Religion, State, and Moral Re-Education: Imam and Murshidat in the Algerian Prison System from a Maghrebi Perspective

Abstract

This article examines the configuration of carceral Islam in Algeria as an instrument of moral governance and civic re-education. Drawing on a multi-year qualitative investigation conducted within several research projects and framed by a comparative Maghrebi perspective, the study analyses how imam and Murshidat contribute to the construction of an “administered religion,” in which spiritual authority is translated into institutional competence and a tool of moral regulation. Through the examination of institutional sources, interviews, and field observations, the research shows how faith becomes a language of discipline, how Tawba (moral and spiritual repentance) is converted into a form of moral capital, and how spirituality functions as a technology of civic conformity. The Algerian prison thus emerges as a laboratory of religious governmentality, where the spiritual dimension is incorporated into logics of security and social control. The comparison with Tunisia—and, to a lesser extent, Morocco—highlights both convergences and divergences among Maghrebi models of religious management, opening new avenues for research on the public function of religion and on the contemporary forms through which states moralize the sacred in Muslim societies.

1. Introduction

Over the past two decades, the relationship between religion and penitentiary institutions has become a privileged field for observing the transformation of regimes governing the sacred. In Algeria, as in other Muslim-majority countries, the prison constitutes an emblematic space where religion—far from being marginalized or repressed—is mobilized as a resource for moral re-education and social stabilization. The carceral environment thus becomes a microcosm of the relationship between the State and Islam: a place where faith is normalized, quantified, and transformed into civic capital.

Interest in penitentiary Islam arises from the intertwining of three dynamics. The first concerns the continuity of the state model of control over religion, which, since independence, has rested on a logic of administered Islam (Bras 2014; Rhazzali 2023): a religion integrated into the apparatus of the State, functional to public cohesion and moralization. The second relates to the expansion of policies of moral and civic rehabilitation, which transform piety into a language of discipline (Foucault 1975).

The third, more recent, is the feminization of the religious field, marked by the emergence of Murshidat1—female spiritual authorities who combine pedagogical function and moral supervision.

The analysis is based on a multi-sited qualitative approach, drawing on interviews with the imam, Murshidat, former inmates, and lay personnel collected between 2017 and 2025 in several Algerian penitentiary institutions. It combines empirical observation with a theoretical perspective inspired by the sociology of religion (Bourdieu 1971; Berger 1963, 1967), as well as neo-institutionalist models that interpret religion as a form of organizational adaptation (Meyer and Rowan 1977). It also draws on contingency-based theories of institutional action, which conceive the emergence of new religious interventions as the outcome of contingent pressures that strongly shape public policy (Aldrich 1979). From this perspective, the prison appears as a laboratory of moral rationality, where religious practices are transformed into technologies of the self and instruments of governance.

In the Algerian context, religion does not oppose the State: it traverses and legitimizes it. The penitentiary imam, an intermediary figure between moral agent and administrative official, embodies this hybridization. As for the Murshida, she represents a new grammar of feminine spiritual care, in which pedagogical gentleness merges with disciplinary function. In both cases, spirituality is placed at the service of re-education: salvation translates into conformity, and repentance into civic docility.

Comparison with other Maghrebi contexts—particularly Tunisia and Morocco—reveals both convergences and divergences. In all cases, penitentiary Islam participates in a broader process of securitization of religion (Cesari 2021): the control of the spiritual sphere in the name of security and social cohesion. Yet, whereas post-2011 Tunisia has opened semi-autonomous spaces of mediation and Morocco has professionalized the training of religious guides, Algeria maintains a more statist configuration, in which faith is entirely administered.

From a broader perspective, the Algerian case invites reflection on a phenomenon common to many Muslim-majority countries: the transformation of religion into a resource of governance. From the prevention of radicalization to moral re-education, from the promotion of citizenship to the training of spiritual cadres, contemporary policies tend to produce an Islam that is functional to the management of order. The prison, in this sense, is not an exception but a paradigmatic laboratory of institutional moralization.

2. Theoretical and Methodological Framework

2.1. State of Research: Religion, Security, and the Carceral Space in the Maghreb

The interest of the social sciences in the presence of religion within detention institutions is relatively recent. Until the 1990s, most European and North American studies focused on prison chaplaincies as mechanisms for regulating religious pluralism. The work of Beckford and Gilliat (1998), further developed by subsequent scholarship (e.g., Beckford 2011; Becci 2011; Becci and Roy 2015; Rhazzali 2015), has shown that prison chaplaincy operates as a space of mediation between the logic of the state and that of religion. In this perspective, religious actors do not stand in opposition to institutional authority: rather, they contribute to its moral regulation and symbolic legitimization, making the chaplaincy a key interface between spiritual care and disciplinary governance.

At the same time, a second line of research analyzed the security-driven reconfiguration of religion in prison, linked to counter-radicalization policies. Authors such as Béraud et al. (2016), Spalek and Imtoual (2015), and Rhazzali and Schiavinato (2023) have shown how the category of radicalization functions as a semantic device of public problematization, allowing the State to integrate new religious figures while strictly delimiting their scope of action. In this perspective, religion becomes a technology of moral government and risk management.

During the decade 2010–2020, international organizations—UNODC, the Council of Europe, ICCPR—codified guidelines on religious assistance and the prevention of radicalization in prisons2. However, as researchers note (Martínez-Ariño and Zwilling 2020), these frameworks have produced a discursive inflation rather than genuine empirical development: reports abound, but field investigations remain scarce. Europe today possesses a solid comparative basis regarding chaplaincy models and religious rights, but qualitative research—particularly on lived Islam—remains limited.

Between these two trajectories—institutional and security-oriented—a third approach emerged in the mid-2000s, shifting attention toward the practices and subjective experiences of detainees. While security-driven and institutional approaches dominate the literature on prison religion, ethnographic research has also highlighted religion as a resource for self-restoration and social rehabilitation, rather than for moral disciplining, as shown by the study of Géraldine and de Guise (2022) on multiconfessional religious accompaniment in Canadian prisons. With Khosrokhavar (2004), Becci (2006, 2010), and Rhazzali (2010), followed by others (Becci et al. 2016; Rhazzali and Schiavinato 2016; Sarg 2016; Sarg and Lamine 2011; Martínez-Ariño and Zwilling 2020; Schneuwly Purdie et al. 2022; Wilkinson et al. 2023), religion has been analyzed as an identity resource and as a language for the recomposition of the self within the total institution, paving the way for an interactionist and micro-sociological reading. This orientation was further developed by subsequent scholarship (Becci and Roy 2015; Becci et al. 2016), showing that the religious dimension constitutes a symbolic space of negotiation between prison actors and inmates rather than a mere disciplinary instrument.

At the same time, it must be noted that the recent consolidation of this research area has been propelled above all by the “Muslim case” (Rhazzali 2010). The centrality of Islam in public debates on radicalization has acted as an intellectual accelerator, pushing scholars to explore the religious life of prisons with unprecedented intensity. This dynamic has broadened the analytical lens applied to Islam, yet it has also produced an asymmetry: while studies on Muslim inmates have multiplied, research on other religious traditions remains comparatively marginal.

In Muslim-majority countries, scientific production on this question long remained doctrinal or normative in nature. Two pioneering dissertations—ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Khalīfī (1995) and Lamiyāʾ al-Ṭawīl (2006), both defended at Imam Ben Saʿūd University in Riyadh—address Daʿwa fī al-Sujūn as a religious duty rather than an empirical object. They testify to an early interest, but it was only from the 2020s onward that several Maghrebi doctoral theses (2021–2023) attempted to offer a sociological reading, thereby opening the field to empirical inquiry.

In the Maghreb, this shift forms part of a broader reconfiguration of the religious sphere, interpreted by recent scholarship as a process through which the State progressively institutionalizes sacred authority by redefining its spaces, actors, and linguistic registers (Kerrou 2014). Within this perspective, the Tunisian case has been read as emblematic of administered Islam, a configuration in which religion is translated into a civic and moral function of the State (Bras 2014), though without specific attention to the penitentiary sector.

Various Maghrebi authors have highlighted the progressive reconfiguration of the religious fields and the consolidation of a state management of the sacred aimed at combining institutional control and moral legitimation (Kerrou 2014). As they show, from the 2000s onward, the public role of religion gradually turned into a tool of political cohesion and civic norm-setting, with Islam increasingly expressed in the administrative and moral language of the State. In this perspective, the securitization of religion cannot be reduced to the surveillance of practices but involves a redefinition of the imaginaries and spaces of public religiosity, where the mosque, the university, and the associative sphere become mechanisms for regulating the social.

These studies have documented how, after 11 September 2001, Maghrebi governments—and others beyond the region—promoted a reorganization of religious institutions and their related domains, from the training of imams to the control of fatwas, without yet extending the analysis to the prison space, which today constitutes a new frontier in the moral government of religion.

In Morocco, beyond the reform of the DGAPR, the involvement of the Ministry of Habous and Islamic Affairs and of the Rabita Mohammedia of the ʿUlamāʾ has given rise to a model in which spiritual guidance is framed within state-led programs of prevention and rehabilitation. Initiatives such as the Musālaha programs for inmates convicted of extremism illustrate a form of “curated” religious intervention combining theological reframing and administrative coordination (El Asri 2020). In Tunisia, after the revolution, the prison became a laboratory of “religious rehabilitation,” coordinated by the Ministry of Religious Affairs and supported by European partners; yet, the literature (Rhazzali 2023) underscores the persistent tension between security logics and pastoral aspirations. In Turkey, spiritual counselling in prisons has been progressively institutionalized through cooperation between the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) and the penitentiary administration. This model formalizes the presence of religious officers as part of rehabilitation programs, as shown by Harun Işık’s analysis of comparative prison chaplaincy practices in Turkey and the UK (Işık 2016). In Saudi Arabia, the management of “ideological prisoners” has been partly shifted to para-penitentiary rehabilitation centers, the most emblematic being the Prince Mohammed bin Nayef Center (Boucek 2008). These institutions combine theological counselling and behavioral monitoring within a preventive logic of deradicalization.

In Algeria, after the Décennie Noire, the Ministère des Affaires Religieuses et des Waqf regained full control of public Islam, including the penitentiary sector, yet field research remains nonexistent. Some official documents mention the presence of an imam in charge of “intellectual revisions” and programs of “religious awareness-raising” for radicalized inmates3, without, however, providing verifiable data. International reviews (Koehler 2021; UNODC 2016) converge on one point: in the MENA region, independent scientific research on religious interventions in prison remains embryonic. Methodologies remain descriptive, impact assessments are rare, and religion is still treated more as a variable of security than as a sociological object.

It is in this context that our empirical study is situated, as part of a broader program on religion in public institutions, in Europe and in Muslim-majority countries. Built on long-term research experience conducted within the European context, the inquiry was later extended to post-revolutionary Tunisian prisons, thus constituting the first systematic attempt at a sociological analysis of religion in the prisons of Arab-Muslim countries. It opens the way to regional comparison and provides theoretical tools for understanding the Algerian case.

The study highlights the ways in which religion becomes hybridized with security and administrative logics, taking the form of an adapted—or “administered”—religion capable of reconciling the requirements of spiritual legitimation and institutional control. This hybridization is manifested through a complex interplay between official and unofficial Islam (Bras 2014; Brown 2017), in which faith becomes a resource of government rather than a space of autonomy.

Although the topic is strategically important, Algeria still has very little independent scholarship on it. What we know comes mostly from UNDP materials and DGAPR reports, which tend to provide administrative descriptions rather than sociological analyses. Hence, the interest and originality of the present research, which aims to fill this gap by proposing an empirical and theoretical reading of the religious supervision dispositif, considering theories of moral government and the statization of the sacred in the contemporary Maghreb.

2.2. Moral Government, Religious Field, and Discipline of the Sacred

The Algerian prison presents itself as a space where two forms of power are condensed: the discipline of bodies and the moralization of souls. Heir to the mechanisms of supervision established by the postcolonial State, it becomes a laboratory where religion, far from being marginalized, is mobilized as an instrument for the production of the compliant subject.

In continuity with the analyses of Goffman (1961) and Foucault (1975), the prison constitutes both a total institution and a disciplinary dispositif: it organizes daily life under the sign of surveillance and visibility, transforming material control into moral internalization. In this sense, religion functions as a technology of the self—a complement to the technology of power—that reformulates coercion into internalized obedience. Ritual gestures, prayers, and the teachings provided by the imam become means of restoring meaning and coherence to an administered existence.

Beyond this general reading, certain aspects of the Algerian case also recall the genealogy traced by Foucault, particularly the link between discipline and the production of morally regulated subjects. Gorski’s extension of this argument (Gorski 1993)—which interprets discipline as a broader cultural revolution rooted in moral regulation—is helpful here. In this light, religious guidance in prison appears as a mechanism through which self-control, responsibility, and conformity to institutional norms are encouraged.

The religious supervision established by the MARW and the DGAPR perfectly illustrates this articulation between biopolitics and theology. The imam and Murshidat appointed to penitentiary institutions act as mediators of power: they embody the moral norm of the State and ensure the symbolic pacification of the carceral space. Their role goes beyond “spiritual assistance”; they participate in the production of the “good prisoner”—disciplined and reintegrable. At a broader level, these practices contribute to shaping what Benedict Anderson called an “imagined community” (Anderson 2006): a shared understanding of what a proper Algerian citizen should look like. Through preaching, advice, and the routinization of moral vocabulary, the prison becomes one of the places where this national self-image is quietly reaffirmed and transmitted.

Pierre Bourdieu’s approach (Bourdieu 1971, 1977) makes it possible to grasp the structural logic of this dispositif. In Algeria, the religious field is not autonomous but integrated into the field of power, whose symbolic function it prolongs. The imam or the Murshida are moral delegates of the State, whose legitimacy rests on administrative recognition rather than on charisma or theological knowledge. This dual delegation—from political power to the religious, and conversely—transforms faith into a resource for mutual legitimation: the State moralizes its authority, while religion is institutionalized as a public function of the sacred.

Within the penitentiary framework, this symbiosis materializes through programs of Irchād Dīnī (religious guidance) and Murāfaqa Rūḥiyya (spiritual accompaniment)4, which make religion an instrument for managing conduct. Religious language is reabsorbed into bureaucratic rationality: obedience becomes a spiritual virtue and discipline an indicator of piety. The Murshidat responsible for accompanying female detainees exemplify this dynamic: they work under administrative protocol, share spaces with lay staff, and adapt their pedagogy to the reintegration objectives set by the State. Preaching thus transforms into civic pedagogy, where spiritual purity equates to republican loyalty.

However, as Khosrokhavar (2004, 2013) points out, religion in prison is never univocal. Alongside administered Islam, a lived Islam emerges—an interpretive space of gentle resistance. In interviews, discussion circles, and requests for collective prayer, detainees reinvest religious norms to reconstruct dignity and a sense of self. Religion thus becomes a field of hybridization between obedience and autonomy, where discipline can be requalified as a path toward redemption.

The neo-institutionalist framework (Meyer and Rowan 1977; DiMaggio and Powell 1983) complements this reading by showing that Algerian reforms are inscribed within dynamics of global isomorphism. Under the influence of international organizations—the UN, the Council of Europe, and UNODC—the Algerian State has adopted a lexicon of reinsertion, deradicalization, and spiritual accompaniment consistent with the global language of governance. These norms, more symbolic than operational, express the desire to “modernize” religion while maintaining control over it.

Thus, the standardization of religious practices—selection and training of imams, control of sermons, supervision of spiritual programs—reveals a logic of controlled isomorphism. Reform becomes an administrative ritual that asserts the moral sovereignty of the State while borrowing the codes of penitentiary modernity.

Ultimately, the Algerian prison crystallizes the interpenetration of political and religious power: a moral government of body and soul, where faith becomes discipline and discipline, salvation. This space concentrates the most explicit forms of Algerian governmental rationality, where religion serves simultaneously as a vehicle of order and a promise of redemption. In this microcosm, the spiritual does not oppose the political; it extends it, cloaking it in moral values. Individual salvation becomes inseparable from the restoration of civic cohesion, and conversion, far from being a rupture, marks adherence to a collective norm. A part of this dynamic is sustained by the emotional charge generated through collective ritual: moments of shared prayer, Qurʾanic recitation, or dhikr create what Durkheim (1912) described as “collective effervescence,” a temporary elevation that binds individuals to a broader moral horizon. Within the prison, this energy is gently redirected toward the State, which appears as the guarantor of moral rehabilitation and social reintegration. Prayer, Qur’anic study, and spiritual guidance function as rituals of docility, translating fidelity to God into loyalty to the State. Faith thus becomes the common language of discipline and the key to a rehabilitation that fuses moral redemption with institutional conformity.

2.3. Methodology: Observing Religion as a Dispositif

The methodological approach adopted in this research combines the tools of qualitative ethnography, institutional analysis, and interpretive sociology. The objective is not to describe a religious phenomenon per se, but to understand how religion is produced, regulated, and made operative within the penitentiary institution, and in what way this regulation contributes to the construction of the contemporary moral subject.

2.3.1. Situated Epistemology

The analysis adopts a cultural–institutional approach that understands religion as a shared system of meanings and a set of regulated practices embedded in institutional settings. Rather than treating religion as an independent causal factor, this perspective focuses on how religious languages and ritual forms participate in the production of order, legitimacy, and moral governance. The study thus starts from situated forms of administered religiosity, through which the interaction between the State, the penal institution, and individuals is expressed. Following the paradigm of administered religion (Rhazzali 2023), religion in prison is conceived as the result of a co-production between institutional dispositif, legal frameworks, and everyday social practices.

The research presented in this article is based on a joint empirical project conducted by the authors, initiated in 2017 within the framework of the Transmed Project (ANR, France; 2014–2018)5 at the CRASC in Oran. It was subsequently developed within the PriMED Project (Prevention and Interaction in the Trans-Mediterranean Space)6 and the PRIN 2022–2026 (Islam and Muslims in Italy)7, which includes a comparative action between Italy and the Maghreb (Tunisia–Algeria).

This extension made it possible to compare two regimes of religious management: a partially pluralistic and negotiated model (Tunisia), in which the Ministry of Religious Affairs cooperates with NGOs and volunteer imams; and a centralized and statist model (Algeria), in which the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Waqf directly control the training and mobilization of penitentiary religious agents.

Fieldwork in Algeria required multi-level negotiation with institutional actors and collaboration with local researchers. As is often the case in studies dealing with highly surveilled spaces, direct access to detention facilities could not be obtained8. However, this limitation was offset by a systematic triangulation of sources, which made it possible to reconstruct a credible and well-documented overview of the penitentiary religious dispositif.

2.3.2. Sources and Data Collection Techniques

The empirical corpus includes more than eighty institutional documents: ministerial circulars, official communiqués, annual reports of the Direction Générale de l’Administration Pénitentiaire et de la Réinsertion DGAPR (2015–2024), and legal texts such as the Code de l’Organisation Pénitentiaire et de la Réinsertion Sociale des Détenus (Law no. 15-04, 2015)9.

Qualitative and semi-structured interviews were also conducted with:

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civil servants and administrative advisors (n = 20);

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imam and Murshidat engaged in Irchād Dīnī programs (n = 60);

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members of faith-inspired civil associations (n = 5);

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journalists and researchers who have followed penitentiary and religious field reforms (n = 6);

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former detainees (n = 20).

In addition, ten focus groups were conducted with the imam and Murshidat, aimed at exploring collective perceptions of their roles, cooperation with lay staff, and their representations of religious intervention within prison settings.

Moreover, the interpretation of the Algerian material was systematically compared with findings from research conducted by the authors in contexts where access to prisons was possible (Italy, Switzerland, and Belgium), as well as with ethnographic studies carried out in other national settings by scholars working inside penitentiary institutions. This comparative lens functioned as a validity check, allowing us to assess the consistency of the dynamics observed in Algeria and to avoid interpretations not grounded in direct empirical experience.

The analysis is based on a thematic and interpretive reading designed to identify the lexicons, rhetorics, and practices through which religion is constructed as a moral resource and an instrument of government.

2.3.3. Analytical Framework and Limitations

The analysis is structured around three main axes—symbolic, spatial-material, and practical—corresponding to the dimensions identified in the theoretical framework. Each axis is explored through operational categories connected with the theoretical frameworks of Goffman, Foucault, Bourdieu, Durkheim, and neo-institutionalist theory, allowing theory and empiricism to engage in a circular dialogue.

The impossibility of directly observing prison life was treated not as a limitation, but as an epistemological indicator of the institutional closure of the field and of the essentially discursive character of the religious dispositif. The study, therefore, does not aim to evaluate the effectiveness of programs, but to analyze how religion is narrated, administered, and performed by the State and by its moral actors.

3. The Invention of the Religious Dispositif

3.1. Colonial Genealogy and Institutional Lexicon

The Algerian penitentiary organization cannot be understood without taking into account its colonial genealogy. From the French conquest of 1830 onward, the prison became an instrument of political and social control, intended less for the re-education of the delinquent than for the normalization of the Indigenous population (Naoui 2019).

In the colonial logic, punishment did not aim at reintegration but at cultural disciplining: it sought to “reform Muslim morals,” considered archaic, by integrating the native population into a European moral order shaped by Christian legacies and secular disciplinary rationalities (Foucault 1975; Stoler 2002).

The prisons built in the nineteenth century—Algiers, Blida, Oran, Tlemcen—reproduced the panoptic and moralizing model of French penitentiary establishments. Muslim religion was tolerated but surveilled: the colonial imam, appointed by French authorities, acted more as a political intermediary than as a spiritual guide. Collective prayer was authorized for disciplinary purposes, and religious texts were subject to censorship.

At the same time, the figure of the Christian chaplain was introduced into these institutions, charged with the moralization of prisoners through confession and prayer. This model—based on the idea that faith supports moral redemption and the docility of the incarcerated subject—would become the implicit paradigm of all future regulation of religion in prison (Beckford and Gilliat 1998; Béraud et al. 2016).

After independence (1962), the Algerian State inherited an administrative apparatus profoundly shaped by the French principle of confessional neutrality. While proclaiming Islam the religion of the State, the young Republic largely preserved the French-style system of administrative control over worship, nationalizing Islamic institutions and entrusting the management of the sacred to a central bureaucracy (Frégosi 1992). The penitentiary reforms of 1972 and 1976 introduced moral and social re-education as objectives of treatment: religion became a subordinate moral language, an instrument of socialist pedagogy, and the formation of the “renewed citizen.” In the 1970s and 1980s, under Boumediene, a civic State Islam emerged: the imam, like the teacher or the civil servant, participated in the moral formation of the socialist and patriotic citizen.

The Décennie represented a turning point. The prison became a space of forced coexistence between Islamist militants, common-law prisoners, and state personnel. To prevent internal radicalization, the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Waqf (MARW) elaborated a national religious reference, reabsorbing the religious field into a state-controlled moral order. It was during this period that the idea of religious supervision emerged as an instrument of moral pacification and spiritual control.

From 2009 onward, the MARW and the DGAPR progressively codified religious presence in detention facilities. The institutional lexicon changed: Daʿwa (preaching) became Irchād Dīnī; al-Mawʿiẓa (moral exhortation) was translated as Murāfaqa Rūḥiyya. This semantic shift marked the passage from a missionary logic to a politico-administrative one, where religion was assimilated into a professional competence serving social reintegration.

The Code de l’Organisation pénitentiaire legally consolidated this process: for the first time, the prisoner’s right to religious practice was guaranteed, and spiritual assistance was recognized as a service under penitentiary administration.

Religion thus entered the language of law, no longer as a humanitarian concession but as a regulated and delegated function. The implicit reference to the European model of Christian chaplaincy is evident in this juridical translation of religion into a public service. However, unlike the French chaplaincy, rooted in confessional pluralism, religious assistance in Algeria is based on a monoconfessional and statist conception of Islam, where the imam acts more as a moral civil servant of the State than as a representative of a community of faith (Rhazzali 2023).

The Christian chaplain mediates between the prisoner and the institution; the penitentiary imam, by contrast, embodies the institution itself, translating surveillance into ethical guidance. Since 2017, joint MARW–DGAPR circulars10 have introduced a technical vocabulary—“moral and civic training”, religious awareness, spiritual animation—that redefines religion as a component of reintegration policy11. We thus witness a process of bureaucratization of the sacred (Foucault 1975; Rhazzali 2023), in which the language of faith is translated into administrative protocols and indicators of effectiveness.

The religious dispositif therefore arises from the hybridization between law and bureaucracy, inheriting from colonial chaplaincy the form of public service while substituting for it the moral function of an administered and normalized Islam.

This process is summarized in the progressive normative and semantic shifts that structure the religious dispositif in Algerian prisons (see Table 1).

Table 1. Normative and Lexical Evolution of the Religious Dispositif.

Year	Event/Document	Semantic or Institutional Evolution
2009	First guidelines of the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Waqf on “religious awareness”	From Daʿwa to Irchād Dīnī
2011	MARW reform after the Arab Spring	Introduction of Murāfaqa Rūḥiyya
2015	Code de l’organisation pénitentiaire et de la réinsertion sociale des détenus (Law no. 15-04)	Legal recognition of spiritual assistance as a public service
2017	MARW–DGAPR agreement for the integration of the imam and Murshidat into detention centers	Formalization of religious supervision and start of specific training
2019	National Program for Moral and Civic Education	Integration of religion into the social reintegration policy
2021	First internal DGAPR–MARW evaluations on the impact of religious activities	Recognition of the educational and preventive role of the penitentiary imam
2022	UN–UNDP Plan “Prevention of Violent Extremism in Prison Environments”	Religion conceived as an instrument of “soft” deradicalization
2024	New MARW directives on spiritual and civic animation	Redefinition of the pedagogical and civic role of religious agents

3.2. The Institutionalization of Religious Supervision

The construction of the penitentiary religious dispositif in Algeria consolidated between 2015 and 2024, in parallel with the evolution of the Code de l’Organisation Pénitentiaire through cooperation between the MARW and the DGAPR. This process of institutionalization does not represent a mere technical adaptation, but rather the administrative translation of a broader political project: to re-establish the State’s monopoly over the management of religion after several decades of pluralization and symbolic conflict.

Created in 2010 as an organ of the Ministry of Justice, the DGAPR currently coordinates a network of around 51 penitentiary institutions, housing an estimated prison population of over 65,000 individuals12. According to ministerial sources13, more than 97% of prisoners identify as Sunni Muslims, while Christian and other religious minorities remain marginal and are handled through specific channels14. An overview of the institutional framework and estimated data on religious supervision in Algerian prisons is provided in Table 2.

Table 2. Estimated Data on Religious Supervision in Algerian Prisons—Year 2024.

Category	Indicator/Estimated Data
Total number of penitentiary institutions	51
Total prison population	≈65,000
Percentage of Muslim detainees	97%
Number of penitentiary imams	≈250
Number of Murshidat	≈40
Average number of religious agents per institution	5
Institutions with weekly moral–religious training activities	80%

The network of religious agents includes approximately 250 imams and more than 40 Murshidat, distributed among the country’s main institutions, with an average of five religious staff per facility, at least one of whom is responsible for moral and civic education. These actors are recruited and remunerated by the MARW but operate under the logistical supervision of the DGAPR. Cooperation between the two ministries is governed by a joint protocol signed in 2017, which establishes procedures for appointment, eligibility criteria, and coordination requirements.

The imam must have completed specific training in spiritual accompaniment in the prison environment, organized by the Center for the Training of Religious Cadres in Bouchaoui (Algiers). The Murshida—a figure introduced in 2015—plays a complementary role focused on women’s sections, ethical mediation, and family counseling.

On the operational level, religious intervention is articulated around three main axes:

• Collective preaching, during holidays and Friday prayers, limited to authorized spaces and under the supervision of penitentiary personnel.
• Moral and civic education, organized in modules of 10 to 15 sessions, aimed at selected groups of inmates for purposes of “intellectual revision” and prevention of fanaticism.
• Individual spiritual accompaniment, reserved for cases reported by psychological or social services, but always conducted in the presence of a DGAPR officer.

These practices are standardized through evaluation forms, attendance registers, and quarterly reports submitted to the MARW. Administrative language translates the religious category into performance indicators: participation rate, “moral progress,” disciplinary attitude, and rediscovery of faith.

Thus emerges a hybrid institutional field, in which the imam functions as a civil servant of morality—subject to evaluation and surveillance as much as the prisoners he accompanies.

The official lexicon reflects this paradigm. Expressions such as spiritual assistance, “prevention of extremist thinking”, or moral and civic training have gradually replaced traditional devotional terminology (Tawba [moral and spiritual repentance], Dhikr [remembrance], Tazkiya [purification]), marking a functional secularization of the language of the sacred. Religion is no longer what escapes the norm, but what the norm incorporates in order to legitimize itself.

The imams are selected, trained, assigned, and evaluated jointly by the MARW and the DGAPR, in accordance with the 2024 executive decree regulating the new special status of imam15. Faith is thus bureaucratized, translated into professional skills and administrative protocols.

As attested by the national press and official communications16, the imam conducts group courses, awareness sessions, and individual interviews aimed at “reforming the prisoner’s soul” and fostering moral reintegration. In a Bourdieusian reading, the imam acts as the moral delegate of the State, occupying a subordinate yet symbolically central position within the field of reintegration.

The Algerian prison, therefore, appears as a genuine laboratory of moral government (Rhazzali 2023): a space where surveillance becomes care and faith becomes an instrument of social discipline. Upon closer observation, the figure of the imam–fonctionnaire, institutionally defined as a dispositif of moral governance, acquires its full meaning only when observed within the everyday practices and material spaces where it takes shape—where tensions, mediations, and ambivalences concretely redefine the religious presence in the Algerian prison.

4. Governing Religion: Organization, Actors, and Functions

4.1. Logics of Moral Government

Within the Algerian penitentiary system, religion appears to be progressively incorporated into a broader dispositif of moral government (Rhazzali 2023), where the language of faith (Īmān) and that of discipline (Taʾdīb, trad. moral discipline-education) intersect in the construction of the “good prisoner.”

Reintegration policies do not separate the spiritual dimension from the normative one; rather, they merge them into an administrative vocabulary that presents religion as a resource of order, self-control, and citizenship.

The 2015 Penitentiary Code explicitly mentions the moral and social re-education of prisoners, translating into legal terms the older ideal of Iṣlāḥ—the moral reform of the soul through simultaneous submission to both divine law and state law.

According to ministerial sources, the management of religion in Algerian prisons appears to be based on three main rationales, which in practice complement each other. The first is a disciplinary rationality, inherited from the French colonial model, which conceives religion as an instrument of Taʾdīb —the formation of character and the making of docile bodies (Foucault 1975). In this model, the penitentiary imam is expected to ‘re-educate’ the Munḥarifīn (moral deviants), correcting their behavior and guiding them back to the Ṣirāṭ al-Mustaqīm.”

The second is a therapeutic rationality, introduced through the moral and civic training programs, which translates repentance (Tawba) and purification (Tazkiya) into indicators of “psychological stability” or “self-control.” The quarterly reports of the DGAPR and the MARW employ a psychologically inflected religious language: the prisoner “at peace with God” is also the one “fit for reintegration.”

The third is a security rationality, emerging after 2010 with the rhetoric of Maqāraba li-manʿ al-taṭarruf (prevention of radicalization). Religion is administered as a symbolic barrier against the risk of ideological deviation: the imam acts as Murāqib Rūḥī17—a spiritual supervisor—responsible for detecting doctrinal drifts or “suspicious attitudes.”

Religious supervision thus becomes a dispositif of moral control integrated within the penitentiary security system. These three logics converge within an apparently neutral administrative language: spiritual balance, civic reintegration, moral correction. This constitutes a form of administered religion (Rhazzali 2023), where faith becomes an object of governance rather than a subjective experience.

Following Goffman (1961), the total institution re-legitimizes itself precisely when it presents itself as a space of care. Tarbiya Rūḥiyya (spiritual education) replaces punishment; Tawba substitutes for fault—yet both remain inscribed within the logic of control.

From a neo-institutionalist perspective, the Algerian system appears as an isomorphic field (DiMaggio and Powell 1983): its religious policies formally align with global paradigms of deradicalization and rehabilitation promoted by international organizations such as the UNDP18 and the Council of Europe19.

This convergence produces an apparent similarity with European models, though the underlying dynamic differs: whereas in Europe the Christian chaplaincy acts as a mediation between the individual and the institution (Beckford and Gilliat 1998), in Algeria, the imam embodies the institution itself.

As neo-institutionalist theory suggests (Meyer and Rowan 1977), this is a case of ceremonial conformity: the DGAPR and the MARW adopt internationally valorized discourses of moral governance without reshaping the real configurations of power.

Field observations confirm that the official discourse translates into operational classifications. Prisoners are categorized into three profiles—radicalized (Mutatharrifūn), vulnerable (MustadʿAfūn), and recidivist (ʿĀ’idūn)—each corresponding to specific religious trajectories.

Participation in Tarbiya Rūḥiyya courses is recorded in disciplinary files and may influence the granting of benefits such as sentence reduction or transfer to a lighter regime.

From a Bourdieusian perspective (Bourdieu 1994), faith becomes a symbolic currency, exchangeable within the moral market of reintegration. The penitentiary imam occupies a central position in this symbolic economy: he translates coercion into redemption, transforming submission to the norm into an act of faith. His daily role consists of ensuring “religious normality” in the eyes of the administration while persuading inmates that obedience to authority constitutes a step toward Iṣlāḥ.

In this sense, the Algerian prison thus becomes a laboratory of modern moral government, where the sovereignty of the State and the spiritual promise merge. Some aspects of this dynamic also recall insights from research on “God images,” a notion first articulated by Ana-Maria Rizzuto (1979) within the psychology of religion. Although external to our sociological framework, this line of work highlights how representations of a morally involved or watchful deity may encourage the internalization of normative expectations. In our interviews with the imam, Murshidat, and former inmates, occasional references to divine judgment emerged as a horizon that gives moral resonance to institutional demands. Without overstating its explanatory role, this suggests that religious imagination can at times support—not only resist—the moral framing promoted by the State.

4.2. Institutional Architecture of Religious Governance

4.2.1. The Vertical Chain of Religious Supervision

At the top, the National Committee for Religious Coordination—composed of representatives from both ministries—validates annual programs and supervises the activity of the penitentiary imam. Each regional directorate has a religious coordinator who serves as a liaison between the field and the central administration. The imam serves in prisons as a religious civil servant; they are selected, trained, and evaluated jointly by the MARW and the DGAPR.

Their status, as defined by the 2024 Algerian executive decree regulating the status of imams, establishes that “the imam is a state agent responsible for guiding the spiritual and moral life of citizens, including within penitentiary institutions.”

The Murshida, introduced in 2015, performs analogous functions focused on the female population: she accompanies women detainees in tazkiya (inner purification) and Iṣlāḥ usra (family reform), while also providing educational guidance and ethical counseling.

Imams are not formally part of the penitentiary staff, yet their access to spaces and the scheduling of their activities depend entirely on the authorization of the prison director. This creates a functional asymmetry: religious authority remains subordinated to the security hierarchy while simultaneously contributing to its symbolic legitimacy. The religious field is thus “incorporated” into the bureaucratic field of the State, and the imam’s position corresponds to that of a moral delegate of administrative power (Bourdieu 1994).

4.2.2. Interactions with Secular Agents

Operationally, the religious actor works alongside psychologists, educators, social workers, and mediators. All contribute to the goal of moral reintegration, though from distinct frames of reference: psychologists rely on behavioral diagnostic tools, while religious agents draw on the categories of Īmān (faith) and Niyya Ṣāliḥa (righteous intention).

Monthly coordination meetings are used to share evaluations of inmates, often couched in moralized terms (“spiritual improvement,” “ethical maturity”). Tarbiya Rūḥiyya thus becomes a shared language of mediation between scientific and religious knowledge.

However, interviews reveal latent tensions between religious and secular staff. Secular agents sometimes perceive religious preaching as “dogmatic” or “paternalistic,” while an imam views the psycho-social discourse as morally neutral and incapable of producing Taʾdīb. This gives rise to a competition over the definition of the ‘true treatment,’ reflecting the Foucauldian dialectic between disciplinary power and pastoral power.

Despite such frictions, cooperation is ensured through strict organizational principles: the imam cannot conduct individual interviews without the presence of a DGAPR officer, and all activities must be logged and validated through a weekly report. Murshidat are subject to the same rules, with mandatory reporting and a ban on private meetings. These constraints limit the autonomy of religious action while legitimizing it as part of the State’s iṣlāḥ (moral reform) dispositif.

4.2.3. Autonomy, Control, and Organizational Mimicry

The position of imam within the prison system perfectly illustrates what neo-institutionalist sociology calls organizational mimicry (DiMaggio and Powell 1983): they adopt apparently spiritual forms and language in response to security constraints while maintaining symbolic conformity to the bureaucratic model. This dual belonging—to the religious and state fields—produces a hybrid and contingent actor, oscillating between obedience and interpretation.

In European prisons, the Christian chaplaincy plays an ethical mediation role between the institution and the individual; in Tunisia, the Imam-Waʿiẓ acts as a semi-autonomous counselor, dependent on the ministry yet free to propose educational initiatives.

In Algeria, by contrast, the relationship is strictly vertical: Tarbiya Rūḥiyya is programmed, quantified, and evaluated through performance indicators. Faith is measured; Tawba is recorded.

From a comparative perspective, this organizational architecture exhibits a clear coercive isomorphism: international deradicalization standards are translated into local bureaucratic procedures that reproduce their form without sharing their substance.

As in the models of Meyer and Rowan (1977), symbolic legitimacy prevails over empirical effectiveness—what matters is not the actual transformation of the prisoner, but conformity to the protocols of security and “good religious governance.”

4.3. Practices of Regulation and the Performance of Religion

4.3.1. Space and Time of Worship

In the Algerian penitentiary context, worship is not merely tolerated: it is organized, quantified, and monitored. Ṣalāt (daily prayer) structures prison life as a temporal discipline rather than as a purely spiritual expression. The five prayers are authorized collectively, but only in adapted spaces—communal or multipurpose rooms—rarely in actual Masājid (prayer rooms). Only large complexes, such as El Harrach or Tizi-Ouzou, have small permanent prayer rooms. The imam in charge of these activities supervises the rites and verifies the proper performance of ablutions, always under the watch of DGAPR officers.

Friday prayer (Ṣalāt al-Jumuʿa) constitutes a zone of legal and religious ambiguity. Some religious authorities, such as the former mufti Benyoucef, have recalled that Jumuʿa in prison is not theologically obligatory, as the inmate is “isolated from the Jamāʿa” (the community of believers). Nevertheless, since 2019, the DGAPR and MARW have authorized the symbolic delivery of the sermon (Khuṭba)20 in a reduced form, serving an educational and moral—rather than liturgical—purpose21.

This decision, consistent with the principle of moral and social re-education, illustrates how Jumuʿa is reinterpreted as a dispositif of Taʿlīm Akhlāqī (moral instruction) rather than a communal rite (Charik 2014).

During the month of Ramadan, regulation intensifies: meal schedules follow the Iftār (breaking of the fast) timetable but remain subordinated to security logistics. Inmates participate in Tilāwa (Qur’anic recitation) sessions and collective moral reflections organized by the imam, often relayed by national media as examples of a “controlled prison spirituality.”

Religious festivals (ʿĪd al-Fiṭr, ʿĪd al-Aḍḥā) are the only occasions when the State’s paternalistic tone translates into symbolic acts of benevolence: official visits, donations from the Algerian Red Crescent, or sentence reductions and collective pardons—officially described in ministerial communiqués as acts of State Raḥma (compassion).

Thus, the regulation of worship functions as a technology for moralizing time and space. The institution grants prayer but determines its limits, timing, and modalities. In Foucauldian terms, Ṣalāt is “incorporated” into the surveillance dispositif: Sujūd (prostration) becomes an act of civic docility simultaneously.

In this perspective, religion operates as a shared language between bodily and spiritual discipline. The Algerian model of Tarbiya Rūḥiyya does not function as mediation between religion and the state, but rather as the internalization of faith as an instrument of bureaucratic governance.

4.3.2. Individual Spiritual Assistance

While collective prayer constitutes the visible dimension of religion in prison, individual spiritual assistance is its invisible—and most tightly controlled—core. The prison imam and the Murshida are formally tasked with providing Murāfaqa Rūḥiyya and Naṣīḥa Dīniyya (religious counselling), but their margin of autonomy remains extremely limited.

According to the DGAPR’s 2020 Permanent Instructions, no meeting may take place without the presence of a security officer, and its duration must not exceed twenty minutes. All encounters are recorded in a register of religious activities, reviewed monthly by the prison director.

These restrictions stem from a dual regime of suspicion: a security-based one, fearing the “ideological re-socialization” of radicalized inmates, and an institutional one, wary of any interaction that is not codified. As a result, spiritual assistance loses its pastoral dimension and is reconfigured as a form of collective moral mediation. The Murshida, for instance, may not receive a female inmate seeking advice on a family matter (Masʾala Uṣariyya) unless in a group setting or during lessons in Fiqh al-Usra (family jurisprudence). Official terminology refers to religious awareness-raising and moral training—expressions that evoke civic pedagogy more than spiritual accompaniment.

As one imam interviewed in Blida in 2024 remarked, “We are not confessors; we are moral trainers. Our task is Taʾdīb, not Tawba.” This semantic distinction—Taʾdīb versus Tawba—reveals the substitution of a religious logic by an administrative one: the reform of the soul is accepted only insofar as it coincides with the reform of behavior.

Observations indicate that many imams have developed a form of “codified pastoral care”: they mobilize religious language as a moral diagnostic tool (“someone who does not pray is not only a sinner; he is unstable,” explained a religious official in Oran). The Murshida describes her role as a “discreet care of faith,” yet always “under the gaze of the law.”

In neo-institutional terms, her function illustrates contingent adaptiveness (Meyer and Rowan 1977): religious discourse conforms to the organizational requirements of the DGAPR, gaining formal legitimacy while losing experiential authenticity. A comparison with Tunisia underscores the specificity of the Algerian model. In post-2011 Tunisia, spiritual assistance remains primarily collective but may include individual counselling provided by a civil imam or accredited religious associations (Rhazzali 2023). In Algeria, by contrast, no non-state actor is allowed; the imam is simultaneously a moral agent and a spiritual monitor (Murāqib Rūḥī).

Empirically, this results in a ritualization of the spiritual relationship: interviews become ethics lessons, narratives of faith are transformed into procedural reports, and Tawba is reduced to a protocol. The Algerian penitentiary institution does not suppress religion; it regulates it to the point of stripping it of spontaneity.

4.3.3. The Qur’an as an Instrument of Redemption

Among the regulated religious practices in the Algerian penitentiary system, memorization and recitation of the Qur’an (Ḥifẓ wa Tilāwa al-Qurʾān) occupy a central place.

The DGAPR and the MARW present these programs as structured spiritual trainings aimed at the moral and civic re-education of inmates. Each institution has a limited number of places for Ḥifẓ classes, led by a qualified imam and supervised by the regional religious coordinator.

• The Pedagogy of Memorization

Learning follows a progressive method (Manhaj Marḥalī): daily memorization of short verses, weekly evaluation of pronunciation (Taǧwīd), and quarterly consolidation tests.

The best students participate in national Qur’an recitation and memorization contests organized every year during Ramadan. According to DGAPR data, in 2022, more than 10,000 inmates22 took part, about 15% of whom were women. The award ceremonies—often publicized by national media—celebrate the laureates as moral models (Qudwa Akhlāqiyya).

These initiatives combine religious ritual and public visibility: the inmate who recites the Qur’an becomes, in the eyes of the State, the emblem of iṣlāḥ—achieved reform.

Tilāwa is not merely a spiritual practice; it is a moral performance, a demonstration of docility and reconciliation with the law. As Foucault (1975) observed, disciplinary power produces moral subjects through the visibility of their conduct.

• Redemption as Administrative Capital

At the institutional level, Ḥifẓ also carries a reward value. The Joint MARW–DGAPR Circular No. 12/2022 provides for a sentence reduction of up to six months for inmates who have completed full Qur’an memorization or have distinguished themselves in national competitions.

This mechanism transforms spiritual virtue into administrative currency: Tawba is quantified, certified, and exchanged for tangible benefits—a form of symbolic capital converted into juridical advantage. Former inmates describe Ḥifẓ as a “path of light” (Tarīq al-Nūr) and a “school of patience” (Madrasat aṣ-Ṣabr).

Yet, in interviews, some imams acknowledge that “motivation is not always spiritual, often opportunistic”: learning the Qur’an can also mean hoping for a pardon or a transfer to a less restrictive facility. This ambivalence reflects the tension between the sincere quest for redemption and the institutional instrumentalization of faith.

• The Logic of ‘Religious Talent’

Since 2019, the Ministry of Justice has introduced Religious Talent Competitions, where inmates compete in Tilāwa Tartīliyya (melodic recitation), calligraphy, and mystical poetry (Shiʿr dīnī). The stated aim is to “enhance spiritual creativity as a lever for social reintegration.” The event, widely covered by national media, constructs a public narrative of the prison as Maʿhad Iṣlāḥī, an institute of moral and cultural reform.

In this sense, the Musābaqāt al-Qurʾān (Qur’an recitation competitions) operate as a symbolic rite of reintegration: religious performance replaces fault with competence. The reward-based use of religion—what may be understood as “administered redemption”—can be read, from a neo-institutional perspective, as an instance of mimetic isomorphism, that is, the adoption of organizational forms that mirror globally legitimized models rather than reflecting an internally formulated administrative doctrine.

As in certain European programs of rehabilitation through faith, Algeria formally adopts the logic of “inner transformation,” while maintaining its function as a technology of the self-oriented toward control. Ḥifẓ does not liberate; it disciplines. Tilāwa does not emancipate; it harmonizes.

In this dynamic, the Revealed Word becomes a governing dispositif, and the inmate’s voice—mediated, recorded, and rewarded—becomes the acoustic sign of obedience.

4.3.4. Religious Performance as Moral Capital

In Algerian prisons, religion is not merely a matter of belief or ritual practice; it is a regulated performance, an institutional language through which morality is measured by the visibility of faith. As an educator at the Tlemcen penitentiary center put it: “Here, prayer is not a matter of the soul, but of behavior: what counts is consistency, not sincerity.”

This statement encapsulates the logic of what can be called a performative moral capital: faith becomes an internal resource of legitimation, accumulable and convertible within the symbolic market of reintegration.

Imams often describe their mission as ʿAmal Ijtimāʿī bi-l-lubās ad-Dīnī—social work under a religious garment.

An imam interviewed in Oran in 2024 explained:

We are not here to preach Daʿwa, but to restore order in hearts. The State asks us to heal intentions (Niyya), not to debate theology.

Their discourse constantly oscillates between theological inspiration and technical purpose. They speak of iṣlāḥ (moral reform) and tazkiya (purification), but link these to administrative notions such as discipline, behavior, and stability.

A Murshida from Blida confided:

We enter the cells as sisters, but we leave as civil servants. Faith is our language, but the law is our guide.

(Blida, 2023)

This duality—Thawq Dīnī wa Lughat ad-Dawla (religious sensibility and state language)—produces a hybrid field of meaning, where spirituality is progressively administered. In Foucauldian terms, this is a state pastoral power: a mode of governing that manages consciences through procedures and grids of evaluation. In this system, Tawba is treated almost as a measurable category, and even ʿIbāda (ritual devotion) tends to function as a monitored practice.

Lay staff adopt this moral lexicon as well. A psychologist from Blida prison remarked:

When an inmate recites the Qur’an, his face changes. We note it in our reports as a sign of self-improvement. But we never ask whether he truly believes.

(Algiers, 2024)

A DGAPR official added:

The Qur’an is our best therapy: it doesn’t divide—it disciplines. And discipline is the first form of freedom.

(Algiers, 2017)

These testimonies reveal a fusion between spiritual and coercive power, which mutually reinforce one another. The religious act functions as a rite of moral evaluation, transforming obedience into virtue and conformity into faith. As Goffman (1961) noted, in total institutions, gestures of symbolic adherence acquire the value of social salvation: here, Sujūd (prostration) is both prayer and proof of re-education.

The moral capital emerging from these practices is convertible: the pious inmate gains recognition from the imam, trust from educators, and administrative credits from prison directors.

Faith becomes a document of conduct—a spiritual report annexed to the disciplinary file. Within this dynamic, religion becomes both a technology of the self and a technology of government: a form of knowledge that shapes the subject as a resource for normalization.

As summarized by an imam coordinator in Algiers in an interview in 2023:

Prison is a moral mosque (Masjid akhlāqī). The one who leads prayer also leads discipline.

Thus, the boundary between redemption and surveillance fades. Tarbiya Rūḥiyya becomes the human face of punishment: a language that promises salvation yet produces conformity. Faith does not free one from control; it renders control acceptable—even desirable.

4.3.5. Murshidat and the Administered Feminization of the Sacred

The presence of Murshidat (female religious guides) in the Algerian penitentiary system forms part of a broader policy of feminizing the State’s religious field, initiated by the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Waqf (MARW) in the late 2000s. This strategy extends beyond the prison context, encompassing mosques, training centers, theological universities, religious media, and moral education programs (Kaddach 2023).

In the institutional discourse, the stated aim is Taḥdīth al-Khiṭāb ad-Dīnī (“to modernize the religious discourse”) and to “promote women’s balanced moral participation in the State’s religious mission”23. In practice, this policy also serves the purposes of legitimation and security: to construct an “inclusive and pacified Islam,” aligned with global paradigms of radicalization prevention and gender mainstreaming as reflected in United Nations development frameworks on gender justice and violent extremism prevention (UNDP et al. 2018).

Within the prison system, the Murshida embodies the most emblematic form of this administered feminization of the sacred. Trained in one of the National Institutes for Specialized Religious Affairs and Waqf Studies, they follow a curriculum combining classical theological studies (Fiqh [jurisprudence], ʿAqīda [doctrine], Tafsīr [Exegesis]) with courses in social psychology, moral communication, and conflict management.

Since 2010, these programs have been explicitly oriented toward moral prevention and social stability: “to contribute to the cohesion of penitentiary institutions”24.

A Murshida from Blida summarized her mission as follows:

We are not here to discuss Fiqh or doctrine… but to bring peace of mind. Our words must reassure the inmates and calm the administration.

(Blida, 2024)

Behind this conciliatory rhetoric lies a redefinition of female religious authority. The Murshida derives her legitimacy not from theological knowledge or spiritual charisma, but from the state-assigned function of social pacification. This represents a functionalization of the feminine religious role: Riʿāya (care) becomes an instrument of discipline, and gentleness a vehicle for moral surveillance.

A MARW official explained:

The Murshida is a very positive figure […. ] the gentle face of religious engagement in our prisons. She shows that the law can have a maternal face.

(Algiers, 2017)

From a theoretical standpoint, the introduction of Murshidat can be read through the lens of neo-institutionalist theory. It responds to a dual process of coercive and mimetic isomorphism:

• Coercive, under the pressure of international programs linking radicalization prevention with female participation (UNDP et al. 2018);
• Mimetic, by reproducing models of cultural and religious mediation developed in Europe, where Muslim women are valorised as guarantors of dialogue and stability (Burchardt and Becci 2016).

From this perspective, the Murshida is the product of a trans-Mediterranean circulation of moral governance devices: she translates global models of spiritual mediation into administrative language, adapted to the logics of state control.

Her role in prison extends, within a closed space, the adaptive process that characterizes the whole of Algerian institutional Islam.

A Murshida interviewed in 2024 expressed this ambivalence:

We have been working in this field for a long time. The encounter between Islam and institutions has given us visibility… but not freedom. Our voice is accepted only when it speaks of calm, not of justice.

Thus, the feminization of religion appears less as emancipation than as a political refunctionalization of gender: woman becomes a symbol of moderation and moral docility.

In a Bourdieusian reading, she holds delegated symbolic capital—recognized but not autonomous, convertible into legitimacy rather than authority. Her role in the prison environment expresses this most clearly: a pedagogy of gentleness in the service of security.

As another MARW officer stated:

The female religious worker is the modern face of our institutions. Her role is now regulated by law: today, not only men but also women exercise this essential profession.

(Algiers, 2023)

Yet religious intervention in Algerian prisons does not end with state Islam. Around the imam and Murshidat gravitates a constellation of humanitarian, associative, and educational actors who contribute to the construction of a “regulated religious society”—a civil and disciplined religion, where piety becomes service and charity obedience.

It is at this level—of para-religious practices and subsidiary moral institutions—that the full extent of the State’s spiritual dispositif unfolds.

4.4. The Role of Religious Actors in Civil Society

Religious intervention in Algerian prisons is not the exclusive domain of the imam. Around them orbits a constellation of para-religious actors—humanitarian, educational, and youth organizations—who contribute to the construction of a regulated religious society (a religious sphere administered and depoliticized).

These actors embody what may be called civic piety: an institutionalized religiosity that translates faith into social service, according to the codes of public morality.

4.4.1. The Algerian Red Crescent: Disciplined Charity

The Algerian Red Crescent (ARC) plays a leading role. Present in almost all institutions, it coordinates solidarity campaigns during Ramadan, distributes clothing for ʿĪd al-Aḍḥā, and organizes support actions for prisoners’ families. These initiatives are presented by official media as examples of ʿAmal Khayrī Muʾassasī—institutionalized charity. An NGO de jure, the ARC functions de facto as an extension of state power: its statutes provide for direct supervision by the Ministry of National Solidarity and for the presence of DGAPR representatives on its regional councils. The organization thus serves as a moral bridge between the prison system and society, administering Ṣadaqa (almsgiving).

A volunteer from the ARC in Algiers summarized:

We do neither politics nor preaching. We help as a public mission—and in obedience to God.

(Algiers, 2022)

This superposition between religious duty and institutional loyalty illustrates the integration of charity into the paradigm of Taʾdīb Ijtimāʿī (social education). Compassion becomes an instrument of government: a way to mend, morally, the rift between the State and its excluded.

4.4.2. The Algerian Muslim Scouts: A Pedagogy of Discipline

The Algerian Muslim Scouts (AMS), active in prisons since 2018, represent the other symbolic facet of this regulated religious society. They organize citizenship classes, sports activities, and periods of ethical-patriotic reflection. In their manuals, service to inmates is defined as Khidma Waṭaniyya bi Rūḥ Dīniyya—national service with a religious spirit. In practice, the scouts act as moral mediators between young inmates and the administration, offering a model of discipline through faith.

A leader explains:

We do not educate as religious agents and we do not replace the imam. Our role is to collaborate in forming new citizens—respectful, polite, and obedient. Faith is the best school of obedience.

(Algiers, 2022)

This moral pedagogy coincides with the state project of forming al-Muwāṭin aṣ-ṣāliḥ, the virtuous citizen. As Bourdieu (1994) notes, the religious field here acts as the State’s left hand, producing consent through virtue. The scouts, therefore, complement the imam: they embody the youthful and civic face of Tarbiya rūḥiyya.

4.4.3. The Absence of Islamist NGOs: A Strategic Void

Unlike Tunisia or Morocco—where associations close to Islamist parties or royal foundations intervene in prisons—in Algeria, independent Islamist or charitable organizations remain excluded. After the “black decade,” Law 12-06 (2012) on associations placed all religious initiatives under control unless explicitly approved by the Ministry of the Interior. The result is a strategic void: Daʿwa-type charity is replaced by moralized volunteering, more administrative than communitarian.

A former imam who became a MARW official summarized:

We learned that religion without control becomes ideology. Better a regulated piety (Taqwā Muʾassasiyya) than political enthusiasm.

(Algiers, 2024)

From a neo-institutionalist perspective, the Algerian system exhibits coercive isomorphism: the plurality of religious initiatives is centralized around a single source of legitimacy—the State. This centralization guarantees stability, but sterilizes social creativity and the plurality of sacred languages.

4.4.4. Religion as Public Morality

The regulated religious society fuses ʿIbāda and Khidma Ijtimāʿiyya (social service). Religion becomes a language of moral citizenship and an instrument of managed cohesion. The Red Crescent and the Scouts constitute the moral hand of the State, while more critical or independent voices remain marginalized.

As one official put it:

Associations are like water: if we do not channel them, they overflow. We built the channels.

An effective model to prevent religious conflict, certainly, yet one that reduces religion to a depoliticized civic morality. ʿAmal Khayrī (beneficent action) is no longer a spontaneous gesture; it is a performance of state loyalty. In this way, Algeria establishes religion without civil society, but with a strong moral society—a state piety.

4.5. Voices of the Dispositif: Subjectivities and Representations of Religious Agents

The imam and the Murshida in Algerian prisons embody professional figures in transition. They move along a thin line between spiritual vocation and state function, between Khidma Dīniyya (religious service) and Miḥna Ijtimāʿiyya (social profession). This dual belonging produces a field of hybrid identities, in which faith, discipline, and legitimacy are redefined in the language of the administration.

An imam in Algiers summarized his position:

We are like physicians of the soul, but we work in a state re-education institution. The difference is that here, healing is also control.

(Algiers, 2018)

4.5.1. A New Professional Identity

Many imams define their work as a Risāla Insāniyya—a humanitarian mission. In their words, the prison is not perceived as a space of punishment but as a “field of mercy” (Maydān ar-Raḥma). They say they enter cells “to bring God’s word where the State’s silence reigns.” Yet this mission is constantly filtered by the bureaucratic apparatus.

An imam in Oran observed:

It is not easy. We must control what we say and do. We must know precisely our remit, and that is learned over time. We are asked to speak of God without touching politics, to preach patience, not justice. It is a fragile balance.

(Oran, 2023)

Murshidat expresses a similar sense of ambivalence, accentuated by gender. One of them explained:

We enter as spiritual guides and we leave as educators and moral supervisors. But without us, many female inmates would never speak about themselves.

(Blida, 2023)

In their discourse, the registers of ʿIbāda and Riʿāya intertwine. They perceive themselves simultaneously as moral mothers and state officials, agents of Taʾdīb (corrective education) and Tawba.

4.5.2. Discursive Ambivalences and Practical Adaptations

The interviews reveal a constant hybridization of language. The imam alternates Qur’anic citations with technical expressions: behavioral evaluation, psychological stability, and moral accompaniment plan. A Murshida uses the formula “productive spirituality,” borrowed from DGAPR documents. This hybrid lexicon constructs a form of “religious secularity” (ʿAlmādaniyya Dīniyya), where the language of faith is translated into professional performance.

As a regional coordinating imam stated:

The State has asked us to be both guides and civil servants. This is not a contradiction: it is our new, modern mission.

(Algiers, 2023)

Theoretically, this hybrid subjectivity corresponds to a bureaucratic-religious habitus (Bourdieu 1994), in which faith becomes a symbolic resource and capital of legitimation. The theological discourse adapts to organizational requirements, producing what Foucault would have called the ‘administered subject of salvation’.

4.5.3. Appropriating Non-Traditional Spaces

Many imams describe the prison as a “moral mosque” (Masjid Akhlāqī). This recurring metaphor signals a re-semanticisation of the punitive space into a missionary space. In the words of an imam working in an Algerian penitentiary:

Prison walls do not stop Daʿwa. On the contrary, they make it more necessary. Here we learn to be imam without a minbar.

(Constantine, 2022)

This appropriation generates a deterritorialised authority: the imam no longer guides a stable community but a disciplined and temporary population. His function is less that of the ʿālim (scholar) than that of the Murabbī (moral educator). The Murshida, in particular, develops a relational sensibility blending compassion and surveillance.

As one of them emphasized:

In prison, you learn that mercy has a timetable.

(Blida, 2024)

In Algeria, the imam and the Murshida embody the institution itself: Wakīl al-Dawla fī al-ʿIbāda—delegates of the State in worship. This structural difference underscores the Algerian specificity: a state-pastoral regime in which religious subjectivity is forged through administrative loyalty. The voices of the imam and Murshidat show that power is not imposed only from above: it is internalized and reinterpreted as moral vocation.

As Foucault (1988) wrote, “pastoral power has never been more alive than when it became administrative.” In the Algerian prison, spirituality becomes a competence, compassion a method, salvation a procedure. The result is the formation of a bureaucratized religious subject, where the ethos of public service converges with the prophetic mission.

It is within this ambiguity—between ʿIbāda and Idāra (administration)—that the contemporary destiny of institutional religion in the Maghreb is being played out.

4.5.4. Governing Religion and Producing the Subject

The analysis of the religious dispositif in Algerian prisons shows that the government of religion is not limited to the regulation of rites: it produces subjectivities and behaviors. Institutionalized Islam acts as the State’s moral technology, fusing the logic of redemption with that of surveillance. Through imam, Murshidat, and auxiliary organizations such as the Red Crescent or the Muslim Scouts, faith becomes an administrative language: ʿIbāda is translated into Idāra, spirituality into competence.

This kind of administered religion (Dīn Muʾassasī) produces practices in which spiritual authority is expressed above all through obedience. The penitentiary imam and Murshida—emblematic figures of the dispositif—embody the encounter between coercion and mercy, power and care. Their words discipline, console, and measure: they are at once pastoral gestures and acts of the State.

But to grasp the full scope of this transformation, the gaze must shift from regulations to the sensory forms of the sacred. The prison—more than an institution—is a moral space in which bodies, gestures, and temporalities of worship are rewritten.

Prayer rooms, Sujūd, Tilāwa, the collective rituals of Ramadan or ʿĪd are not only religious expressions; they are devices of sensory discipline that produce moral order through the arrangement of spaces and bodies.

The following section will therefore analyze space and the body of the sacred as material elements of this moral governmentality; we ask ourselves how prison Islamises discipline and how discipline rewrites the sacred.

5. Space and Body: The Materiality of the Penitentiary Sacred

5.1. Spatializing the Sacred: Architecture, Surveillance, and Ritual

In the Algerian prison, the sacred is not only believed; it is constructed, delineated, and surveilled. Administered Islam takes shape within a moral architecture in which every devotional gesture simultaneously becomes an act of discipline. Prayer rooms are not spaces of transcendence but genuine governing dispositif: sober, transparent environments where piety is rendered visible and intimacy carefully contained.

A DGAPR official interviewed in 2024 explains:

Prison mosques must not be places of withdrawal, but places of example. Here, prayer also educates those who watch.

This logic of regulated visibility recalls Foucault’s genealogy of the panopticon, while reversing its function: faith is not repressed; it is channeled and administratively verified. Sujūd becomes an act of moral conformity; the ordered row of worshippers a choreography of consent. Each praying body thus takes part in a theater of redemption, where Tawba is inscribed in posture itself. As in other Maghrebi institutions, the sacred space here merges with the pedagogical space.

The walls of prayer rooms display verses and moral slogans chosen by the DGAPR:

Inna Allāha yuḥibbu al-tawwābīn (God loves those who repent),” next to “Citizenship and discipline: two paths to freedom.

The message is clear: piety does not redeem; it normalizes. Architecturally, the Masājid follows a standardized model, introduced in 2018 by the Ministry of Justice and MARW: modular spaces, without minbar or dome, easily reconvertible for educational or training uses. Each site is equipped with attendance registers: devotion is documented; ritual is procedural.

An imam from Oran comments wryly:

Here, my dear friend, everything is subject to checks […] everything is tracked for reasons we know; for security reasons. Here, even God must sign the register.

This rationalization of worship goes hand in hand with permanent surveillance. In many institutions, prayer rooms also have internal cameras—formally for security, but in practice sometimes used to assess inmates’ participation. The religious act thus enters the realm of audit: faith is quantified; piety archived. In this way, the penitentiary sacred becomes an administrative mosque, where the space of worship coincides with disciplinary order.

5.2. Sober Spaces, Absent Signs

Unlike Christian chapels or European multi-faith rooms, Algerian prison prayer spaces display no permanent sacred signs: no carved Miḥrāb, no calligraphic inscriptions, no dedicated furnishings—only modular carpets, a few shelves for the Qur’an, and pedagogical posters.

Across interviews, descriptions converge on a pared-down religious architecture, as if transcendence had to remain reversible. The DGAPR designates these places as “moral training rooms” (Qāʿāt at-Tawjīh al-Akhlāqī), not as places of worship. This choice extends a historical continuity: the colonial genealogy of the penitentiary and what Maghrebi scholarship has described as the statization of the sacred have produced a model of administered laicity, where worship becomes a moral function rather than a symbolic one (Kerrou 2014; Bras 2014).

The result is paradoxical: a “mosque without a mosque,” where Islam is recognized yet de-symbolized. No images of genuine internal mosques appear on institutional portals or in the press—unlike Egypt’s Wadi el-Natrun prison complex, which features a monumental mosque and church. Algeria follows another path: to integrate the religious into the grammar of control without monumentalizing it.

By comparison, the difference is clear: in France, chaplaincies have identified and signposted spaces; in the United Kingdom, Prison Service Instructions provide for dedicated and equipped rooms. In Algeria, by contrast, architectural neutrality preserves the principle of functional islamization: space remains administrative; sacrality, procedural.

As a DGAPR official stated:

We do not need a mosque to remember God. Discipline is already an act of faith

(Algiers, 2024)

De-iconization, therefore, does not imply the absence of religion, but a politics of the sign. Avoiding a sanctuary effect prevents the sacred place from becoming autonomous. Sacrality is redirected into organizational form: the gesture is controlled, prayer surveilled, and architecture neutralized. Algerian penitentiary Islam islamizes the norm without sacralizing space; an equilibrium that reveals the dispositif’s deep logic: to render the sacred visible, but not powerful.

5.3. Temporality and the Ritual Body: Prayer, Gender, and Moral Control

In the Algerian prison, religious temporality forms an integral part of the disciplinary dispositif. The time of worship—structured by the Ṣalāt, Jumuʿa, and Ramadan—does not suspend surveillance; it reconfigures it.

As a MARW official remarked in 2024:

In prison, God’s time is not separate from the State’s time: to pray is also to respect the schedule.

The five daily prayers (Salawāt Khams) are authorized only when compatible with internal logistics; Adhān (calls to prayer) are replaced by discreet announcements or clocks synchronized with DGAPR timetables.

Participation in collective prayer becomes an indicator of moral stability, as specified in the penitentiary authority’s annual reports. Although Ṣalāt al-Jumuʿa is formally scheduled, it rarely takes place in full form: for security reasons, inmates pray in small groups.

In some institutions, the Khuṭba is broadcast by loudspeaker from central mosques approved by the MARW.

An imam from Algiers notes in 2018:

Here, Jumuʿa is a school, not an assembly. The imam’s voice must unify, not gather.

Religion thus becomes a pedagogy of posture: the body that bends before God also learns to bow before the institution.

In the women’s sections, ritual acquires a pedagogical and therapeutic dimension. Murshidat organizes sessions of Qur’anic reading and meditation in small groups.

One of them explains:

We work with wounded bodies. Prayer should not be imposed; it should restore confidence in modesty.

(Blida, 2024)

The female body is treated as a moral and vulnerable space—to be educated rather than simply surveilled. The Murshida thus becomes an affective and pedagogical mediator: she interprets piety as therapy and discretion as discipline.

During Ramadan, the convergence between sacred and carceral time reaches its peak. Iftār is organized collectively and accompanied by media campaigns extolling “faith as moral reintegration.”

In this framework, religious time itself becomes a way of teaching self-control, closely tied to the goals of moral and civic rehabilitation.

As a DGAPR official concluded:

The time of prayer does not free from the time of prison. We make them coincide, so that both may heal together.

The believing body, shaped by surveillance and disciplinary rhythms, becomes the primary site where the effectiveness of the project of administered redemption is assessed.

6. Conclusions

The analysis of the Algerian penitentiary field shows that religion, far from being a residual form of the sacred, now operates as a device of moral governance. Administered Islam does not oppose the security logic: it integrates it. Faith is translated into a norm, piety into a measurable behavior. In this sense, the prison turns into a sort of laboratory of bureaucratized Islam, where power tends to justify itself not through redemption but through the production of ‘re-educated’ subjects. The figures of the prison imam and the Murshida embody this hybrid rationality: spiritual agents and moral civil servants, mediators between transcendence and administration. Religion is desacralized and made operative, becoming a grammar of conduct that combines spirituality and surveillance. As illustrated by practices of Ḥifẓ al-Qurʾān, prayer and Tarbiya Rūḥiyya, redemption is administered, faith quantified, and morality evaluated.

The Algerian prison does not extinguish religion: it institutionalizes it as a technique of discipline, a civic Islam that translates repentance into moral citizenship.

This moral government also operates through the emotional intensity generated by ritual practices. Moments of collective prayer, Qurʾanic recitation, or dhikr produce what Durkheim described as “collective effervescence,” a temporary elevation that binds individuals to a shared moral horizon. Within the prison, this energy is subtly redirected toward the State, which appears as the guarantor of ethical rehabilitation and social reintegration.

A comparison with Tunisia and Morocco reveals a structural divergence in the management of the religious sphere. In Tunisia, the penitentiary system maintains a logic of negotiation between state power and religious authorities, where imams, Wāʿiẓin (preachers and Wāʿiẓāt (female preachers), act as community mediators with a certain degree of narrative autonomy.

In Morocco, the Mohammed VI Foundation for the training of imams, Murshidin and Murshidat, has established a centralized model, theologically legitimized by a monarchy that holds spiritual authority.

Algeria occupies an intermediate position, where security and morality coincide: Islam is a state language rather than a field of mediation. Unlike Tunisia’s pragmatic pluralism or Morocco’s institutional sacralization, the Algerian case highlights a symbolic neutralization of the sacred, where faith is reduced to a pedagogical function and piety to a civic competence.

The logic of coercive isomorphism—common to many postcolonial systems—translates here into a totalizing moral dispositif that absorbs diversity under the rhetoric of uniformity. The result is a religion without community, but a morally administered society, where conversion rhymes with conformity and discipline with salvation.

The Algerian case thus invites a comparative reflection on the trajectories of institutionalizing the sacred and on the modes of participation of religious authorities—imam, preachers, Murshidat, and emerging mediating figures—in the management of deviance, vulnerability, and public morality.

From this reflection, several promising research avenues emerge. The first concerns the evolution of women’s roles in religious and social mediation, signalling a broader process of feminizing moral functions within contemporary Islamic regimes. A second focuses on the increasing hybridization of religious languages and administrative rationalities in fields such as education, health, and justice, where faith tends to be transformed into a technical language of collective discipline. A third invites analysis of the transnational circulation of models of “civic Islam”, showing how religion, as a shared symbolic infrastructure, can be mobilized as a technology of security, cohesion, and control.

Understanding these dynamics means analyzing not only how states govern the sacred, but also how the sacred—in its institutionalized and depoliticized forms—contributes today to governing the states themselves.