A prison cell. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Islam’s Rule of Numbers holds that, wherever and whenever Muslims grow in numbers, the same acts of “anti-infidel” violence that are endemic to the Islamic world grow with them.

This has become especially evident in one Western institution that has a disproportionately large number of Muslims: prisons. Several anecdotes just surfaced last month alone.

Consider Whitemoor prison in Cambridgeshire: it recently became the first Muslim-majority prison in Britain. Between the ages of 22 and 39, Muslims now represent 56 per cent of the population there. “Prisoners and staff found the Muslim presence overwhelming” says a recent report. Non-Muslims “were often bullied into converting to Islam, and those who resisted were too scared to cook pork in communal kitchens in case it caused offence.”

As for those non-Muslim inmates who refuse to convert, they are being pressured to pay a “protection tax” — or in Islamic parlance, jizya — to Muslim gangs. Along with Whitemoor prison, the collection of jizya is taking place in at least three other of Britain’s largest prisons.

According to a new investigation,

Religious extremists in prison are using bullying tactics and violent threats to force prisoners to convert or pay money. Tobacco and other luxury commodities smuggled inside prisons are often used by non-Muslims to pay the tax, while some victims said they had to ask friends and family for money…. Faced with the option of paying up or suffering at the hands of the radicals, some prisoners have been pressured into converting to Islam to ease their time in prison.

A Whitehall source said that “the tax may have been inspired by the actions of ISIS, who are well known to demand jizya from non-Muslims living in Syria and Iraq.”

In fact, it is the Koran, Islam’s holy book, that calls for the collection of jizya from subdued Christians and Jews:

Fight those among the People of the Book [Christians and Jews] who do not believe in Allah nor the Last Day, who do not forbid what Allah and His Messenger have forbidden, and who do not embrace the religion of truth [Islam], until they pay the jizya with willing submissiveness and feel themselves utterly subdued” (Koran 9:29).

In other words, Muslim prisoners are not copying ISIS; rather, both they and ISIS are obeying the Koran.

Meanwhile, down under, in Australia’s highest security prison, “an extremist ISIS gang … has threatened to behead correctional officers and inmates unless they convert to radical Islam.” At least 30 Muslim gang members residing in Goulburn jail “have engaged in warfare against ‘infidel’ that oppose their religious ideologies.”

“They were going to take a hostage — one of the six Christians in the yard — and behead them,” reported a prison guard.

Ironically, one may have supposed that, if anywhere, it would be in prisons that the Muslim sense of supremacism would be broken. Far from it; Western prison policies — whether banning pork for all inmates to appease Muslims (in an Ohio prison), allowing prayer mats where knives are concealed and used, spending thousands of tax payer dollars to rebuild toilets to face away from Mecca, apologizing for serving non-halal food to Muslim criminals, or possibly accommodating the Salafi beard against prison policies — all serve to confirm Muslims in their sense of supremacy.Bullying and threatening non-Muslims into converting to Islam or else demanding money (jizya) from them if they refuse is a regular occurrence around the Muslim world, wherever “infidel” minorities live side by side with Muslim majorities. As Muslims make for disproportionately large numbers in Western prisons — another fact that speaks for itself — it should come as no surprise that coercion, threats, and extortion in the name of Islam are also becoming a regular occurrence.

This is to say nothing about the fact that lax and politically correct policies have made prisons prime recruiting grounds for the jihad. One U.S. prison was referred to as a “terrorist university” for the Islamic State and one U.K prison allowed the distribution of a jihadi book calling on the slaughter of non-Muslim “infidels.”

Thus prisons have become microcosms of Islamic behavior vis-à-vis “infidels” — replete with a sense of violent Islamic supremacism on the one hand and craven political correctness on the other.

Raymond Ibrahim is a Judith Friedman Rosen fellow at the Middle East Forum and a Shillman fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

This article was originally published by Frontpage Magazine.