After arriving in a frigid Siberian jail in November 2023, Nariman Dzhelyal ate nothing but bread and gruel.
The bespectacled, bearded Crimean Tatar community leader is a devout Muslim. He said most of the meals he was served contained pork, the consumption of which is forbidden in Islam.
“I just took bread, it wasn’t of good quality, and ate it with tea,” Dzhelyal, who had been sentenced to 17 years in jail for “blowing up a natural gas pipeline” and “smuggling explosives” in a trial Ukraine called Kremlin-orchestrated, told Al Jazeera.
He denied all the allegations against him.
Within days after arriving in the drab town of Minusinsk, his diet got marginally better.
Breakfasts were tasteless, unsweetened gruel, suppers contained fish, and only one of the lunch dishes was with pork.
But diet is by far not the biggest problem tens of thousands of Muslims face in Russia’s notoriously cruel penitentiary system.
For almost a century, Soviet and Russian jails have been described as a dark underworld governed by unwritten laws.
Hardened criminals known as “crowned thieves” or “the black caste” still sport elaborate tattoos, speak a sophisticated slang, and maintain a strict, ruthless hierarchy with themselves on top.
The jails they control are known as “black prisons”, where wardens collude with “crowned thieves” and turn a blind eye to drug smuggling, card games and extreme violence.
“Red prisons” are the ones where wardens hold sway. Here, career criminals have accused prison officials of inhumane conditions including torture, solitary confinement, malnutrition and rape.
But in the past two decades, a third force has begun affecting Russia’s prison population as tens of thousands of Muslims have been convicted of “terrorism”, “extremism”, or other crimes.
About 15 percent of Russia’s population of 143 million is Muslim. They represent the fastest-growing demographic amid a population decline.
Muslim inmates constitute roughly the same percentage of the prison population – 31,000 out of 206,000, Russian Mufti Albir Krganov reportedly said in November 2024.
Russia’s prison populace has more than halved since Moscow invaded Ukraine in 2022. The number of Muslims who volunteered or were enlisted in return for pardons is unknown.
According to rights groups and media reports, Russian convicts who convert to Islam are “automatically” listed as terror suspects and occasionally have their sentences extended for “extremism”.
“If a convict converts to Orthodox Christianity and gets baptised, he’ll be celebrated,” Anna Karetnikova, a former analyst with the Federal Service for Execution of Punishment, Russia’s main organisation that runs correctional facilities, told Al Jazeera.
If someone converts to Islam, he “will be listed as someone prone to extremism, his prison’s administration will be punished” and intelligence services will pay special attention to him, said Karetnikova, who also worked at an agency overseeing penitentiaries in Moscow and in the Memorial rights group.
Muslim migrants from Central Asia who travel to Russia to work are especially vulnerable to criminal persecution because of their poor knowledge of the Russian language, laws and ways of life, rights groups say.
Some have been made to fight in Ukraine, reportedly by force, and others have claimed that Russian police and prosecutors target and frame them for crimes committed by others.
Abdulaziz, a construction worker in Moscow, told Al Jazeera that police had planted synthetic drugs known as “spice” on his younger brother, Abdulmumin, in 2022.
They electrocuted and beat Abdulmumin with plastic water bottles that leave no bruises so that he “confessed” to placing drug stashes under park benches, Abdulaziz claimed.
Then a judge sentenced Abdulmumin to five and a half years in jail in the Ural Mountains region, but “luckily, there are enough ‘green’ inmates there,” Abdulaziz said, referring to Muslim convicts.
“They proved themselves on the zone,” he said, using a slang term for jail, “and other convicts don’t mess with them … The only trouble is the guards, but they accept bribes and turn a blind eye when they have to.”
Abdulaziz refused to provide his last name and other details. Al Jazeera could not independently verify his claims.
Some Russian jails are badly suited for Muslim inmates.
Rights groups say that in some prisons, schedules ban eating and leaving beds between 10pm and 6am, turning each early morning and late evening prayer into a violation. Fasting during Ramadan can also be difficult for some convicts.
There are, however, attempts to educate prison staffers.
“They have to be taught the basics of Islam, they have to know the mentality of [Muslim] inmates they work with. For some, a Muslim prayer alone is a manifestation of ‘extremism’,” Azat Gaunutdinov, an ethnic Tatar man who converted to Islam in jail and started a rights group that monitors the rights of Muslim convicts, told the Kavkazsky Uzel news website in 2020.
The situation often depends on individual prisons.
The wardens in Minusinsk, where Crimean Tatar leader Dzhelyal served most of his sentence, were lenient.
He and other Muslims were allowed to pray and eat their Ramadan meals in their beds.
They could get the Quran and Muslim books from the prison library – unlike Muslims in other prisons, where the Quran and Arabic are banned altogether, and only certain Russian translations are permitted, rights groups say.
According to Dzhelyal, some jailed Muslims refuse to engage in illegal activities while imprisoned, such as smuggling cigarettes, mobile phones or alcohol and drugs.
“There are, indeed, Muslims who say, ‘We have no use for these criminal rules of yours.’ Because [these rules] can often contradict the norms every Muslim lives according to,” Dzhelyal said.
The number of Muslim inmates in Russian jails began to increase in the early 2000s, when the second war in Chechnya began.
The Kremlin cracked down on what it called “extremists” in other North Caucasus provinces, especially in multiethnic Dagestan. Thousands were jailed.
Decades later, Russian authorities and prison administrations still have not found “any response whatsoever” to the challenge, analyst Karentikova said. “There’s nothing but sticks and carrots, no attempts to understand something, to work out some strategy.”
