A visit to the mosque wasn’t the only thing on Shakoor’s mind after he regained his freedom.
Like many formerly incarcerated people reentering society, he had to address a long list of needs made more complicated by his status as a person with a felony: securing housing, connecting with loved ones, work find.
He fared better than most because a few weeks after his layoff, he got a job at a Middle Eastern restaurant in the Bay Area called Falafel Corner. He now used the skills he had honed using makeshift hotplates in his cell and prison kitchen to build a new career, and he quickly took over the management of the restaurant.
In 2016, the restaurant opened a second location in Sacramento and in 2018, Shakoor bought out the previous owner. He says the company now has more than 30 franchise locations in Northern California.
While cooking was a skill Shakoor continued to develop after his release from prison, his interest in criminal justice reform work was another.
In 2014, Shakoor, who earned a degree from Ohio University remotely while incarcerated, testified before the state Senate in support of SB 1391, which expanded access to higher education for people incarcerated in California prisons. The bill was passed and brought into force in September 2014.
In 2023, he also became a vocal supporter of SB 309, which created universal religious grooming and head covering standards in California’s prisons.
He drew on his own experiences of harassment to express his religious devotion behind bars, recalling an incident in 2002 when he was sent to solitary confinement for seven days for refusing to wear his Chitrali cap to lose weight, which is important for his identity as a Muslim of Pakistani descent.
But perhaps his favorite form of activism is sharing food and worship with fellow believers in prisons across the state, a practice he began in 2017.
He says he typically conducts about five such visits a year, sometimes as many as ten. This is no easy task, requiring hours of cooking and the even more strenuous ordeal of navigating the exhausting bureaucracy of the prison system.
But Shakoor sees the events as a source of community and optimism for the prisoners in a situation that can otherwise seem depressingly hopeless.
During his time at San Quentin, when he still thought he would spend the rest of his life behind bars, he fell in love with a pair of flowers that sprouted from an inhospitable crag.
“We can’t always change our environment, just like this flower couldn’t,” he says. “But we can learn to rise above the things that hold us down and use our surroundings to cultivate ourselves.”
Back in the colorful mural-adorned room in Solano, Kali, the 69-year-old man enjoying his burrito and who has known Shakoor since her incarceration at Pleasant Valley State Prison, talks about the goals and sense of peace he has through Islam found.
He first converted in 1992 during a stay in solitary confinement, where he took what he called a “moral inventory” of himself by immersing himself in the Bible and the Koran.
For many sentenced to life in prison, religion offers a way to resist, if never fully escape, the pressures of despair that come with a life forever locked up.
The physical proximity of the free world, often visible just beyond a window or concertina fence, only reinforces the tantalizing feeling of foreclosed possibilities. Under such circumstances it seems a miracle that sources of warmth, creativity and community emerge at all.
It’s a feeling that Shakoor understands deeply and that Kali says he now helps others live with by leading anger management classes in Solano.
He quotes his favorite verse from the Koran: “Truly, with hardship comes relief.”
