Finding the "Muslim Cool" in Mos Def's 'The Ecstatic'

Finding the "The Muslim Cool" in Mos Def's 'The Ecstatic'

By Abdullah Durrani

Living in metropolises across North America, it is easy to pick up on the litany of slang exchanged by the city’s youth. To the uninitiated (read: old) ear, hearing Arabic words like Wallahi or Akhi seamlessly weaved in with Patois and African American Vernacular English (AAVE) might sound like gibberish. However, this new urban creole has become integral to youth culture. When I moved from a small town in Pakistan to New York City in 2017, I felt that aspects of my identity were not represented. Determined to carve out a space for myself that coalesced my religious identity with my new urban life, I educated myself with the contemporary culture of NYC. In doing so, I uncovered a deeper and richer history of Islam in the city.

My journey of finding an identity between my roots in Pakistan and my new life in NYC was deeply influenced by the African American experience and its artistic expression in Hip-Hop culture found deep in the annals of New York City. I could not explain the sense of connectedness I felt when blaring The Fugees on my way to school, or hearing Digable Planets play as I entered a bodega, until I became familiar with the works of Dr. Sherman Jackson. A prominent scholar of Islamic jurisprudence and Afro-American studies, Dr. Jackson writes of the similar experiences of racialization and exclusion faced by both communities in America. Despite grounds for solidarity, there is dissonance between the experiences of non-Black Muslim immigrants and Black Americans due to the “racial agnosia” exhibited by the former.(Jackson 2011, 97). The reluctance of Muslim immigrants to recognize the centrality of race—regardless of how White America racializes them—whitewashes the dark history of racial tensions in America. In doing so, the category of Whiteness becomes “invisible”, and its “historically predatory power” of socio-economic exclusion is erased, therefore undermining the history of Black struggle in America (Jackson 2011, 97). He asks of non-Black Muslim immigrants to “exercise [agency] in adopting or crafting an [American] racial identity of their own” to resist the inevitable racialization they will face (Jackson 2011, 104). This requires young American Muslims to overlook the racial agnosticism of their parents that sought to ‘cash in’ on impressions of a good immigrant Muslim by not involving themselves in matters of race or White supremacy (Jackson 2011, 97). Cognizant of the fact that South and Central Asian/Middle Eastern Muslim immigrants cannot, and indeed should not, emulate Blackness, Dr. Jackson advocates for Muslim immigrants to form their own racial identity “through the prism of American Blackness” (Jackson 2011, 101).

One cannot ignore the impact that many Black figures have within the creation of American culture. Figures such as “Snoop Dogg, Muhammad Ali, and Martin Luther King, Jr.” are essential to the cultural fabric of American society (Jackson 2011, 95). The political importance of cities like New York within the story of Black struggle would be incomplete without the subcultures of artistic expression they have produced, particularly the cultural movement of Hip-Hop. The expressive means by which the message of Hip-Hop is conveyed, is through Rap music. Undoubtedly, Rap is a language in itself; one that acts as a medium for conveying marginalized struggle with its own unique structure, gestures, and vocabulary (Luu, 2015). Musical forms akin to Rap have been used as an “oral tradition” by indigenous civilizations across the globe to pass down cultural stories cross-generationally (Luu, 2015). As a discursive form, Rap exists to consolidate an urban-racial identity, such as that of young Muslim immigrants, by speaking to one's own struggles under White supremacy through the language of the city. One of the most prominent artists in New York City's Hip-Hop scene is Mos Def, who speaks about both his Black and Muslim identities in his music. Among his discography, no album quite sticks out like The Ecstatic. During my initiation into Hip-Hop, The Ecstatic was specifically intriguing given the context surrounding its release. Mos had changed his name from Dante Smith to Yasiin Bey and released a project with overtly Islamic themes and lyrics. In interviews, he spoke of “colonialism in the [music] industry” that made him, as a Black man, “surrender [...] to the flashing lights” and prevent his expression (Sundaresan, 2020). Rap is an expressive art form and “an [integral] aspect of Black culture that has its roots in the African American tradition, rising out of New York” (Lohlker 2014, 116). Rap’s themes and lyricism are inseparable from “marginality” and emerge from a historic “meeting [of] marginalized communities [that] produce new subcultures”(Lohlker 2014, 120). Its different forms correspond to complex emotions surrounding the unique experience of artists, as individual poets, who seek to express the struggle of their communities, “upset polite sensibilities”, and disrupt hegemonic discourses (Lohlker 2014, 121). Su’ad Abdul Khabeer speaks of disruptive forms that emerge at the intersection of Islam and Hip-Hop; drawing from “Blackness”, it rejects hegemonic subjectivities (Khabeer 2016, 2). She writes that “White American normativity” renders intersections of Black and Muslim identities “invisible,” where Hip-Hop provides a unified platform to address issues that affect Black and Muslim persons alike (Khabeer 2016, 3). She expounds upon the idea by stating “Hip-Hop provides epistemology [that] radically challenge[s] sanctioned forms of knowledge” (Khabeer 2016, 29). Tying this theory to Mos Def’s album, one can see how his music creates a disruptive form of identity that upsets White modes of understanding both Blackness and Islam, and “remakes a Muslim identity in the United States,” or as Khabeer puts it, embodies a “Muslim cool” (Khabeer 2016, 30). His whole album speaks of Black struggle within society, while also speaking to more theological ideas such as Islamic spiritualism and Pan-Islamism. This is evident in many parts of the album, such as the opening track ‘Supermagic’ where Mos recites the Quranic invocation “Bismillah Ar-Rahman Ar-Rahim”, a prayer for initiating tasks, immediately followed with a recording of Malcolm X’s 1964 speech to Oxford University, where he describes the “miserable condition that exists on this Earth” for the Black man (Mos Def, 2009). In “Wahid” he opens the track with the Shahada, the Islamic oath of God’s oneness and the acceptance of Muhammad as his messenger, while in “Revelations” he speaks of “Black freedom, Black genius, Black power, Black ink for printing the Black dollar” (Mos Def, 2009). Throughout the album, Mos interweaves themes of Black excellence, racial consciousness, and radical reform with the use of Quranic supplications and references and critiques of anti-Arab rhetoric (Mos Def, 2009). By interweaving these struggles in his tracks, Mos Def makes invisible the differences between his Blackness and Muslim-ness, tying them into the nexus of marginalization that both Muslims and Black people—albeit differently—experience. What can we learn from the unique expression in ‘The Ecstatic’? As Jackson states, the “double consciousness” of second-generation Muslims is not sustainable (Jackson 2011, 99). Many young Muslim immigrants—such as myself—are socialized in an urban setting with diasporas of many different ethno-racial groups and cannot distance ourselves from racial discourses. Mos Def's music is not only reflective of a “revolutionary spirit” that is attractive to many marginalized youth groups, but also functions as a formative tool for new epistemologies, which are formed on a semblance of community amongst young Muslims and their peers in the Black community (Khabeer 2016, 34-35). While much still needs to be addressed regarding Black-Muslim relations, the constitutive ability that Rap has in creating a ‘Muslim racial identity’ is very important in addressing Jackson’s problem. As one of Khabeer’s interlocutors states, Hip-Hop “helped him interpret his own Muslim experience,” shedding “virtual identities” passed down by parents who immigrated from Muslim countries and brought their own Islams (Khabeer 2016, 45). The interconnections and intersections that he saw between Black and non-Black immigrant Muslim identities enabled him to “find [himself] as Muslim in Hip-Hop" (Khabeer 2016, 46). In his narrative, “Hip-Hop as epistemology is central,” wherein it forms a locus for young Muslims to form their identities in an urban setting (Khabeer 2016, 46). Coming to America, I was advised not to concern myself with matters of race: “it isn’t any of our business,” my grandmother would always tell me. Rap gave me an appreciation of Black struggle in America, while scholars like Jackson and Khabeer inculcated within me a strong sense of importance for racial solidarity. I feel welcome within Black cultural spaces during my time in New York because I could express colourful aspects of my own religion and culture to my friends of colour. Not only is it ‘our business’ to involve ourselves in matters of race as young Muslim immigrants and to stand with all racialized communities, but I believe that cross-cultural solidarity focused on uplifting and highlighting the influence of Black communities can become the tools with which we to counter White supremacy.