“I believe in Islam,” he told me one night. “That’s true. It’s given me a great deal of understanding. And the Koran gives me insight into the world, and the belief of a man who believes that God has given him the right to speak his word, the prophet Muhammad, peace be unto him. I look at Islam from different perspectives, just as I look at everything else. I find it so beautiful because in Islam you have to tolerate every religion, you know what I mean? ‘Cause everyone has different beliefs. Most so-called religious leaders are bullshit. Voltaire knew that, knew organized religion was a scam. Their object is power. They want power.”
Tyson’s skepticism about organized religion includes some of the sects and factions within Islam. He pledges his allegiance to none of them.
“One guy says, ’I believe in Islam, I live out of the Koran.’ Well, I believe in that but other than that, please.…They got a sect here and a sect there. Unbelievable. I just don’t understand that. How can / be a Muslim and you be a Muslim, but we have two different beliefs?”
Tyson thinks of Islam as not simply a religion but a kind of discipline. He says he prays five times a day. The Koran is a daily part of his reading (but obviously not the only reading he does). “And you know, I got a sailor’s mouth,” he laughed. “But I’ve cut down my cursing at least 50 percent.” He clearly needs to believe in something larger than himself, but his choice of Islam is entwined with a revulsion against certain aspects of Christianity.
“If you’re a Christian,” he says, “and somebody’s a Christian longer than you, they can dictate to you about your life. You know, this is what you should do, and if you don’t do this, you’re excommunicated. I just found that bizarre … in conflict with human qualities, you know what I mean? I couldn’t understand why a person couldn’t be a human and have problems and just be dealt with and helped. In Islam there’s nobody who can put you in your place. They can let you know this is wrong, you need help on this. But the only one that can judge you is Allah.”
I asked Tyson how he could reconcile his embrace of Islam with the fact that many of the slave traders were Muslims. The horrors of the Middle Passage often began with men who said they accepted Allah. Tyson answered in a cool way.
“Look, everyone in Arabia was a slave, know what I mean? They had white slaves, black slaves, Arab slaves, Muslim slaves. Everybody there was a slave. But the slave traders were contradicting Islam and the beliefs of Islam. The prophet Muhammad, he wasn’t a slave trader or a slave. As a matter of fact, the Arabs were trying to kill him, to enslave him. People were people. But Europeans took slavery to a totally different level. Brutalized, submissive, abhorrent. But you can’t condemn all the Jews or all the Romans because they crucified Christ, can you?”
Tyson emphasizes one thing: He’s a neophyte in his understanding of Islam and has much to learn.
“Being a Muslim,” Tyson says, “is probably not going to make me an angel in heaven, but it’s going to make me a better person. In Islam we’re not supposed to compete. Muslims only compete for righteousness. I know I’m probably at the back of the line. But I know I’ll be a better person when I get out than I was when I came in.”
For the moment, jail is the great reality of Tyson’s life. Unless a court orders a new trial or overturns his conviction, he will remain in prison until the spring of 1995. The Indiana Youth Center is a medium- to high-security facility and looks relatively tame compared with some of the others I’ve seen in New York and California. Boredom is the great enemy. “I get up and eat and go to class,” he says, explaining that he doesn’t eat in the prison dining room, because “the food is aaaccch” but goes to a commissary where he can buy packaged milk, cereals, and other food, paying from a drawing account called the Book. He works out in the gym every day, shadowboxing, doing push-ups, running laps to keep his legs strong and lithe. “There’s nothing else to do,” he says. “You gotta keep busy so you don’t go crazy.”
But it’s still prison. For now it’s the place where Mike Tyson is doing time, using all of his self-discipline to get through it alive.
“I’m never on nobody’s bad side,” he says. “Even though there’s guys in here just don’t like the way you walk, the way you look, or whatever, I just — I’m never on nobody’s bad side. I don’t like to be judgmental, because we’re all in the same boat. I have to remember to be humble. But sometimes I get caught up with who I was at one time, and I must remind myself my circumstances have changed.”
There are still a lot of hard cases on the premises, including Klansmen and members of the Aryan Brotherhood. Tyson laughs about their swastikas, shaved heads, white-power tattoos. “They talk back and forth,” he said. “But they realize once they’re in prison, no one gives a fuck about them.”
More dangerous are people who seem to crack under the stress of doing time. “A couple of days ago, this guy who never bothered nobody just cracked a guy on the head with a lock in his sock,” he said in an amazed tone. “And there are other guys — they’ll do something disrespectful to some guy, and they’ll walk around with their headphones on, acting like they didn’t do anything, jamming, dancing, then, next thing you know — ka-pow! — they get clocked.”
In the bad old days, Tyson might have empathized with such people; he is, after all, the man who as champion once socked an off-duty heavyweight named Mitch Green in Harlem at 4:00 in the morning. But in prison, he is at once part of the general population and detached from it because of his celebrity. “When I get out, I have a future,” he says. “A lot of these guys don’t.” Sometimes he even volunteers for a form of solitary confinement (“to be alone, to focus, to meditate, to read, to get some fucking sleep”). But he also looks with compassion on his fellow prisoners.
“They send some guys to prison that don’t necessarily have bad records,” he says. “Instead of rehabilitating him, they Rehabilitate him by sending him to prison. Without him even being attacked or molested, just from what he witnesses, some things that are so taboo to his humanity. It could totally drive him insane.”
Among the scarier aspects of prison these days is AIDS. “They are falling like flies in here,” Tyson said. “And some of these guys keep boning each other over in the dorms.” There are other people for whom prison is life itself. “There’s one guy here who’s been inside for thirty-one years. Not in here but in other prisons. There are other guys with so much time… I watch them adapt. This is their home. You don’t go in their door without knocking.”
Tyson said that much of what he has seen is sad and comic at the same time.
“You see a guy, he’s doing all the time in a lifetime, he’s talking to a girl on a phone. I mean, he’s doing ninety years. And what’s he saying? ‘Don’t go out tonight, baby. Don’t go out tonight, baby. Don’t go out tonight, baby.’”
Tyson laughed in a sad, rueful way.
“Most guys that are in here, they got a lot of time, so they lose hope. They get caught up in the sideshows, like homosexuality, drugs, you know what I mean? It’s very difficult for me to think about participating in the things these guys do. You talk to the guys, and to me they seem rather sane. But to see their conduct, some of them, they’re in a totally insane frame of mind. The fact is, prison is like a slave plantation. We have no rights which the authorities respect. I wasn’t a criminal when I got put in here. I didn’t commit no crime. But we become the problem out there, because we’re not aware. We become the problem because out there we’re robbing, we’re stealing, we’re selling drugs, we’re killing. I hear people talk about revolution. They mention Castro, Mao, Lenin, the Black Panthers. But how can you have a revolution when you have crime, when you have people selling drugs, you have people murdering? There’s no collective ideas there.”