Advancing the stories and ideas of the kingdom of God.
Jayson Casper
One Catholic and one Muslim, they disagree on the role of religion in their work in Lebanon, but are united in their aim.
The shadow of a cross on the wall of Lebanon's Roumieh prison as prisoners stand behind bars during the Holy Thursday mass.
Maya Yamout stared at the hardened jihadist sitting across from her over a plastic desk in the unkempt library prison. Books littered the floor. The man, a veteran al-Qaeda militant in the notorious Block B of Lebanon’s Roumieh jail pushed forward a glass of tea.
“Where’s the sugar?” Yamout asked.
The curt question fit their relationship. In their previous brief encounters, the prisoner called Yamout a spy, a pig, and all manner of insults that belittled her as a Muslim woman who did not wear a veil.
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Yet this time, her mischievous smirk made the terrorist smile. Two weeks earlier, when he was sick, Yamout inquired about his health from prison guards and brought medicine and shampoo on her next visit. Once he recovered, he invited the visit, prompting the nervy but playful exchange. Sensing a breakthrough, Yamout proposed therapy. He accepted.
Eventually, filled with shame, he apologized for how poorly he treated her.
“To reach a prisoner, you have to bond over something,” said Yamout, the cofounder of Rescue Me, a Lebanese crime prevention and deradicalization organization.
But Yamout is clear: This something should not be religion. She’s found that speaking about faith often gets entwined in politics and leads to endless debate. It also rarely addresses what radicalized a militant in the first place.
Yet Marwan Ghanem, a priest in the Maronite Catholic church and president of the Lebanese chapter of Prison Fellowship International (PFI), takes the opposite approach. He centers his ministry on the story of Jesus and Zaccheus, believing the tax collector’s model of repentance can help any prisoner restore a debt to society.
Yamout and Ghanem worked independently in separate sections of Roumieh but met often for mutual encouragement. Despite their differences, when Yamout left in 2024 to pursue a PhD at the University of Swansea in the UK and budget restrictions at Rescue Me pinched its ability to go into prisons, she asked Ghanem to continue her work with extremists. She simply counseled him to go slow with religion, avoid provocation, be patient if insulted, and remember the prisoners’ humanity.
“Kill them with kindness,” Yamout said, “and kindness will prevail.”
Rescue Me, which Yamout and her sister Nancy founded in 2011, primarily worked among at-risk youth in the Hayy al-Gharbia neighborhood of Beirut until funding cuts in 2017 curtailed its service among the Lebanese poor as well as Syrian and Palestinian refugees.
Many in hopeless situations became easy targets for Islamic extremist groups, she discovered. And when prison overcrowding assigns ordinary criminals to Block B—designated for terrorist offenses—even the nonreligious can be radicalized through their need to belong, Yamout said.
She said Block B extremists fall into four categories. A quarter of her cases sought retribution for wrongs they suffered or the poverty they endured. Another quarter put a religious overlay on their frustration, while 35 percent did the same with politics. The remaining 15 percent are simple psychopaths—“I joined ISIS to smell the blood,” one told her.
Another prisoner she met fell into the second category. Born into Lebanon’s impoverished northern city of Tripoli, he went to Syria at the age of 19 to train with a jihadist group. A Lebanese court issued him the death penalty following his capture during clashes with the Lebanese army. Once in prison, he readily accepted working with Yamout and her sister.
No matter a prisoner’s classification in her system, Yamout engages each one individually through a variety of care including art therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, aggression replacement training, and newer techniques such as EMDR to address trauma. Over a decade in the prison, she has seen about 750 cases. At minimum she conducts six sessions with a prisoner. Some, like the man from Tripoli, require many more.
Only 10 people, she said, have gone back to terrorism after being released.
In the Tripoli prisoner’s case, Yamout recalled a conversation he had with Nancy.
“I deserve to die,” he said, quoting the quranic verse that a killer should be killed.
“I believe in rehabilitation and forgiveness,” she replied.
“But you are a Muslim,” he countered. “You have to follow this.”
“I go beyond religion,” she said. “I believe in second chances.”
Many years later, the prisoner sought Nancy’s opinion.
“Do you believe it can be right to kill a Lebanese soldier?” he asked.
“What do you think?” she asked.
“No,” he said quietly, his voice troubled by guilt.
The man remains in prison today, fasting and praying according to Islamic guidelines but distant from extremism. He followed Nancy’s advice to demonstrate his remorse by sharing his story with others. On Wednesdays, that became his routine in Roumieh, introducing new inmates to Block B.
“This is humanity,” Yamout said. “Why do I need religion?”
Ghanem, the Catholic priest, dedicated his life to answering this question. His early choir ministry morphed into charitable service in 2005, and through his Nusroto Association—Syriac for “chants of joy”—he runs a juvenile home, a shelter for battered women, and a drug rehabilitation center in addition to his work in the prisons.
Like Yamout, Ghanem won trust among the inmates by helping them secure essential medicine and hygiene products from outside the prison. But his breakthrough with the Islamists came when he gave an interview on television and spoke with compassion about their needs inside the prison. Many extremists in Lebanese prisons are Syrian, and many in the country resent the refugee population and the impact of Syria’s civil war on Lebanon.
“You are our abuna,” Ghanem said they told him, using the Arabic equivalent of father to address Catholic clergy. “They were proud to have a priest by their side.”
Using PFI programs The Prisoner’s Journey and Sycamore Tree, Ghanem told the prisoners about how the Messiah—avoiding Christian-Muslim controversy over the name Jesus or Isa—led Zaccheus to repent over defrauding his own people. True justice, Ghanem taught them, is not simply punishment in prison. It also restores relationships. The prisoner must confess his mistakes legally, in court. But then he must make it right with society.
Militant extremists seek justice for the ills of society through violence, Ghanem said. He helps them see the victims in their radicalized quest. And while he focuses on the social aspects of their crimes and life in prison, he does not ignore religion.
“Islam also demands repentance,” he said. “But my approach is Christian.”
Ghanem formerly served as the head prison chaplain for the Council of Catholic Patriarchs and Bishops of Lebanon, part of the interfaith High Council for Prisons that oversees all spiritual work. But it is primarily Christians, he said, who serve inmates outside their sect.
One day, a fight nearly broke out between Sunni and Shiite prisoners at Roumieh. Ghanem intervened to remind them they shared the same deprivations. Hungry, they both needed food. Hot, they both needed fans. He would do what he could to assist, he assured them, and the situation calmed.
Over time, Ghanem’s personal intervention in the lives of prisoners led one militant to send a letter of apology to the family of his victim, seeking reconciliation. Another, who detonated bombs on two passenger buses, told Ghanem he now knows that Christianity is a religion of love, forgiveness, and peace.
“As a priest, I speak to everyone as a human,” Ghanem said. “But I also help them see God in their life and show them the way to become a Christian.”
Rik Peels, a professor of religion at the Free University of Amsterdam and project leader of its Extreme Beliefs program, said academia is divided over the role of religion in deradicalization. Some view it as irrelevant, though he believes it is sometimes pivotal.
In his book Monotheism and Fundamentalism, Peels argued that all three Abrahamic religions must deal with problematic texts, mentioning the passages in Deuteronomy that can appear genocidal in advocating the killing of all Canaanites. But in teaching the image of God in all humanity, the unity in our fallen natures, and the nonviolence of the kingdom of God that loves even one’s enemies, Christianity provides essential principles to moderate a militant’s faith.
Studying violent extremism in America, the RAND Corporation found that structured interventions with sympathetic individuals outside the militant’s ideological circles can assist the process of deradicalization. Peels said that while the nature of extremism creates us-versus-them boundaries, such personal encounters are able to break through negative stereotypes.
Yamout recognizes the possible value of religious re-education, citing positive outcomes in Nigeria and Saudi Arabia while insisting on focusing on social and psychological factors. But in moving beyond spiritual particulars, she is living out hard-won lessons from her youth.
Raised in Tripoli before moving to Beirut at age 13, Yamout attended Catholic and Seventh-day Adventist schools where, like many Lebanese, she had friends from all sects. But after two friends went to Syria to join jihadist groups, the religious diversity of her environment drove her to seek God. Christians are sometimes better than Muslims in their love and acceptance of others, she felt, while Muslims often demonstrate a better commitment to justice.
In working together, they complement each other, Yamout said. But at age 24, trying to decide between political and religious approaches to her graduate work in deradicalization, she nearly died from a virus in her lung.
When she finally recovered, she realized that the presiding doctor caring for her was a Shiite, the primary nurse a Christian, and all were doing everything they could to save their Sunni patient.
“Humanity prevailed within me,” Yamout said, “and God gave me a mission.”
INTERVIEWS BY MELLIE CYNTHIA
Jayson Casper in Beirut, Lebanon
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