Rap Emerges as an Added Form of Muslim Expression and Mobilization - By Peter Mandaville

Listening to South Asian Muslim teenagers in the post-industrial British city of Bradford, one can understand how Islamic faith and American hip-hop music have come to coexist. Searching for music that reflects their own experiences with alienation, racism and silenced political consciousness, many teens, even some quasi-religious groups, have turned to the urban music of black America.

Despite the recent popularity of a pop-oriented variant of nasheed devotional music, the musical acts that have garnered the largest followings are not Muslim nor do they focus on overtly Islamic themes. Rather, the teens offer a litany of popular culture icons – American hip-hop and rap artists including Jay-Z, the late Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur. Young South Asian Muslims throughout the United Kingdom have widely adopted and thoroughly adapted symbols and styles of African-American urban culture. Slang combining northern English colloquialisms as well as Bengali and American gangsta culture now infuses daily conversations in these South Asian Muslim communities.

Social ills – whether drugs, gangs, or unemployment – are common in British cities, where racial tensions can run high. A collective sense of identity emerges from this common urban experience, across different national settings – hence the trans-Atlantic currency of the hip-hop movement, and the presence of Islamic references in hip-hop culture, through quasi-Muslim religious groups such as the Five Percenters.

A number of artists have been seeking to validate the impulse that lies behind the popularity of this music, while also trying to direct its outward expression in more positive directions. In order to do so, the artists have recently experimented with Muslim versions of hip-hop. As Abdul-Rehman Malik, an observer of the United Kingdom’s Muslim music scene has put it, “[T]hey’re searching for a cultural and political expression that they can marry to their religious beliefs.” The fusion is sometimes proving a tough sell, however, not least because of persistent debates within Islam and Muslim communities over the permissibility of music.

Beginning with the group Mecca2Medina, which was established in London in 1997, the Muslim hip-hop movement has grown with impressive speed even as it struggles to achieve mainstream recognition within both the British Muslim community and the wider hip-hop scene. Many Muslim artists cite passing references to Islam in mainstream hip-hop, and in their minds, the natural extension is to bring a religious identity to the front and center in their music. For some, hip-hop is also a vehicle for engaging world politics. A figure such as Fun-Da-Mental front man Aki Nawaz has attracted controversy for the 2006 album “All Is War,” which some viewed as glorifying terrorism. The music of another edgy act, Blakstone, features aggressive and confrontational lyrics.

While well-known rap and hip-hop artists in the United States, such as Mos Def and Lupe Fiasco, express a Muslim identity, they do not make religion or politics an explicit focus of their music, in order to avoid discomfort or a rejection of their music by the music industry. Many Muslim hip-hop artists, such as the female spoken word duo Poetic Pilgrimage, complain of persistent racism, even within Muslim communities in the West, while they have affirmed that their work transcends ethnic and racial barriers.

This legacy of racial tension, although rarely a focal point of contemporary national-security policy in the West, has reared its head in the form of multiple efforts in recent years to reinvigorate the figure of the late Nation of Islam activist Malcolm X. For example, shortly after the election in 2008 of Barack Obama as president of the United States, Al-Qaeda’s deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahiri released a video statement castigating the winning candidate as a “house slave,” in contrast with the hard-line confrontational politics of Malcolm X.

Pointing to another side of the American civil rights leader, a British government-funded counter-radicalization project – one combining traditional Islamic scholarship and social consciousness with hip-hop sensibilities – has sought to mobilize urban British Muslim youth around what they see as more cosmopolitanism impulses of Malcolm X after his break with the Nation of Islam and his subsequent global travels. Abdul-Rehman Malik, a driving force behind the Radical Middle Way, expects popularity of Islamic hip-hop to grow: “Hip-hop is our way of seeing Islam in situ, in our place – a way of reflecting the anger of the Muslim street by creating discursive spaces for the expression of that anger. But it has to be real, and it has to resonate: your rap is only as good as the depth of its message.”

Thinking about radicalism this way permits a better understanding of other forms of oppositional politics framed in terms of Islam, as well as recognition of the appeal of Muslim politics when it is connected to broader histories of global exclusion.

These developments become more significant when one considers the demographics of Islam. The reality is that some 70 percent of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims are under the age of 30. Embracing hip-hop could be a fad or a sign of the growing affinity among young Muslims for leftist values. Islam, however, has never fit in very comfortably on a political spectrum defined by the conventional terms of right and left. The Islamic worldview tends to be socially conservative in most of its mainstream manifestations, but the centrality of social justice in Islam has also always meant that Islamic parties share some common ground with the left – even when the politics between them may remain contentious.

Leftist parties in the Muslim world historically haven’t hesitated to couch their rhetoric in religious terms when so doing was perceived as useful – witness, for example, onetime Pakistani President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s description of his own Pakistan People’s Party policies in the early 1970s as Musawat-i-Muhammadi, or “Muhammad’s egalitarianism.” When it took place over three decades ago, Iran’s Islamic Revolution was received as an essentially Third World project in many quarters of the Middle East and the world, with supporters in places from Nigeria to Indonesia and even some from outside the Muslim-majority world citing Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s anti-hegemonic credentials.

Today we see sparks of growing cooperation between Islamist groups and leftists in the Middle East, although so far this speaks more to a realization by opposition leaders that it is politically expedient to play down differences between themselves. This marriage of convenience extends to Islamist-leftist engagement at the global level as well, with both sides regarding the other warily even as they occasionally make common cause. In 2004, for example, the Bangkok-based non-governmental organization Focus on the Global South partnered with the Lebanese organization Hizbullah to host a strategic-planning conference in Beirut for anti-Iraq war and anti-globalization movements. This prompted criticism from other left-leaning groups in Lebanon that have been opposed to Hizbullah.

A common anti-war stance has provided space for coordination between Islamists and the global justice movement on other occasions. For example, the Muslim Association of Britain, which is an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood, organized, in concert with several anti-globalization groups, the huge rally that took place in 2003 in London expressing opposition to the impending war in Iraq. The same association sent a delegation to the World Social Forum meeting in Venezuela in 2006, although again the motivation was more a shared antipathy for the administration of President George W. Bush than real ideological affinity.

In other cases, however, the engagement between Islamic movements and the left has had more substance. In Europe, Muslim groups and the Green movement have shared platforms, and no less a figure than the writer and public intellectual Tariq Ramadan has had an ongoing if fractious dialogue with the so-called “altermondialisation” movement, France’s distinct current of anti-globalization thought.

One also cannot help but notice the recent spate of texts on Islamic liberation theology that have been inspired by Latin America’s dissident fusion of Catholicism and Marxism dating back to the 1960s and 1970s. Muslim thinkers from Ali Asghar Engineer in India to Farid Esack in South Africa, to the Iranian-American cultural critic Hamid Dabashi have articulated varied, often sharply contrasting, accounts of the relationship between Islam and activism in the defense of social justice.

While these new arenas of Muslim politics do not yet represent mainstream political Islam, it is significant that the actors and networks largely bypass the established “old guard” movements of modern Islamism, such as the Muslim Brotherhood. In other words, young Muslims, dissatisfied with the failure of conventional Islamist groups to deliver results, may be searching for alternative avenues of political expression and mobilization – with their iPods firmly in hand.

Peter Mandaville is an associate professor of government and Islamic studies at George Mason University in Virginia, as well as the co-director of the university’s Center for Global Studies. He is also the author of “Global Political Islam.” This article is reprinted with permission from YaleGlobal Online (www.yaleglobal.yale.edu). Copyright © 2010, Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, Yale University.