditions he describes, rather than a separately established finding about every official involved.

Restrictions and Punishment

During an interrogation session in October 2003, Slahi continued praying while interrogators subjected him to degrading treatment. An interrogator angrily rebuked him for praying and characterized his worship as hypocritical. Slahi refused to stop. He says that afterward he was forbidden to perform his ritual prayers for about a year. The restriction thus extended beyond the immediate session: a moment of defiance was followed by a prolonged denial of ordinary religious practice.

The same episode involved fasting during the sacred month of Ramadan. Slahi says he was forbidden to fast and was fed by force. He also refused food and drink during the session, explaining that his hunger strike was chiefly an effort to lose consciousness and escape suffering, not an attempt to impress his captors. The account distinguishes his reasons from the interrogators’ response: they did not allow him to decide whether to eat, and he reports that they described feeding him as something they would ensure. Food and religious observance were both made matters of control.

Prayer remained contested on later shifts. Slahi recounts that one interrogator appeared to invite him to pray, but when he began, another guard mocked his religion. Rather than continue aloud and give the guard another opportunity to blaspheme, Slahi turned to prayer in his heart. This exchange shows how an apparent permission could be withdrawn or made unsafe in practice. The resulting adaptation was not an end to worship, but a retreat from audible, visible observance to an inward form the guards could not as readily interrupt.

The Secret Camp and Private Worship

Slahi describes the prohibition as encompassing not only prayer but the conditions that support it: reciting or possessing the Quran, fasting, and other Islamic-related rituals. After what he calls his Birthday Party, he says he could not keep track of whether it was day or night for the first couple of weeks. In that condition, he prayed inwardly while lying down, unable to stand straight or bend. To distinguish day from night, he looked at the drain in the toilet and judged the light reflected there. The account places religious practice within an environment where even the passage of time had become difficult to establish.

He nevertheless tried to recover moments for prayer. Slahi says he managed to pray without permission, but was discovered. The guards ordered him to stop, and he does not remember whether he completed that prayer while sitting or finished it at all. As punishment, he was forbidden to use the bathroom for a time. The sequence connects an act of worship to a further restriction on an ordinary bodily need; it also shows the limits of what the narrative can firmly recover, since Slahi explicitly cannot say whether the prayer was completed.

On another night, an interrogator moved him to a specially prepared room between ten and eleven. The room was cold and displayed pictures of U.S. weapons, aircraft, and George W. Bush. Slahi was told not to pray during the national anthem, which played throughout the night. He tried to pray, but the interrogator watched him closely and again objected; exhausted, Slahi decided to pray inwardly. He says he shook through the night. The scene sets a state anthem and patriotic images against the detainee’s effort to maintain religious practice, while showing how surveillance narrowed the available space for it.

Orders, Conscience, and Consequences

The restriction was also enforced through a chain of command. Slahi later asked a guard, after they had become friends, why he had forbidden prayer when he knew the order was illegal. The guard explained that he feared refusal would result in an undesirable assignment. He also told Slahi that a superior had ordered him to prevent religious activity and expressed remorse about having forbidden prayer. The exchange identifies both the source of the instruction, as the guard described it, and the pressure under which a subordinate carried it out; it does not establish the order’s full chain beyond that account.

That later conversation changes the emphasis without undoing the earlier harm. The guard’s admission presents enforcement as more than an isolated personal choice: an order was passed down, and the guard understood that disobeying it could have consequences for him. At the same time, his regret shows that carrying out the rule did not eliminate personal responsibility or moral conflict. Slahi’s account holds those facts together rather than treating the guard’s explanation as a restoration of the religious freedom he had lost.

Across these episodes, the prohibition is shown through specific acts and consequences: a year without ritual prayer, a Ramadan fast forcibly interrupted, Quran-related practices barred, private prayer mocked or interrupted, and punishment after an attempt to pray. Slahi’s recourse to prayer in his heart marks the remaining distinction between outward compliance and inward observance. The narrative does not depict that inward practice as a substitute freely chosen from equal options; it emerges because visible worship has been made punishable. Religious life persists in the account, but under conditions in which its permitted form, timing, and expression are controlled by the people holding him.