sociology essay

NYU Press

Chapter Title: The Loop of Muslim Cool: Black Islam, Hip Hop, and Knowledge of Self

Book Title: Muslim Cool Book Subtitle: Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States Book Author(s): Su’ad Abdul Khabeer Published by: NYU Press. (2016) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1bj4sbr.5

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27

1

The Loop of Muslim Cool

Black Islam, Hip Hop, and Knowledge of Self

Three pairs of Adidas sneakers and a pair of black combat boots lined the doorway of my apartment. The first pair of sneakers was chocolate brown with beige stripes, and the second was white and black under- neath scuffmarks. The last was a pair of shell tops with emerald green trim and hot pink stripes. The shoes’ owners were a small but diverse group of U.S. American Muslim grassroots activists— three men and one woman, of U.S. Black, South Asian, Arab, and mixed race heritage— whom I had invited to my home, then on the North Side of Chicago. As activists, they worked at the intersection of art and social justice through Chicago- based nonprofit organizations whose agendas for social change were characterized by the centrality of hip hop.

I had invited the group over for what I was calling a “head discus- sion,” “head” being shorthand for hip hop head. In hip hop communi- ties, a hip hop head is someone who knows hip hop, loves hip hop, and takes hip hop seriously, whether as an artist, an activist, an artist- activist, or a fan. At this point I had spent several months in Chicago, primarily on the South Side, exploring questions of hip hop and iden- tity with college- aged Muslims. Since, as the hip hop saying goes, “real heads know,” I was eager to pick the brains of some heads who were also Muslims equally dedicated to the future of young people and to the future of hip hop.

My Muslim hip hop head teachers had been raised in the city of Chicago or the surrounding suburbs; some had been born into Mus- lim families, while others had converted to Islam. Their trajectories to hip hop were likewise varied and included international migration and grade- school graffiti writing. For Tyesha, a Chicago native and a convert to Islam, that variation was what linked hip hop and Islam:

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That’s the beauty in it to me, to see someone who just came here, that im- migrated, that is Muslim, and is attracted to hip hop, and a shorty [young person] who hip hop’s all they know, and it’s a different kind of hip hop, a ghetto hip hop is obviously different because it has a different purpose and different means for coping, but I think the beauty of it is that this one thing, hip hop, it serves all of our needs for really healing and dealing with living in these times wherever we are. That’s why [hip hop], it’s Islam; it’s the costume for Islam.

Tyesha’s comment points to the way in which hip hop could be rel- evant to a “shorty” and to “someone who immigrated,” given its tran- scendent quality, which it shares with Islam. Tyesha made this claim based on her years of experience as a Muslim and a Chicago activist who uses hip hop to empower young U.S. Black Americans and Latin@s. In fact, because hip hop “serves all our needs,” it is so strongly aligned with Islam that Tyesha equated the two: hip hop, she said, is Islam. She further claimed that hip hop is “the costume for Islam.” Although the term “costume” is often associated with artifice or exaggeration, I read her intended meaning as “hip hop is Islam in a different outfit.” Hip hop is Islam because of the long- standing dialogic relationship between hip hop and Islam as practiced in urban Black communities in the United States.

This is a relationship that begins with hip hop artists taking up ide- als of self- determination, self- knowledge, and political consciousness as poor and working- class Blacks and Latin@s from the antiracist Mus- lim cosmologies of Black Islam. It is a relationship that takes shape in a number of ways, including representations of Islamic beliefs in hip hop music, adoptions of specific Muslim practices and ethical stances within hip hop communities, and stylistic choices such as kufiya scarves and knitted kufi caps. It is a relationship that has constructed an epistemol- ogy through which the distinct yet historically rooted set of understand- ings, self- making practices, and ways of meaning making give shape to what I call Muslim Cool.

In Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mis- sissippi Delta, Clyde Woods theorizes the blues as epistemology. He ar- gues that U.S. Black American conflict with “plantation powers,” namely, the White American moneyed elite, is “one of the defining features of

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The Loop of Muslim Cool | 29

African American social thought” (Woods 2000, 29). Blues music as an epistemology emerges out of this conflict as a “self- referential clas- sificatory grid” that produces “a distinct and evolving complex of social explanation and social action [that provides] support for the myriad of traditions of resistance, affirmation and confirmation” (Woods 2000, 29).

Woods’s theory of the blues as epistemology is grounded in the roots of blues music in working- class Black life in the Mississippi Delta. Hip hop emerges from a similar milieu, though not (immediately) from the Delta but out of the convergence of the African diaspora— from the U.S. South and from the Spanish- and English- speaking Caribbean— in poor and working- class communities in New York City. And, like Woods’s Delta Blues, hip hop is shaped by the conflict with “plantation pow- ers” in the “North” who, like their southern counterparts, are partici- pants in global economic, political, and cultural forces of domination, what hooks aptly terms the “white supremacist imperialist capitalist patriarchy.”

Following Woods, Nitasha Sharma argues that “like the blues, hip hop provides epistemology” (Sharma 2010, 208). Marc Lamont Hill calls this epistemology “the pedagogy of hip hop,” arguing that the consump- tion and production of hip hop culture “reorganize conceptions” of the self and the world in ways that “radically challenge sanctioned forms of knowledge” (Hill 2009, 121). Furthermore, H. Samy Alim identifies this epistemology as having the potential to “create a counterhegemonic discourse that ‘threatens’ the ruling class and their ideas” (Alim 2006b, 22). I follow Woods, Sharma, Hill, and Alim by likewise theorizing hip hop as epistemology. Like the blues, hip hop is committed to “social and personal investigation, description and criticism” (Woods 1998, 30). For my teachers, hip hop disrupts dominant theories of knowledge by of- fering alternative ways of reckoning history and interpreting and acting upon the world. Importantly, hip hop worked this way for my teachers because Black Islam played a central role in the development of hip hop’s epistemology. As Alim notes, many hip hop artists cite their introduc- tion to Black Islam as key to “regaining a ‘knowledge of self ’” that re- oriented their perspective from being “merely ‘artists’” to being actively engaged in acting upon the world (2006b, 38). Likewise, my teachers “show and prove” the ways in which Black Islam, through knowledge

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30 | The Loop of Muslim Cool

of self, has been and continues to be central to hip hop as epistemol- ogy and as a lived experience. Furthermore, they “show and prove” the centrality of Black Islam to the religious self- making of U.S. American Muslims.

In what follows, I chart knowledge of self as an epistemological route that leads to Muslim Cool. This route is composed through the loop of Muslim Cool: Black Islam gave knowledge of self to hip hop, which in turn confers knowledge of self to young twenty- first- century U.S. Mus- lims, who then return to Black Islam as Muslim Cool. I trace the first bend in the loop— how Black Islam gave hip hop knowledge of self— from a historical perspective and illustrate ethnographically the jour- neys of two of my teachers from knowledge of self to Muslim Cool. By looping back to this root— Black Islam— through hip hop, I show how my teachers chart their own routes to remake Muslim identity in the United States.

The Topography of Muslim Cool

I had been in the field for a few months when I met up with Tasleem and Man- O- Wax at a café in Hyde Park. Hyde Park is a historic South Side neighborhood that is home to the University of Chicago, Minister Louis Farrakhan, and President Barack Obama. It is a twenty- to thirty- minute eastward drive down 63rd Street from IMAN (and from where I lived at the time). The drive passes through predominantly U.S. Black and working- class neighborhoods such as Woodlawn, which borders Hyde Park and has a tenuous relationship with what some residents see as its land- grabbing neighbor, the University of Chicago. Driving through Woodlawn into Hyde Park, one cannot but be struck by the latter’s historic architecture, tree- lined streets, and resources such as restaurants, health food and grocery stores, and independent bookstores. Meeting in Hyde Park was convenient for Tasleem, who lived further south at the time, but Man- O- Wax and Tasleem chose Hyde Park as a meeting location because there were few, if any, cafés in other neighborhoods on the South Side. As a result, Hyde Park was a common meeting, dining and hang out alterna- tive for folks at IMAN seeking to avoid the long haul to White North Side neighborhoods such as Lincoln Park, Wicker Park, Logan Square, and Lakeview where café culture in Chicago was concentrated.

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The Loop of Muslim Cool | 31

I had met both Man- O- Wax and Tasleem at IMAN. Man- O- Wax had just begun to work at IMAN full- time, and Tasleem was a frequent volunteer— what the organization calls an “IMAN leader.” Beyond their work with IMAN, I saw them as key actors in the Muslim hip hop scene in Chicago; indeed, Man- O- Wax was one of my key teachers in the field. A hip hop DJ, Man- O- Wax worked as IMAN’s youth director and later its Director of Arts and Culture. Man- O- Wax was a South Asian U.S. American in his late twenties, raised in an upper- middle- class Muslim family that had immigrated to the United States from Kuwait when he had been a child. He belonged to the older cohort of my teachers and was a teacher also in a broader sense: he had taught hip hop, as art and epistemology, to most of the other young Muslims whose stories I nar- rate. Tasleem was a U.S. Black American spoken word artist and fashion designer. A convert to Islam, raised between the city of Chicago and the southern suburbs, Tasleem also coordinated arts after- school program- ming and online courses on natural healing.

Given their different perspectives, I hoped that talking with them to- gether would give me a fuller sense of the Muslim hip hop scene in Chi- cago. Man- O- Wax hesitated to call it a Chicago “scene.” He explained, “It is more a mentality that has no geography. It is not big enough to be a geographic thing. There is a hip hop scene outside [the Chicago Muslim community],” but “until [IMAN’s] Community Café there was a discon- nect between some parts of the Muslim community and hip hop culture, aside from ISNA and the masjid rapper.”1 The “masjid rapper type” was a euphemistic way of describing a specific type of amateur Muslim mu- sician, described by Tasleem as follows: “A person can’t even sing but just because they said Allah, or throw Alhamdulillah in a [rap] song,” they are allowed to perform at masjid or community events such as the an- nual convention of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA).

As an artist himself, Man- O- Wax seemed to feel that there was no “scene” because there was no space. He knew the importance of venues, physical spaces in which community is built around music culture. Such spaces have been key to hip hop’s development from the first hip hop jam planned by DJ Kool Herc and his sister, Cindy Campbell, to street corner ciphers. Because of the dearth of venues like IMAN’s periodic Community Café, that took hip hop seriously as an art form, Muslim artists with more professional skills and ambitions tended, according

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Community Café, February 2012. Courtesy of Eve Rivera.

Stage Crowders. Courtesy of Eve Rivera.

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The Loop of Muslim Cool | 33

to Man- O- Wax, to gravitate toward the larger Chicago hip hop scene “outside” the Muslim community.

Man- O- Wax saw an obstacle to the creation of a Muslim hip hop scene in the many “divisions within the [Chicago] Muslim commu- nity: ISNA, The Mosque Cares [community associated with Imam W. D. Mohammed], the NOI [Nation of Islam],” and even the Blackstone Rangers, “who read Quran and pray to the East,” and the “Vice Lords,” who have been influenced by Islam. As Chicago street organizations, the Blackstone Rangers (also known as the Black P. Stone Nation) and the Vice Lords are not typically included in descriptions of the Chicagoland ummah and do not always define themselves as Muslim. However, the point Man- O- Wax seemed to be making was that there are many dif- ferent interpretations of “Muslim” in Chicago, which poses a challenge to establishing one scene in which all Muslims can equally participate.

Tasleem’s assessment came from a slightly different angle. She noted that in the late 1980s and 1990s, when Chicago hip hop was taking off, Muslims were “inside” hip hop because of the influence of the Nation of Islam and the Five Percenters2 on the hip hop generation. However, the Muslims inside the hip hop scene fell “outside” many orthodox Sunni

Community Café, April 2012. Courtesy of Eve Rivera.

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Muslim communities in Chicagoland. Tasleem explained, “no one rap- ping at the time, or very few, were calling themselves Sunni Muslims.” This situation, Tasleem argued, differed from the contemporary mo- ment, when many hip hop emcees explicitly refer to themselves as Sunni Muslims. She clarified that at that earlier stage, Black Islam had been part of the Chicago hip hop milieu, but the kinds of divisions identified by Man- O- Wax had been less salient. An artist may have been Muslim or a Five Percenter or just selectively practicing certain aspects of Black Islam, such as diet or dress. However, she argued, “people are more de- fined now” as they move to embrace Sunni orthodoxy, a move that she believed was prompted by artists feeling a responsibility to respond to misconceptions about Islam since 9/11.

Like Man- O- Wax, I see the Muslim hip hop scene as a mentality, a way of thinking, and an epistemology— as Muslim Cool. Therefore, the question whether the scene is big enough is immaterial; what mat- ters is the existence of a network of Muslim hip hop artists that is not bound by city limits, state lines, or national borders. Man- O- Wax and Tasleem were part of a network of Muslim artists and activists con- nected to each other through shared music, faith, and hip hop– based activism. This network encompasses a long list of artists, both converts and those raised Muslim, including hip hop legends such as Jorge “Pop- master Fabel” Pabon of the Rock Steady Crew, as well as artists who have achieved significant commercial success, such as Yasiin Bey and Lupe Fiasco. Many others are stars of underground hip hop and up- and- coming artists, such as Brother Ali (Minnesota), The Reminders (Colorado), Omar Offendum (LA/DC), Ms. Latifah (Atlanta), Amir Sulaiman (Atlanta), Tyson (Oakland), Cap D (Chicago), Maimouna Youssef (Baltimore), Khalil Ismail (Baltimore), Miss Undastood (NYC), and Quadeer Lateef (Buffalo).

Many of these Muslim artists were involved in IMAN’s work. Their artistry and activism predated their affiliation with IMAN, but their network formed an imaginary community whose “scene” was made by and through the spaces, physical and conceptual, enabled by IMAN as an organization.3 Thanks to its vision of arts- based activism, IMAN had become the epicenter of the Muslim hip hop scene in Chicago, the wider United States, and even globally, and thus IMAN was central to my teachers’ journeys through the loop of Muslim Cool.

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The Loop of Muslim Cool | 35

My first visit to IMAN took place in the fall of 2006, before I of- ficially began conducting fieldwork. IMAN had been established in 1997 by a group of undergraduate students from DePaul University; the group included Dr. Rami Nashashibi, who is currently the organiza- tion’s executive director. During its early years IMAN served elemen- tary school students, many of whom were Palestinian U.S. Americans, who would visit IMAN daily for after- school tutoring. At the time of my visit, IMAN’s current office space was still in the process of being con- verted from its former use as a bank. IMAN was moving from its first and much smaller home further west along 63rd Street, affectionately called the Markaz (center) by the neighborhood’s Arab U.S. American community.

According to Garbi Schmidt, who wrote one of the first academic studies on IMAN, “gathering in the Markaz everyday created a sense of community among the children” and a rare environment in the United States in which “being Muslim and Arab involved no risks” (Schmidt 2004, 49). Since its incorporation, IMAN has grown beyond the local Palestinian community to become a thriving nonprofit organization that has a budget of almost two million dollars and serves as a center for Muslim life in Chicago and a model for Muslims around the coun- try. This success was due to IMAN’s efforts to create spaces within and outside its walls where being Muslim and American “involved no risk.”

One part of IMAN’s new building had been completed by the time of my first visit in 2006: the mural that covers the building’s entire eastern wall. This mural, which can easily be seen from a distance, announces IMAN’s presence and priorities even before a visitor or volunteer walks through its doors. The mural was realized as a joint project between IMAN, the Greater Southwest Development Corporation (GSDC), and the Chicago Public Arts Group (CPAG), an organization that manages public art projects through collaboration, youth mentoring, and com- munity development (CPAG 2010). The mural is named “Reflections of Good” and features mirrors shaped like tear drops along with ara- besque motifs, spray- painted Arabic calligraphy, and pieces of broken dishes collected by the fifteen young people from the neighborhood who worked on the project with Juan Chavez, the lead artist.

The production of the mural is emblematic of IMAN’s style of com- munity engagement. IMAN, a Muslim- run organization, partnered with

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36 | The Loop of Muslim Cool

local non- Muslim nonprofits and community institutions, GSDC and CPAG, and local non- Muslim master artists, Juan Chavez and Zor, on a project that bridges art and activism. In the project, Chavez and Zor, the artists, acted as mentors to the neighborhood youth who assisted in producing the piece of public art. As part of this process of com- munity engagement, nonprofits, neighbors, artists, and youth together determined the mural’s design, which is infused with IMAN’s Muslim identity— symbolized by the Arabic calligraphy of Qur’anic verses, writ- ten by Zor— while espousing values that are universal in their appeal. More than a neighborhood beautification project, the mirrors that adorn the wall were meant to reflect the good that already existed in the surrounding community. This point was important, because many outside the neighborhood, including many Chicagoland (the Chicago metropolitan area) Muslims, saw this area of the city as a place of fear and danger rather than as a space of good.

Revising this dominant perception of the ’hood is central to how IMAN positions itself and is positioned within the Chicago and na- tional Muslim community. Explicitly committed to antiracist work, IMAN privileges the U.S. Black American experience as a critical site of critique for U.S. Muslims. As the Inner- City Muslim Action network, IMAN identifies the locus of its work as the economically resource- poor community of color on Chicago’s Southwest Side, where the organiza- tion is located. IMAN’s work in the ’hood includes not only the provi- sion of services to its poor and working- class neighbors but community organizing with residents around the social and economic justice issues that most affect the neighborhood.

While I was in the field, Nashashibi was often called on to speak pub- licly, and when he did— whether giving a speech at a volunteer meeting or delivering a lecture at a local university— he would always come back to the social, economic, and political disadvantages faced by Black and Latin@ urban communities and trace how systemic inequality deter- mined the ways in which U.S. Americans live, from residential patterns, schooling, and policing to modes of consumption (Massey and Denton 1998; Gregory 1999; Woods 2000; Pattillo- McCoy 2000). Critically, the often implicit associations with Blackness and the ’hood— how mate- rial conditions of disadvantage become material for conceptions of the ’hood as a space inextricably tied to Blackness— were not lost on IMAN’s

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leadership. Accordingly, the “inner city” in IMAN’s discourse reflected a hip hop remix on the ’hood in which working- class Black and Latin@ residential areas were conceived as culturally rich communities rather than as inner- city wastelands (Forman 2002). This point is particularly salient because racism and ethnocentrism continue to beleaguer Ameri- can Muslim communities in Chicago and beyond.

As described in the Introduction, ethnic prejudices often drive ten- sions over religious authority and legitimacy within the U.S. American Muslim community, and they also shape the representation of this com- munity vis- à- vis the state. These prejudices preclude the possibility of U.S. Black American Muslim leadership over the broader U.S. Ameri- can Muslim community (McCloud 1995; Jackson 2005; Karim 2008). IMAN’s operation within the context of the ’hood and its privileging of Blackness make it unique among U.S. Muslim nonprofits. The majority of such associations tend to focus on the concerns of middle- class im- migrants from South Asia and the Middle East. A growing number of nonprofits address the needs of poor immigrants from the same regions, particularly around issues of immigration and civil rights. Yet very few make the concerns, the tensions, and the fortunes of the ’hood the focus of their work.

Moreover, like their constituencies, these other organizations are rela- tively homogeneous. By contrast, IMAN’s staff, volunteers, and clientele are ethnically and socioeconomically heterogeneous. To be clear, IMAN is no racial utopia and maintaining a culturally diverse space is always a work in progress. But in comparison to its peer organizations in Chi- cago, the ethnic diversity among Muslims at IMAN events and activities is remarkable. As Jamillah Karim described in her work on U.S. Black- South Asian American Muslim relations, “[few Muslim] organizations demonstrate substantial inter- ethnic relations, but one group that comes close to this ideal is the Inner- city Muslim Action Network” (Karim 2008, 15).

I had come to IMAN in 2006 to participate in its first Artist Retreat. I was invited by Nashashibi as an academic scholar (most of the other scholars invited were religious scholars) and thus as one part of the scholar- artist- activist tripartite whose synergy, he believed, was criti- cal to shaping a U.S. Muslim identity that was critically engaged in the broader U.S. society. The retreat was designed to be a safe and private

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space, and I will thus not go into much ethnographic detail about it here. However, a description on IMAN’s website of its third Artist Re- treat, which I also attended, aptly describes the purpose of these events: “These Retreats have not just been a deliberative space for the exchange of ideas over the meaning of art and the role of artists in the Ameri- can Muslim community, but they have also been a creative space where artists collaborate during cipher sessions that are intimate and sponta- neous, and a spiritual space where artists and scholars explore the con- nections between creativity and spirituality” (Najam 2011).

The retreat, which represented one of the two ways in which the Muslims I knew in the field engaged with IMAN, was critical to my understanding of Muslim Cool. Intimate events such as the Artist Re- treat and public venues such as the Community Café and Takin’ It to the Streets were all structured similarly in that they provided a space for the “Muslim and hip hop focus” that Man- O- Wax identified as having been missing before IMAN’s founding. For my older teachers, such as Man- O- Wax and Tasleem, this space provided an important sense of com- munity among established Muslim artists as Muslims and supported the cultivation of their artistic expression and professional lives as artists.

The other role that IMAN played, and the primary focus of this chap- ter, was enabling a discourse and creating spaces through which hip hop as Muslim Cool was introduced to young Muslims:

Tasleem: One thing I like about IMAN is, it is a kind of center for introducing that kind of music to young Muslims; where else would they find it? Cap D, The Reminders, these are people they probably would not have heard. We need more of that around the country. I think it breeds pride; young people can be, “I can still be cool, I can still be hip.” And there is quality [in the music]. IMAN is putting on concerts at professional venues and a young person is like, “Wow, I am proud to be a Muslim, it’s cool.” Even if they go to a non- Muslim school they have music they can share with their friends and feel really included in society. Teens face a lot of peer pressure; they are bombarded with MTV, BET. . . . The thing people like about Lil Wayne is his tight beats and good production, so in order to compete a Muslim has to do both and have even tighter lyrics. IMAN plays a key role in that.

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The Loop of Muslim Cool | 39

Tasleem’s comments underscore the challenges of context for young Muslims in the United States. Like other youth of color, Muslim youth do not often see themselves represented or elevated in mainstream media or the broader mainstream popular imagination as Muslims in ways that ascend to the level of “cool”— a category of value coveted not just by the young. The artists mentioned by Tasleem— Cap D, a Mus- lim emcee from Chicago who is well known locally and a member of IMAN’s board, and The Reminders, a Colorado- based husband- and- wife rap duo— do not have Lil Wayne’s fame; you won’t find them on mainstream radio or music television, where many young people have the easiest access to music. Yet they are not “masjid rappers.” Rather, as Tasleem described it, they are quality artists who model how to be Mus- lim and “still be cool.”

Yet the religious self- making IMAN facilitated went a level beyond the provision of role models. IMAN was a key stop for my younger teachers’ journeys through the loop of Muslim Cool.

Man- O- Wax: To me, the trajectory usually goes: you get into hip hop for whatever reason it speaks to you, and that usually leads you to something beyond hip hop. Either you get into the elements [rap- ping, b- boying and b- girling, DJing, and graffiti], you start learning about them, you learn how this all goes back to indigenous culture, the drummers, the DJ . . . or just in the music itself, you like hip hop and you start hearing samples and you realize, “Oh, I like soul and funk, too,” or you may like jazz or blues or something, and it [hip hop] becomes an entryway into appreciating a larger culture, Black culture in general, African music for some.

The trajectory Man- O- Wax traced was not meant to be Muslim- specific; rather, it described hip hop as epistemology. The key element of this trajectory, namely, hip hop leading somewhere beyond hip hop to Black culture in general, is precisely the loop of Muslim Cool. My younger teachers’ interest in hip hop typically arose before they started to volunteer at IMAN. They knew hip hop as the preeminent soundtrack of urban Black youth culture and a significant part of mainstream popu- lar culture. Yet it was through their relationship with IMAN that they turned to Black Islam and traveled the loop of Muslim Cool, reorienting

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40 | The Loop of Muslim Cool

what it meant for them to be Muslim and American in the contempo- rary United States.

OmarMukhtar

OmarMukhtar4 was a twenty- something Libyan American engineer and visual artist who had been a volunteer at IMAN for a few years by the time I began my fieldwork. He grew up in Bridgeview, Illinois, a southwest suburb of Chicago, and belonged to the older cohort of my teachers. He had first heard of IMAN as a teenager but could not get involved until he had more autonomy and mobility as a college student in the city of Chicago:

[I] tried to get involved with IMAN, but it was hard to get in touch. Sha- hidah Jackson [an IMAN organizer] reached out to me to do a logo; a buddy of mine did a lot of events around the community, he asked me to do some design work, he was on the steering committee for Streets, and Rami was like, “I need a graphic designer,” and so he called my guy, Adnan, and Adnan was like, “Try my guy OmarMukhtar.” And Rami, and this describes [how] IMAN [works], called me real late at night, like, “Ok, I need you to do this, it’s for tomorrow, can you do this for us?” And I was enthralled by the fact that Rami called me direct. [I was] hungry and eager to put art into the world and didn’t sleep for two days straight, went to class all tired [the next day].

OmarMukhtar’s IMAN initiation story was typical: a call from Rami Nashashibi, asking for help on a project that had to be finished “yester- day.” Like all the young Muslims I encountered at IMAN, OmarMukhtar was enthusiastic about IMAN’s work and eager to get involved. Since that first phone call, he had volunteered as IMAN’s go- to graphic artist, designing all sorts of materials from flyers to T- shirts. During the long days and late nights when I worked at IMAN on Streets, OmarMukhtar and I shared grievances over Rami’s “deadlines.” We also shared a love of all things hip hop— although OmarMukhtar liked to test me by quizzing me on my knowledge of rap music. Working with OmarMukhtar (and answering his quizzes), I found him to be a very reflective individual with strong opinions and very little filter.

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The Loop of Muslim Cool | 41

OmarMukhtar shared his IMAN initiation story with me during the second of two formal life history interviews I conducted with him. For the first interview, which had lasted four and a half hours, we had jumped into my now dearly departed Corolla for a tour of his old and current “stomping grounds” in Bridgeview and on his college campus. For this second interview, we met at a café near the West Loop; I wanted to follow up on some of the stories he had shared earlier, including his disappointment with his local community, which had led him to IMAN:

You had people who were just as young as me at IMAN who were con- tributing in ways that you didn’t see in Bridgeview. At the time, Rami was a very “bring it to your face” kind of guy. I remember him going up to ISNA and just chewing out the people for not building with the Warith Deen community, who had a convention the same week, just on a dif- ferent side of town: “How do you guys not at least acknowledge them? . . . You are not the only Muslim game in town.” And I saw him doing these things, and in my college angst . . . I was like, “That’s the truth right there; that’s what’s going on.”

OmarMukhtar described being attracted to IMAN because he saw that young people were being active in ways that mattered; namely, like Rami they were pushing back against anti- Black racism within the Muslim community. The “Warith Deen community” OmarMukhtar referenced was the primarily U.S. Black American Muslim community guided by the teachings and leadership of Imam W. D. (Warith Deen) Mohammed.5 This Sunni Muslim community, with affiliated masjids across the country, has been known by a number of names during its history: Bilalian, the World Community of Islam in the West, the Muslim American Society, and currently The Mosque Cares. Like The Mosque Cares, ISNA is a national association of Sunni Muslims, but ISNA’s primary demographic is South Asian U.S. American Muslims, with a strong Arab U. S. American contingent.

For most of the first decade of the twenty- first century, the yearly con- ventions of the community of Imam W. D. Mohammed and ISNA were held in two different parts of the Chicago metropolitan area during the Labor Day weekend. The tens of thousands of Muslims attracted by each convention were segregated along an ethnic divide, with the primar-

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ily U.S. Black American Muslim “Warith Deen community” inhabiting hotels in the Loop or the south suburbs and the primarily South Asian U.S. American Muslims of ISNA, along with some Arab U.S. American Muslims, filling a convention center in Rosemont, a northern suburb. While The Mosque Cares and ISNA’s leadership publicly endorsed each other, OmarMukhtar voiced the common perception that ISNA would not “build” with the community of Imam Mohammed because South Asian and Arab U.S. American Muslims implicitly believed that their Black coreligionists were ill- equipped to offer the authoritative religious education and religiously sanctioned social environment both conven- tions promised. Accordingly, Rami was “chewing out people” at ISNA to call them to account for what he and many others perceived as anti- Black racism.

For OmarMukhtar, IMAN stood in stark contrast to his primarily Palestinian U.S. American community in Bridgeview, where “unless you meet three very basic requirements— you have a beard, you are married with children, you have a stable job and speak very good Arabic— your voice and opinion are ignored.” Young people in the community, he ob- served, were particularly likely to be ignored. During our first stop on the life history interview tour, we parked in the lot of the local youth center near the Bridgeview mosque. It was a two- story square brick building that matched the industrial feel of most of the surrounding area. We tried to go inside, but the use of the center alternated between “sisters’ days” (restricted to women) and “brothers’ days,” and the day we arrived was a sisters’ day. It was a breezy yet sunny March morning, so we walked around the neighborhood. As we drew closer to the mosque, the neighborhood changed, becoming less industrial and more subur- ban, with both garden apartments and more sprawling homes.

The Bridgeview Mosque was built in 1982, and by the time of the interview my teachers could point out the few homes that were still owned by non- Muslim families in the Arab section of Bridgeview. The sociologist Louise Cainkar describes White flight from this suburban neighborhood thus: “The Arabs . . . were viewed by many of the major- ity White suburbanites as ‘non- White’ invaders. As their numbers grew (to ten percent in some southwest suburbs), they were increasingly seen as undesirable and unwelcome neighbors whose presence would lower a neighborhood’s property values” (Cainkar 2005, 183). Like most im-

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migrants, the first wave of Muslim immigrants to Chicago lived in the city, and the move to the suburbs fell in step with the national ethos, emergent in the 1950s, of the suburban subdivision rather than the city as the home of the American dream.

Yet in a deeply segregated metropolitan area and nation, the American dream remains a racialized one; so when Muslim immigrants moved to the suburbs, they also moved away from Chicago’s Black belt and away from a certain kind of Blackness, the undisciplined and un- middle- class Blackness that is, incidentally, most commonly associated with hip hop. Moreover, the suburban homes of many Muslim immigrants and their families are equally distant from the Black middle class.6 Although en- tangled in, and often reproducing, the logics of anti- Black racism, this suburban movement of immigrant Muslim parents was also part of an overall strategy to create Muslim spaces that would enable these new immigrants to live a Muslim life until they could return to their nations of origin. Speaking specifically of the Palestinian U.S. American Muslim community in Bridgeview, Cainkar explains: “The dream of most early Palestinian immigrants was to work hard, save money, and retire under their grape arbors in Palestine. Many never saw this earthly dream ful- filled. They were instead buried in the Muslim section of Evergreen Cemetery at 8700 South Kedzie Avenue” (Cainkar 2005, 188).

As the immigrants realized that the return “back home” was in- creasingly unlikely— for reasons including denial of the right of return to Palestine as well as the wish to ensure that their children benefited from the U.S. education system— establishing community life in the suburbs came to be motivated by the desire to stem the loss of culture and religion within the second generation. The Muslim youth center in Bridgeview was established as part of this effort, but, OmarMukhtar noted, there was a constant struggle over control of the center between the young men who ran the center “on a shoestring budget” and the older men who ran the masjid community. Nevertheless, according to OmarMukhtar, young people were not ignored within the walls of the center and the space proved to be significant in his developing sense of his Muslim identity:

I was an active participant. They had a weight room, half basketball court, foosball table. Every day after ‘isha [night prayer] there would

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44 | The Loop of Muslim Cool

be a thirty- minute conversation about something relevant to what was going on, ’cause the guys [who ran the center] were a little bit older than us, but they were still plugged into the neighborhood. So they would be, “I heard this and that from my brother” . . . “You guys shouldn’t be fighting the Latinos” or “getting into beefs [disagreements] over girl- friends,” and they would tie it in with an Islamic lesson. At that point, for such a long time, before high school, Islam was this abstract thing that my parents practiced and they tell us to practice and that made us different in one way or another, but moving into high school, my iden- tity, being a part of the center, kind of changed. Now it was practical, now it’s relevant.

As a teen, OmarMukhtar learned what it meant to be Muslim in a more “practical” way at the youth center, yet it was his exposure to the Black radical tradition through hip hop that pushed him to look for a way to understand his identity as a Muslim in the context of the broader struggle for racial equality in the United States. In high school, he began reading writings from the Black radical tradition, “a lot of Black Pan- ther literature, Eldridge Cleaver, Mumia [Abu Jamal],” through which he began to see that “you just swap the word ‘Black’ with ‘Muslim’ or ‘Palestinian’ [and] it all becomes very relevant. You start to attach the struggles together, the civil rights struggle and at the time I was really into the Palestinian thing, and you start to identify the two and under- stand the two together.”

The Black radical tradition challenges systemic anti- Blackness through intellectual analysis and creative exposition informed by Black consciousness, and it asserts a political agenda that transcends national boundaries and links Blacks across the diaspora (Robinson 2000; Shakur and Davis 2001; Moten 2003; Kelley 2003). In OmarMukhtar’s narra- tion of his trajectory, the Black radical tradition and its analysis of anti- Black racism in the United States resonated with his own experience as an Arab U.S. American Muslim. He used the metaphor of “swapping” to describe how he found Blackness to be relevant to his own experi- ence as a Muslim. However, he did not merely “swap Black for Muslim,” which would imply exchanging one distinct identity— “Muslim”— for another— “Black.” OmarMukhtar did not swap Blackness out but rather linked himself to it as a racialized Muslim subject.

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Further, IMAN’s approach to anti- Black racism within the U.S. Muslim community drew him to the organization. OmarMukhtar’s movement from the youth center to the literature of the Black radical tradition and then to IMAN shifted his perspective— he linked justice within his local Muslim community to justice on a national and inter- national scale. This made him challenge the Muslim status quo on race in his local community: “They had this ‘honorary White’ sort of under- standing. They were like, ‘Oh, we’re exempt because we are here and they like us,’ and so people try to lay low, and I am like, ‘If they are coming for us, they are coming for all of us.’” OmarMukhtar’s evolu- tion also underscores how anti- Black ideologies circulating in the wider United States are paralleled within the U.S. Muslim community, which encourages Muslim complicity in the society’s structures of dominance. Thus, linking Blackness to his Arab Muslim identity became a means for OmarMukhtar to critique his position as a member of a racial minority in the United States and a means of intervention in interminority rela- tions among U.S. Muslims.

It was through such critiques that young Muslims such as Omar- Mukhtar articulated Muslim Cool as an alternative to the dominant dis- courses in their local Muslim communities. OmarMukhtar had been a hip hop head since early adolescence. Listening to hip hop emcees “using Muslim language” over low- fi hip hop radio shows way into the night and devouring hip hop manifestos such as the 1994 book Bomb the Suburbs (Wimsatt 2008), he found that hip hop helped him interpret his own Muslim experience:

Through hip hop I did validate my own Islam, it no longer felt like I was, you know, apart from something greater. ’Cause through hip hop it was like you always heard Nas, The Fugees, mentioning Islamic references in their rhymes and it was like, OK, word, so I am not just like this minor- ity group offshoot, sort of like sect almost, it’s like I am recognized. . . . I guess through hip hop, listening to a lot of music about being conscious, about being aware of what’s going on, it kind of, like, simplified Islam for me. Islam is a simple religion if you really think about it, and the pro- phetic tradition is very simple as well. If you look at him, his attributes were not how long his beard was or how short his thobe [gown] was, that’s all irrelevant. What’s really relevant is that he was a compassion-

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46 | The Loop of Muslim Cool

ate, truthful, honest human being, and if Muslims understood that then it would turn our understanding of the world upside down. We would no longer be bound to these things: you have to say these things, pray in this order; your wudu’ [ritual ablution] is invalid if you do it this way. No; what matters is that if you can focus on these things— being com- passionate, truthful, honest, sincere, just— then your whole well- being is transformed and your whole understanding of the world is transformed. And it’s the same thing with hip hop. What they are really looking for is for people to be understanding, compassionate, truthful and just, merci- ful. It’s like the RZA7 said— [this statement is] a Five Percent thing I like to carry around— “You need knowledge, wisdom, understanding, justice, freedom, equality, love, peace, and happiness.” And in that order. And that makes perfect sense, to have the understanding of how to get justice, freedom and equality is fundamental for you to be happy . . . successful, to have love, peace, and happiness.

It was precisely the interconnections and intersections, rather than disconnections and divisions, that he saw between the “Black” and the “Muslim” that enabled OmarMukhtar to find himself as a Muslim in hip hop. In his narrative, hip hop as epistemology is central. Islamic refer- ences in hip hop music made him feel like he belonged and they culti- vated his understanding of Islam itself. The relationship he described between a growing awareness of his Muslimness and hip hop is not co- incidental: OmarMukhtar was able to find himself as a Muslim in hip hop because, as Tyesha argued, hip hop is Islam. In fact, despite some omissions of Islam in academic treatments of hip hop, as described in the Introduction, Islam, and specifically Black Islam, has had a signifi- cant presence in hip hop’s origins, and this genealogy roots the loop of Muslim Cool.

Black Islam and Hip Hop

Popmaster Fabel: DJ Afrika Islam, they call him the son of Bam- baataa8 because he was similar to Bam in playing rare selections and he had a similar DJ style. He would dj on the radio, on WHBI, and he would play break beats, and [he] was the radio show [Zulu Beats Show] host, and he would play excerpts from El-Hajj Malik Shabazz’s

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speeches, . . . Elijah Muhammad, [Louis] Farrakhan. [DJ Afrika Islam would] take little sound bites . . . you would hear a break beat and over it [someone saying the greeting] “As Salaamu Alaikum” [and the response] “Wa Alaikum as Salaam,” . . . [and] The Supreme Team with Just Allah the Superstar and Se’Divine the Mastermind and they were on the radio, part of a show in ’82, maybe with Mr. Magic.9 They would make references to the Five Percent and always end their show with words of wisdom for life, which is cool, and would have some Islamic ideas.

In my interview with Jorge “Popmaster Fabel” Pabon, he described some of his earliest recollections of Islam in hip hop, years before his own con- version to Islam. Popmaster Fabel is a legendary hip hop figure. He is the senior vice president of the Rock Steady Crew, the first hip hop b- boy collective, and a longtime member of the Universal Zulu Nation, the first hip hop organization. I had first met Popmaster Fabel as a preteen, long before I formally began my research on Islam and hip hop. I had attended a performance of his off- Broadway hip hop musical “Jam on the Groove” even further off Broadway— at a public school in Brooklyn, where I grew up. I would later cross paths with Popmaster Fabel as an adult at cultural festivals and events within and outside the NYC Muslim community and also, thanks to my research, at IMAN events in Chicago. Then as now, I found Popmaster Fabel, true to hip hop epistemology, to be a teacher.

During our conversation, Popmaster Fabel identified early links be- tween Islam and hip hop in DJ Afrika Islam’s radio play list, which in- cluded speeches by NOI leaders Elijah Muhammad and Minister Louis Farrakhan and the 1983 song “Malcolm X No Sell Out” by a European DJ, a track in which selections from the speeches of the late El-Hajj Malik El- Shabazz (Malcolm X) are mixed over break beats. In addition to the Nation of Islam, Popmaster Fabel also referenced the Five Percent Nation of Gods and Earths in his historical narration of the relationship between Islam and hip hop and listed what he called “warning songs” that he described, later in the interview, as “an extension of the proper Islamic tradition.” These early tracks included “It’s Life” by Rock Master Scott and the Dynamic 3, “Get Tough” by CD III, and “Problems of the World Today” by the Fearless Four. His turn of phrase “warning songs”

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is a clear allusion to the Qur’anic assertion that the Prophet Muhammad was sent to warn humanity.10 Accordingly, the songs Popmaster Fabel identified narrate social ills in order to warn of their negative effects and to promote more ethical life choices.

In marking these songs as “an extension of the proper Islamic tradi- tion,” Popmaster Fabel underscored how Muslim Cool and its ties to Blackness are implicated in tensions over orthodoxy in the history and experience of Islam in the United States. Yet he also identified the songs as “an extension of the proper Islamic tradition,” thus also emphasizing the reach and influence of Black Islam beyond Black Muslim communi- ties. He highlighted key hip hop technologies— vinyl records, tape cas- settes, the radio, and sampling techniques— as essential mediums that introduced and reintroduced Black Islam to non- Muslim audiences, and he located these songs within the ethical and spiritual Muslim tradition, whether or not the artists who wrote and performed them were Muslims themselves.11

“Black Islam” is a big tent term I use to describe the range of articu- lations of Muslim beliefs and practices among U.S. Black Americans. Under this big tent I include the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, the Moorish Science Temple, the Nation of Islam (NOI), and the Five Per- cent Nation of Gods and Earths as well as Sunni and Shi‘i orthodoxies (which include Sufi traditions). The wide breadth of the term is un- doubtedly controversial to some. Many orthodox Sunni and Shi‘i Mus- lims identify the Ahmadiyya, the NOI, the Moorish Science Temple, and the Five Percenters as unorthodox or even as non- Muslims because of these groups’ approaches to the Qur’an and hadith.12 Further, according to the ethnoreligious hegemonies of Arab and South Asian U.S. Ameri- can Muslims, the fezzes and turbans of the Black Moors, the bow ties of the NOI, and even the Geles (head wraps) worn by many U.S. Black Sunni women symbolically distinguish Black Islam as falling outside “true” Islam.

However, following the critical work of scholars Aminah McCloud, Sulayman Nyang, Yusuf Nuruddin, and Edward Curtis IV, I am less in- terested in claims of heterodoxy than in what links these articulations of Islam to the broader Islamic tradition, to each other, to U.S. Black Amer- ican history and contemporary life, and consequently to hip hop. These traditions of Black Islam share a pointed concern with the realities of

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Black communities living in conditions of systemic inequality. They re- spond to conditions of injustice by articulating alternative cosmologies, politics, and social norms geared toward individual and community em- powerment. Moreover, through the construction of what Curtis (2006) terms African American Islamic history narratives, these traditions as- sert genealogies that connect present- day U.S. Black Americans to a past that predates the transatlantic slave trade and to a transnational Black identity as well.

These varied engagements with Islam have related but diverging re- lationships to the intellectual and spiritual traditions that have devel- oped throughout global Muslim history, yet I bring them together under the banner of Black Islam, because within U.S. Black communities they speak the same language of Black consciousness, which is an important part of Black vernacular culture. By Black vernacular culture I am refer- ring to the everydayness of the Black experience in the United States. Black Islam is not only part of the extraordinary moments of Black life, embodied by larger- than- life figures such as Malcolm X, but also part of the grammar of everyday practices from language and dress to food.

Speaking to me over tea during my interview with her and Man- O- Wax, Tasleem gave the following detailed account of Chicago during the 1990s:

[Chicago hip hop artist] Common was like that: when he first came out, he would use words in his lyrics, he and other artists [said] things like “God” and “Earths.” They were influenced by God- consciousness; it was knowledge. Because I knew their crew personally, I know their diet and consciousness were influenced by Islam, whether it was the Nation of Islam or the Five Percenters. X Chromosome was [another] artist in the early 90s, a female, and she rapped about Black consciousness. She was in the Nation of Islam and the two guys with her were registered members, so they got their knowledge and their influences from the Nation of Islam. The Nation of Islam at that time was very visible and even the Hebrew Is- raelites were everywhere. They all had street credibility. You saw brothers selling The Final Call [the NOI newspaper], and even if you weren’t go- ing to the mosque [as a Muslim], we all went to Saviours’ Day or went to listen to Khalid Muhammad; it was everywhere. Even the Sunni Muslims were visible and Muslims got much respect, people wouldn’t mess with

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a Muslim. People used to call the adhan [call to prayer] out the windows at this one masjid, and the whole neighborhood knew. Even Jeff Fort and the El Rukn, they were calling themselves Muslim then, and the women would wear scarves and jilbabs.13

Tasleem’s account describes a Chicago in which Black Islam was Black vernacular culture: “it was everywhere,” she said, underscoring the signif- icance of the relationship between hip hop and Black Islam that Popmas- ter Fabel described beyond New York City and the 1970s. Like Popmaster Fabel, Tasleem traced Islam’s influence on hip hop not solely through Sunni orthodoxy, but through the NOI and the Five Percenters as well.

Tasleem identified the influence of Black Islam in a diverse collec- tion of people, places, activities, and material cultures. She mentioned the Chicago emcee Common, who is now a mainstream household name. Common’s hip hop reputation, like that of the less known emcee Tasleem also named, X Chromosome, is tied to his lyrics, which reflect “Black consciousness.” X Chromosome and her crew were members of the NOI, whose presence was palpable at that time. Male members sold the organization’s newspaper, The Final Call— likely at 79th Street and Stony Island Avenue near the NOI national headquarters— and NOI ministers were extremely popular; a prominent example is Khalid Mu- hammad, a controversial, now deceased NOI minister, who was (and continues to be) cited by artists of the hip hop generation.14 Further, Tasleem described an NOI whose influence was so great that even non- NOI members attended the NOI annual convention, Saviours’ Day, which celebrates the organization’s founding.

In Tasleem’s recollection, the Sunni Black Muslims whose call to prayer echoed throughout their neighborhoods, and the “literal, sym- bolic, and transnational connections to Muslim culture and identity” made by the Chicago street organization the Black P. Stone Nation also represented Black Islam (Nashashibi 2009, 271– 72). The Black P. Stone Nation was led by Jeff Fort, who upon his release from prison in the 1970s, renamed the organization the El Rukn, a word that means “cor- ner” or “pillar” in Arabic. Sunni Muslim culture was also evident in the female dress Tasleem described.

The terms Tasleem used to describe the influence and widespread proliferation of Muslim practices, “God- consciousness,” “knowledge,”

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“[healthy] diet,” “street credibility,” and “respect,” point to the central motivation of Black Islam: reshaping the way in which Black people see themselves, take care of themselves and each other, and remake the world. Importantly, Tasleem also included an explicitly non- Muslim group, the “Hebrew Israelites” or the community of Ben Ammi Ben Is- rael,15 not because she misidentified them as Muslim but rather because they spoke the same language as their Black Muslim counterparts. Her references, from Black Jews to Black Muslim newspapers, reflect the rhizome- like travel of Black Islam through many different yet connected actors to become Black vernacular culture.

Tasleem’s narrative demarcates the centrality of hip hop in this mi- lieu in which Black Islam was easily recognized and always “got much respect.” The Chicago context that it describes reflects what many call the “golden era” of hip hop. In contrast to the period that follows it and that is dominated by “Gangsta rap,” the golden era is defined by “the sheer number of stylistic innovations that came into existence,” innova- tions made by male as well as a growing number of female emcees that were lyrical, sonic, and thematic (Cobb 2007, 47).16 Critically, as Tasleem described it, in addition to innovations in style, the golden era was also defined by a renewed and powerful interest in Afrocentricity and Black Nationalism.

The video for Queen Latifah’s 1989 Black feminist anthem “Ladies First” opens with slides of five women: Harriet Tubman, the nineteenth- century abolitionist and poet Frances Harper, Sojourner Truth, Angela Davis, and Winnie Mandela. The images of Black women activists, both U.S. Black American and African, from different time periods, are shown accompanied by only the clicking sound of a slide projector as the images change. As the song’s music and the chorus “Oooh ladies first, ladies first” begin, the video switches between two different scenes of Queen Latifah. In the first scene, with two female dancers dressed in African print blazers and combat boots flanking her, Queen Latifah is wearing a black pants suit with a gold and black African print sash diagonally across her body. The sash and her sleeves, with gold stripes around the wrist, give the look a military and Afrocentric feel. In the second scene Queen Latifah is alone and is wearing a head wrap and a white military- style suit while authoritatively studying a large chess- board map of Africa, on which the camera angles focus on South Africa.

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In these scenes and images, which represent only the first twenty sec- onds of the video, Queen Latifah displays Black consciousness— a mix of Black Nationalist and Pan- African sensibilities as well as an Afro- centric hip hop aesthetic.17 The core tenets of Black Nationalism and Pan- Africanism are self- determination and self- reliance for African- descended peoples (Dawson 2003; Harris- Lacewell 2006). These tenets are demonstrated in Queen Latifah’s video in the selection of the women portrayed, who link African- descended people across the African dias- pora; in the focus on South Africa, which specifically linked U.S. Black Americans with the antiapartheid struggle; and in the military style of dress, which evokes the power of Black self- determination.

Black Nationalism and Pan- Africanism are also defined by the as- piration toward and adoption of alternatives to the social, political, economic, and cultural epistemologies of mainstream White American society. In U.S. Black American communities, Islam has consistently been seen as a viable alternative to the White and Christian U.S. main- stream, and as a result the pairing of Black consciousness and Islam is

Sisters, Philadelphia, Penn., 1996. Courtesy of Jamel Shabazz.

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a consistent feature of the U.S. Black American experience.18 From all official accounts, Queen Latifah, née Dana Owens, is not herself Mus- lim,19 yet her choice of Latifah, a Muslim- identified name, as her stage name is not inconsequential. As an artist who self- identifies as politi- cally conscious, Queen Latifah’s name choice reflects a commonly held view within urban U.S. Black communities that Islam is in alignment with Afrocentric and pro- Black sensibilities.20

In addition to the aesthetics of style and naming, this alignment is demonstrated in the sampling of male Black Muslim leaders such as Malcolm X, as described by Popmaster Fabel. For example, an excerpt of a recorded speech by Minister Louis Farrakhan introduces the 1989 track “Young, Gifted and Black” by the Brooklyn Five Percenter emcee and hip hop legend Big Daddy Kane. Likewise, the album Death Certifi- cate by Ice Cube features excerpts of speeches by Khalid Muhammad. Black Sunni Muslim men also appear in hip hop music: the legendary hip hop group A Tribe Called Quest end the song “Phoney Rappers” with a clip from a speech by Brooklyn Imam Siraj Wahhaj. In the se- lections featured, Farrakhan and Muhammad preach that Black people have been divinely appointed as the leaders of humanity and Wahhaj warns against a failing moral center in U.S. society. Through their words of Black pride and social critique, these Black Muslim men serve as aural representations of the Black consciousness that links Islam and hip hop.

This alignment between Black consciousness, Black Islam, and hip hop is also articulated in lyrics. The group Public Enemy (PE) is well known for its “overt references to NOI doctrine, icons and rhetoric” (Floyd- Thomas 2003, 51). On the group’s 1988 album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, PE front man Chuck D identified himself as “the follower of Farrakhan, don’t tell me that you understand until you hear the man” in the song “Don’t Believe the Hype”; in another song, “Bring Noise,” he declares, “Farrakhan’s a prophet and I think you ought to listen to what he has to say to you” (Public Enemy 1988).21 Likewise, in Lauryn Hill’s warning song, “Doo Wop,” she advises, “Yo, my men and women, don’t forget about the deen, the sirat al- mustaqim,” and she reprimands her people for “talking out ya neck like you a Christian, a Muslim sleeping with the jinn.”

In her admonitions, Hill, who is not a Muslim, refers directly to Sunni Muslim beliefs. She cites a verse from the opening chapter of the

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Qur’an, “Al- Fatiha,” when she reminds her listeners to stay true to the “true way of life” (deen) and to adhere to “the straight path” (sirat al- mustaqim) and chides them for spiritual hypocrisy— claiming to be holy but spending their time with devilish beings (jinn). Similarly, on his track “I Ain’t Mad at Cha” Tupac Shakur raps about his homie who “hit the pen and now no sinning is the game plan.” His friend, who converted to Islam in prison, is now a “Muslim with no time for dope games” who “wants to go to the mosque; no time for females.” In addi- tion to describing his friend’s personal transformation, Tupac speaks to the way in which being Muslim in the U.S. Black community is often identified with not only personal righteousness but also a commitment

Big Daddy Kane, Chicago, 1986. Courtesy of Jamel Shabazz.

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to the uplift of Black people as a whole, as evidenced by his verse “When I say I’m living large all you see is the struggle.”

The pursuit of righteousness is a recurring theme in hip hop verses composed by emcees from the Five Percenters, a genre Felicia Miyakawa (2005) calls “God Hop.” For example, the Brand Nubian song “Allah and Justice” is an adaptation of the Five Percenter anthem “The Enlightener,” which is sung at Five Percenter community events. Lyrics such as “God came to teach us of the righteous way / How to build and be born on this glorious day” refer back to Five Percenter beliefs, and the song’s verses detail the science of Supreme Mathematics, the Five Percenter numero- logical system, making the song itself a lesson for Five Percenters. The proliferation of such hip hop songs in turn introduces new audiences to Five Percenter beliefs (Knight 2008).22

Five Percenter religious practice is structured around “breaking down” numbers and words in order to reveal their deeper meanings on a path to knowledge of self.23 The kind of linguistic deconstruction and mastery of words required by these teachings has set the standard for rhetorical eloquence and word play in hip hop lyricism, making the list of emcees who are also Five Percenters an impressive one. It includes legends such as Rakim, groups such as the Poor Righteous Teachers, and innovators such as the Wu Tang Clan. Accordingly, Five Percenter ideas have also informed hip hop vernacular. Common phrases in hip hop music and culture, such as “What up God,” “dropping science,” and “word is bond” come directly from Five Percenter lessons.24

While the hip hop golden era is notable for “shifting the center of the rap world . . . decidedly in a Black Nationalist direction” (Chang 2005, 229), the value of golden era hip hop for Black consciousness goes back to the very origins of hip hop music and culture, which are in turn linked to hip hop’s early relationship to Black Islam. Afrika Bambaataa, one of the godfathers of hip hop, credits the NOI messages of Black pride and self- respect for changing his own thinking and leading him to reorga- nize his 1970s street organization Black Spades to form the Zulu Nation:

They [NOI] held the teachings of “You’re not a ‘nigga.’ You’re not colored. Wake up Black man and Black woman and love yourself. Respect your own. Turn back to Africa.” That started sticking with a lot of the brothers

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and sisters. . . . And that always stuck in my mind and heart. I said I have to do some type of change to get the mindset of the masses that was fol- lowing me to lead them to another way. (Chang 2005, 100)

Members of the Zulu Nation are united by hip hop music and the pursuit of a common set of values, which include knowledge, wisdom, understanding, freedom, justice, peace, unity, love, respect, work, fun, science, truth, facts, faith, and the oneness of God.25 Many of these val- ues are universal, yet they also reflect the influence of Black Islam on hip hop.

The Last Poets, an ensemble consisting of poets and a percussionist, is often cited as the progenitor of hip hop, specifically the art of emcee- ing. Jelani Cobb refers to the group “as proto- rappers, playing many of the verbal techniques that would later become central to MCs (emcees)” (Cobb 2007, 42). In 2005, in a nod to that history Common featured The Last Poets in his critically acclaimed ode to the ’hood, “The Corner.” Coming out of the Black Arts Movement, the aesthetic arm of the Black Power tradition, the work of The Last Poets reflects a Black conscious- ness perspective, an Afrocentric aesthetic, and the influence of Black Islam.

The Last Poets was formed in 1968 at a commemorative event to celebrate the life of Malcolm X. Reflecting on the group’s formation, Abiodun Oyewole identified Malcolm X as the group’s “pathway to revo- lutionary understanding”:

Malcolm went through a series of rites of passage— from Malcolm Little to Detroit Red to Satan to Malcolm X to El- Hajj Malik El- Shabazz. All this because this man never stopped trying to develop and recognize the best of himself. Malcolm was saying we need to be more. And we heard that. And he said it better than anybody ever said it. He made things clear to us. So all we wanted to do was to be disciples of Malcolm, in a sense using poetry to illuminate the same values that he had planted in our heads. (Oyewole 2003)

The model of rebirth that Malcolm symbolized and encouraged in The Last Poets is repeated in contemporary hip hop narratives. As Cobb (2007) argues, Malcolm’s autobiographical form is replicated throughout

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hip hop storytelling: fatherlessness and poverty lead to a life of crime, and a stint in the penitentiary leads to penitence and rebirth.26 It is important to note that while Malcolm X is iconic, his narrative is not singular. Rather, he epitomizes the possibility for Black resistance and redemption that Black Islam represents in U.S. Black communities. Ac- cordingly, even the non- Muslim members of The Last Poets identified with Islam at some point because “it [Islam] touches a lot of brothers who come out of the streets” (Oyewole and Hassan 1996, 31).

Black Islam touched a lot of brothers and sisters because, as Tasleem noted, Black Islam was everywhere. The art and culture described by Tasleem as well as The Last Poets and Afrika Bambaataa, and demon- strated by Queen Latifah show that during the twentieth century Black Islam was a social phenomenon known for advancing the principles of Black consciousness, resistance, and redemption and an interdepen- dent notion of community that was broadly experienced in U.S. Black communities. Through music and poetry, the model of Black Muslim leaders such as Malcolm X, and the practice of Black Islam in everyday U.S. Black life, a body of shared knowledge on Black Islam emerged in urban communities through which Black Islam became Black vernacu- lar culture.

From Afrika Islam’s radio show and the lyrics of Common, Lauryn Hill, Public Enemy, and Ice Cube to nods at Malcolm X and Muham- mad Ali as icons of Black cool and to Queens- bred and non- Muslim rapper Nicki Minaj’s quip “I don’t fuck with pigs like As Salaamu Alai- kum” (Minaj 2009), hip hop’s engagement with Black Islam varies in its intensity. But however meaningful or irreverent, hip hop’s early and continuing engagement with Black Islam reflects the enduring impact of Black Islam on hip hop music and culture. This impact manifests itself in many ways but is defined by Black Islam’s most significant contribu- tion to hip hop: knowledge of self.

Knowledge of Self as Hip Hop Epistemology

At exactly which point do you start to realize that life without knowledge is death in disguise? That’s why knowledge of self is like life after death Apply it to your life, let destiny manifest (Def and Kweli 1998)

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These lyrics are taken from Talib Kweli’s song “K.O.S. (Determina- tion)” on the album Mos Def & Talib Kweli Are Black Star. Kweli is not a Muslim, in contrast to his friend and musical partner on this album, Mos Def, currently known as Yasiin Bey, who is a Sunni Muslim. The track title is taken from its call and response chorus: “With that, what? [call:] ‘Knowledge of Self Determination.’ [response].” Kweli’s lyrics “life without knowledge is death in disguise” do not describe a physi- cal death but the death of the spirit or mind. This harkens back to the NOI and the Five Percenter belief, as well as Sunni and Shi‘i thought, that an individual without self- knowledge is less of a human being and more akin to a beast of burden. Kweli then instructs his listener that with knowledge of self you can be reborn and your destiny will become manifest because you, as a god, the original man, or simply a servant empowered by the decree of the Divine can reach or experi- ence power. The song was released thirty- three years after NOI leader Elijah Muhammad published his seminal text Message to the Blackman in America (1965), in which he provides an exegetical exposition on knowledge of self. While neither Talib Kweli nor Mos Def are adher- ents of the NOI, this song indexes the centrality of knowledge of self to hip hop epistemology.

Knowledge of self, as articulated by the Nation of Islam, has been particularly influential in hip hop. Some add it to emceeing, b- boying/ b- girling, dj- ing, and graffiti as hip hop’s fifth element. References to knowledge of self in NOI theology can be found in the “Lost- Found Muslim Lessons,” the NOI catechism taught by W. D. Fard Muham- mad, the founder of the Nation of Islam, to Elijah Muhammad as his apostle. The title “Lost- Found” refers to the condition in which W. D. Fard found the “so- called Negro.”27 According to early NOI belief, U.S. Black Americans are descendants of the original inhabitants of Planet Earth and the ancestors of all humanity, forming the tribe of Shabazz (Muhammad 1965, 31). As “the Maker, Owner, and Cream of the Planet Earth,” U.S. Black Americans, descendants of enslaved Africans in the Western hemisphere, who lived in subjugation were seen, in an exis- tential sense, as lost or wandering without guidance in the “wilderness of North America.” When found by Master Fard they would discover knowledge of self and reclaim their rightful position among humankind. Two of these lessons teach that self- knowledge is to be “civilized” and

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endowed with knowledge of the self and also the social world— the sci- ence of everything:

Why did Mossa (Moses) have a hard time to civilize the Devil— 2000 BC?

Answer: Because he was a savage. Savage means a person that has lost the knowledge of himself and who is living a beast life. . . . Civilize means to teach the knowledge and wisdom of the human family of the planet Earth. (Lost- Found Muslim Lesson no. 1, Question 2)

What is the Duty of a civilized person?

Answer: To teach the uncivilized people, who are savage— civilization (righteousness, the knowledge of himself, the science of everything in life— love, peace and happiness). (Lost- Found Muslim Lesson no. 2, Question 18)

According to NOI beliefs, when knowledge is coupled with righ- teousness it leads to peace, happiness, and the dominion that is the natural right of the “original man.” Elijah Muhammad offers an exegesis on knowledge of self in his Message to the Blackman in America. I quote this exposition at length below in order to highlight three themes— time, learning, and action— which define knowledge of self as taken up in hip hop.

It is knowledge of self that the so- called Negroes lack which keeps them from enjoying freedom, justice, and equality. This belongs to them di- vinely as much as it does to other nations of the earth. It is Allah’s (God’s) will and purpose that we shall know ourselves. Therefore He came Him- self to teach us the knowledge of self. (Muhammad 1965, 31)

We must become aware of the knowledge of self and the time in which we are living. You must know these things whether you agree that Elijah Mu- hammad is on time or out of time. If what I say is out of season, it goes for nothing. If I am on time or in season, then all I say will bear fruit. . . . It is time for us to learn who we really are, and it is time for us to understand ourselves. . . . Trace over the earth. Check back 5,000, 10,000, or 20,000

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years ago. Look at history. Who were those people? They were our people. (Muhammad 1965, 34– 35)

I am for the acquiring of knowledge or the accumulating of knowl- edge— as we now call it; education. First, my people must be taught the knowledge of self. Then and only then will they be able to understand others and that which surrounds them. Anyone who does not have a knowledge of self is considered a victim of either amnesia or uncon- sciousness and is not very competent. . . . Gaining the knowledge of self makes us unite into a great unity. Knowledge of self makes you take on the great virtue of learning. . . . We need an education, but an education which removes us from the shackles of slavery and servitude. . . . The ac- quiring of knowledge for our children and ourselves must not be limited to the three R’s— reading, ’riting and ’rithmetic. It should instead include the history of the black nation, the knowledge of civilization of man and the universe and all the sciences. (Muhammad 1965, 39– 41)

The so- called Negroes must be taught and given Islam. Why Islam? Islam, because it teaches first the knowledge of self. It gives us the knowledge of our own. Then and only then are we able to understand that which sur- rounds us. “Know thy self ” is the doctrine Socrates espoused, and this is the base of the educational system in America. The religion of Islam makes the so- called Negroes think in terms of self and their own kind. Thus, this kind of thinking produces an industrious people who are self- independent. (Muhammad 1965, 57– 58)

The first of the three central themes is time. Knowledge of time, dia- chronic and synchronic, is critical to knowledge of self. Muhammad directs his readers to “trace over the earth. Check back 5,000, 10,000, or 20,000 years ago. Look at history,” and knowledge of self relies on knowing the past— where the self originates. This knowledge of the past is particularly valuable because it facilitates correct knowledge of the present— the self in time— enabling individuals to interpret their condi- tion in the here and now. In the particular case of U.S. Black Americans, argues Muhammad, this kind of knowledge is essential to undo the cen- turies of “mis- education” (Woodson 2013) that has led many Blacks to believe they are inferior to Whites. The narrative that was dominant in

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the United States at the time Muhammad wrote Message to the Blackman and that persists today contained a history of the world that depicted White people as subjects and Black people as objects. As the adage goes, “knowledge is power,” and Muhammad thus argues that once empow- ered with knowledge of time, the Black individual is able to reinterpret his or her subordinate position and see it not as an inevitable result of Black inferiority but, as in NOI theology, as a specific juncture through which Black people are meant to regain their rightful position among humankind.

The second theme, which follows from the first and is critical to knowledge of self, is learning. Muhammad is for “the acquiring of knowledge.” Indeed, the knowledge of time is acquired through deliber- ate study. It was a pedagogical imperative within the NOI that adherents be required to study and memorize the Lost- Found Muslim Lessons, which included a rendering of scientific facts such as the circumference and age of Planet Earth. Being well versed in a range of facts was critical to knowledge of self, in and across time, and also drew on alternative knowledges that converged and diverged with mainstream narratives of science and history. Importantly, the learning was deliberate in that it was geared toward freedom from mental slavery. This deliberate learn- ing leads to the third theme of change and action. The journey toward knowledge of self is designed to change the way individuals think; spe- cifically, its goal is that Black people “think in terms of self and their own kind,” which will make them industrious and self- independent. For Mu- hammad, this kind of thinking is meant to reorient Black people away from an integrationist impulse and toward the shaping of a community that is autonomous from White society and envisions Black people as subjects and creators of their own destiny. In this way, knowledge of self works toward the cultivation of an awareness of self and the social world and encourages direct action to change the condition of the “so- called Negro” lost in the wilderness of North America.

These same three themes— time, learning, and action— run through appropriations of knowledge of self in hip hop. The hip hop articula- tions may adhere to the dispensationalism and Black exceptionalism fundamental to the NOI rendering of self- knowledge; however, more often, as in Kweli’s track, knowledge of self is interpreted more broadly. In hip hop, the pursuit of knowledge of self emphasizes being well in-

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formed about the past, particularly the alternative histories that privilege the “hidden transcripts” (Scott 1990) of marginalized peoples, as well as being keenly attuned to contemporary racialized, classed, and gendered oppression and the continuities of contemporary subjugation with past repression. Knowledge of self becomes an ethical epistemology vis- à- vis other human beings, animals, the natural world, and notions of the Divine that engenders a commitment to social change through personal transformation and direct action.

Going back to OmarMukhtar’s trajectory from the youth center to Black Panther literature to IMAN, OmarMukhtar situated himself in time. For him, Blackness and the Black American struggle for libera- tion became the means through which he understood his own position as a member of a racial minority. OmarMukhtar’s understanding and deployment of Blackness articulates what Sharma identifies as a “global race consciousness” that extends “the meaning of Blackness beyond bi- ology” (Sharma 2010, 230). Blackness operates as “a matter of critical understanding,” which prompts awareness of “how various racisms im- pact interminority relations and maintain the ideological supremacy of Whites” (Sharma 2010, 2). OmarMukhtar also learned through hip hop. Through his meditation on Five Percenter philosophy (“It’s like the RZA said”), he discovered what he considered the “core essence” of Islam: being compassionate, truthful, honest, sincere, just. This knowledge was critical, as it redirected him away from the privatized and insular sense of Muslimness dominant in his childhood community and toward a potentially more expansive and more action- oriented sense of Muslim identity.

Knowledge of self is the first bend in the loop of Muslim Cool, and like OmarMukhtar, my teachers moved toward knowledge of self in order to be Muslims. Many U.S. Muslims might object to this claim— that a concept derived from the NOI and interpolated through hip hop could undergird Muslim piety— because of the aforementioned ways in which Black Islam is seen as “outside” orthodox Islamic traditions. Yet for my teachers, the pursuit of knowledge of self reiterated the “cen- trality in Islamic thought and society of reason and knowledge,” arising from the Qur’an’s valorization of the human faculty of reasoning, en- dowed to humankind by God, and from prophetic traditions that elevate knowledge and learning (Rosen 2002, xi).

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Among the numerous directives in the Qur’an and the traditions of Prophet Muhammad are instructions that humans should reflect, con- sider, and contemplate the natural world as a means of reaching spiritual awareness. This is, as quoted above, precisely how Elijah Muhammad explicates knowledge of self. Not coincidentally, the celebrated twelfth- century Sunni scholar Abu Hamid al- Ghazali also championed the idea in his text The Alchemy of Happiness. In the first chapter, “On Knowl- edge of the Self,” al- Ghazali counsels Muslims to seek knowledge of self in order to know God: “What art thou in thyself, and from whence hast thou come? Whither art thou going, and for what purpose hast thou come to tarry here awhile?”28 Like Elijah Muhammad, al- Ghazali also locates knowledge of self in time, learning, and action.

My teachers are diverse. They are Sunni and Shi‘a, Arab, South Asian, Black, and Latin@; they are converts and they were raised Muslim since birth. Across this diversity they travel the loop of Muslim Cool and in doing so recover knowledge of self as, once again, a central episteme in U.S. American Muslim identity. In this way, Muslim Cool is also a com- mentary on orthodoxy, or on what “counts” as Islamic. My teachers were clear about what traditionally stands as Islamic orthodoxy: the oneness of an omnipotent and omnipresent God and the finality of prophethood in the life and body of Muhammad ibn Abdullah, born in the seventh century C.E. They did not claim to include, for example, the Five Per- centers under the umbrella of this traditional notion of orthodoxy, but they did seek connections to Black Islam and identified the various tra- ditions of Black Islam as legitimate resources through which they could interpret their own Muslimness.

When Elijah Muhammad taught his followers knowledge of self, he did so in response to racialized exclusion that marked Blackness as a site of social illegitimacy in the U.S. mainstream. He argued that awareness of “civilization- righteousness, the knowledge of himself, the science of everything in life” would return Black people to their legitimate social status. Likewise, Muslim Cool responds to the idea of Blackness as a site of social illegitimacy in the U.S. mainstream and as a site of religious illegitimacy among Arab and South Asian U.S. American Muslims. Through hip hop epistemology, that is, knowledge of self, Muslim Cool reclaims Black Islam and Blackness as a means of critique that informs action.

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Rabia

In comparison to OmarMukhtar, Rabia was less likely to cite the RZA with such precision, but she had also traveled the trajectory of knowl- edge of self to Muslim Cool. Rabia was an eighteen- year- old Pakistani American who was both an IMAN volunteer and one of my key teach- ers in the field. Sitting around the kitchen island in her family’s home in Bridgeview, I asked her, “Does hip hop help you be Muslim?” Without missing a beat she responded, “Yeah,” as if the answer was obvious. She continued, “Imagine if I was listening to Nicole Richie?” I countered, “But she is not a singer.” Rabia then offered, “OK then, Paris Hilton,” who also did not sing. Laughing at herself, Rabia exclaimed, “Well then, Hannah Montana! Imagine if I was listening to that Nickelodeon crap!” Rabia’s juxtaposition of hip hop with Nicole Richie, Paris Hilton, and Hannah Montana was telling. Rabia posited hip hop as an alternative to mainstream popular culture— represented by three White women, Richie, Hilton, and Montana— which Rabia saw as without value and potentially injurious (after all, “crap” is colloquial for feces).29 While I searched for accuracy in her comparison, it seemed to be irrelevant to Rabia that Richie and Hilton were not musical artists, because they, along with Montana, were not hip hop.

One afternoon, while driving from IMAN to an event on the South Side, Rabia, seated next to me in the car, blurted out, somewhat confes- sion-like, “Let me tell you something: the people I used to hang out with smoked weed— and hip hop was on all the time. I didn’t really know a different kind of hip hop until this last year when I began going to IMAN.” She went on to explain that through Man- O- Wax and others at IMAN she discovered “conscious” hip hop and other forms of alterity re- lated to it, such as vegetarianism. It is worth noting that the soundtrack to Rabia’s admission, like the soundtrack to her former friends’ mari- juana smoking, was hip hop. In fact, her reflection was provoked by what was playing on my car’s CD player, “The Score,” the first (and thus far the last) album of the hip hop group The Fugees.

Rabia was excited to hear the album, which she had just discovered, and she raved about the first track “How Many Mics,” which makes reference to Khalid Muhammad. Since Sunni orthodoxy prohibits rec- reational drug use, it was clear that Rabia was concerned that her as-

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sociation with weed smoking would negatively affect my opinion of her. I was not moved by her admission of weed- smoking friends,30 but I was floored by the fact that she had only recently heard “The Score.” The Fugees are often seen as icons of “conscious” hip hop, so I expected that as an IMAN volunteer Rabia would be as familiar with them as OmarMukhtar and I, who could recite the album backward and for- ward. What I failed to account for at the time was not only the fact that she had only recently been introduced to IMAN and by extension to “conscious” hip hop but also her age: when “The Score” was released, Rabia was only eight years old.

I met Rabia at IMAN, where she had been active since she started college. Rabia’s family had initially lived in the city but had moved to Bridgeview when she was a young child. Rabia was in college at the time of my fieldwork and had yet to decide between a career in law and one in medicine. She was a commuter student who negotiated her comings and goings with her parents. Rabia’s volunteering at IMAN was at times an additional source of tension with her parents, as it represented another reason in addition to school for her to be away from home. Yet Rabia successfully asserted her autonomy— granted less by her parents’ wishes than through the sheer force of her own youthful willfulness. Rabia was also something of an urban fashionista: her scarf usually matched the swoosh in her Nikes, and at the time of my fieldwork she was consider- ing dance classes that would add b- girl to her growing list of qualifica- tions. One afternoon we discussed her relationship to her university’s Muslim Students Association (MSA), and Rabia explained why she was not very involved with the group:

Rabia: It’s . . . I don’t know, I guess I never gave it [MSA] a chance, to explore it.

Su’ad: What do you think [made you not do that]? Rabia: I guess I judge those people in the MSA. You saw how it was!

The guys don’t even salam31 on you, and then the girls, they just, like, there are some cool girls but some them are just, like, weird to me, so I just don’t try to mingle with them.

Su’ad: The other girls, what makes them weird to you? Rabia: I don’t know; to me, they are just like typical desi girls, and

that’s just not like me at all. So I, like, don’t even . . .

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Rabia felt out of place at her MSA because she was not “a typical desi [i.e., South Asian] girl.” Who is a typical desi girl? For Rabia, such girls were young South Asian American women who “only hang out with other desis, they only speak in Urdu, they only watch desi movies.” Fur- thermore, according to Rabia, beyond the leisure activities of “smoking hookah, going out to dinner and to Cedar Point [amusement park],” they do not do anything that is “valuable.” In Rabia’s estimation, be- cause the typical desi girl’s universe of concerns is limited to “family, desi friends, getting married, and going to medical school,” she fits within, rather than challenges, the South Asian U.S. American Muslim commu- nity’s status quo. It is important to note that Rabia’s “typical desi girl” is a bit of a straw desi girl; even within Rabia’s description, the “typical desi girl” does not always abide by the status quo. Notably, “smoking hookah” as a leisure activity is not likely to be endorsed by all immigrant South Asian parents.

Rabia’s “typical desi girl” corresponds to what Sharma terms “hege- monic desiness” (Sharma 2010). Hegemonic desiness denotes a way of being South Asian in the United States “among South Asian immigrants contending with their new status as [racial] minorities” that pivots on exceptional financial and educational success and ethnic insularity (Sharma 2010, 85). Like Rabia, Sharma also identifies college student cultural organizations as sites of hegemonic desiness. For Sharma’s desi emcee interlocutors, being authentically Indian within Indian student organizations meant coming from or aspiring toward middle- class con- sumptive practices such as suburban living, dressing in Abercrombie and Fitch clothes, and adhering to heterosexual norms (Sharma 2012). “Being Indian” also rested on cultural authenticity, which then made one culturally authoritative, a designation bestowed on certain students because they displayed “cultural knowledge and because they socialized strictly with Indians” (Sharma 2010, 60). Part of this authenticity was also tied to the “religious hegemony of Indian Hindus” (Sharma 2010, 52). Likewise, Maira (2008) describes second- generation Indian Ameri- cans who navigated predominately White college environments by en- gaging in “ethnicizing moves.” These are symbolic markers such as dress and jewelry as well as “literally performing their ethnic identity with ‘bhangra moves’ . . . to assert . . . ethnic identity” (Maira 2008, 56). Both Maira and Sharma show that hegemonic desiness, although somewhat

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more palatable to the multicultural tastes of White U.S. normativity, is a performance of a particular type of desiness rather than Whiteness.

Importantly, Rabia encountered hegemonic desiness not in a South Asian American student group, where she might have felt marginal as a non- Hindu, but in the Muslim Students Association. This is somewhat ironic, considering how well Rabia fit her MSA’s demographic: young, South Asian U.S. American, and Muslim. Because Rabia felt out of place at the MSA, most of my subsequent encounters with the organization, at their events and in the MSA prayer room, took place without her. These encounters were made possible in part by the relationship I developed with a young Puerto Rican convert, Leticia. She had converted to Islam in high school through her South Asian U.S. American Muslim female classmates, and while I was conducting fieldwork Leticia served on the MSA’s executive board. Yet her leadership position in the group only confirmed Rabia’s view of the MSA.

I met up with Leticia at a small but popular café in her neighborhood, far from the hallowed halls of her university but close to her roots, in Humboldt Park. I was starting a cleanse the next day so had to avoid all the lovely pastries, cupcakes, slices of cake, caribe grilled cheese, and fresh bread and butter at the café— although I did determine that hot chocolate fell somehow within my precleanse program (it was really, re- ally good). We sat in a corner, and Leticia described her experience with the MSA. She explained that she was “working with them [the MSA students] to try not to be so secluded,” particularly “the immigrant stu- dents [second- generation South Asian U.S. Americans] who think every Black Muslim is a convert. . . . They are also very medical- and science- focused.” Part of her efforts involved getting the MSA to cosponsor an event with a Latin@ fraternity about Latin@ Muslims and collaborating with antiracist groups on campus to fight Islamophobia.

“Working with them” was hard work. Leticia found that her South Asian U.S. American Muslim college classmates were either unwilling or unable to see the need to be active in the broader college community, let alone the city of Chicago. Part of this resistance arose from attitudes of anti- Blackness that played themselves out through microaggres- sions, such as assuming a Black Muslim must be a convert and thus less schooled in the religion. Although Leticia is Latina and not phenotypi- cally Black, anti- Black attitudes had direct implications for Leticia’s au-

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thority as an MSA board member and for her feelings of belonging as a convert to Islam. She recounted being subjected to racialized class- based prejudices, such as a Muslim classmate’s question and comment: “Leti- cia, are those your Jordans? They are nice. You are so ghetto!” At this MSA, hegemonic desiness operated as a performance of Muslimness in which class mattered. This made Leticia feel out of place for being “so ghetto” or failing to be appropriately middle class.

Leticia also echoed Rabia’s description of male- female interactions at the MSA. She explained that after being seen chatting in front of a campus building with “two guys I knew and one from MSA,” she was reprimanded by a fellow student, who told her that this was inappropri- ate behavior. Leticia concluded that “maybe because I was on the MSA exec board I might have a little more leeway [to talk to members of the opposite gender because of the demands of the position], but to be outside doing that” was considered unseemly. While I was conducting fieldwork, the MSA’s prayer space was remodeled to include a high wall between the male and female prayer areas, and there was implicit social pressure to sit and socialize separately at MSA events. Thus the prevail- ing notions of piety seemed to hinge to some extent on gender segrega- tion; as Leticia put it, at MSA “everything is separate.”

Not too long after Rabia’s confession on the car ride, I visited her again at her family’s large suburban home, which not only housed her immediate family members but also was a frequent way station for rela- tives newly immigrated to the United States. Seated at the kitchen table, I watched while Rabia enthusiastically informed her mother about a food cooperative that sold organic zabiha meat (meat slaughtered according to Islamic jurisprudence). Rabia’s mother was a very devout Muslim and accordingly purchased only zabiha meat for her family. Therefore, while she was quite pleased with Rabia’s insistence on zabiha, at that moment her sole concern was that the meat was killed properly.

Through her participation in IMAN’s programming Rabia had been introduced to a number of ideologies around food, such as vegetarian- ism and the concept of tayyib. The term “tayyib” appears in a Qur’anic verse that enjoins Muslims to eat food that is halal (permissible) and tayyib (good and wholesome).32 Muslim advocates of organic farming argue that tayyib is consequently a necessary condition of a proper Mus- lim diet and that in order for that condition to be met, animals must

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be raised humanely (Abdul- Matin 2010). Dietary prescriptions such as these can be found in a number of prophetic traditions that encourage moderation in eating and drinking as well as limits to the consumption of meat, along with the Qur’anic prohibitions on pork and alcohol. Yet Rabia’s enthusiasm for organic halal meat had not been ignited by the dietary discourses of the Hanafi orthodoxy of her home community but rather through hip hop’s interpolation of Black Islam.33

There are a number of hip hop songs that speak to the necessity of eating healthfully and prescribe certain rules for eating. The chorus of A Tribe Called Quest’s track “Ham n’ Eggs” declares, “I don’t eat no ham n’ eggs, cuz they’re high in cholesterol,” and each member of the crew, when asked “Do you eat em?” responds with “No, not at all” (ATCQ 1990).34 In the song “Be Healthy,” dead prez’s Stic.Man rhymes, “I don’t eat no meat, no dairy, no sweets, only ripe vegetables, fresh fruit and whole wheat” (dead prez 2000). Likewise, KRS- One released an early hip hop manifesto against beef. This song, entitled “Beef,” narrates the perils of factory farming, including the “fear and stress” of the cows, which transfer to the humans who “thaw it [frozen beef] out with the blood and season it / then you sit down and begin eatin’ it” (BDP 1990). Importantly, many of these songs’ directives can be traced back to Black Islam.35 This is done implicitly by ATCQ when the group members col- lectively eschew ham, evoking the “no pork on my fork” mantra of U.S. Black American Muslims, and when Stic.Man eats only whole wheat bread, referencing the NOI prohibition against white bread. It is also done explicitly when KRS- One directs his listeners to “Read the book How to Eat to Live by Elijah Muhammad, it’s a brown paperback” (BDP 1990).

In her work on U.S. Black American Muslims, Carolyn Rouse (2004) examines diet as a means of “ingesting ideology.” She discusses Elijah Muhammad’s prohibition of what he called “slave food”— foods such as collard greens and sweet potatoes that are commonly used in Black Southern cuisine. Muhammad labeled these foods “slave food” because he argued that they “are unfit for human consumption” as they were discarded by the slave- holding class and were given to Blacks only to emphasize the latter’s allegedly subhuman status. Accordingly, for Mu- hammad eating these foods reproduced the logics of Black enslavement and blocked the path to knowledge of self. Muhammad, who located his

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70 | The Loop of Muslim Cool

teachings within the broader Islamic tradition, also encouraged modera- tion in eating and drinking and limited the consumption of meat. He viewed such prescriptions as necessary for spiritual purification in order for Blacks to reclaim their God- given roles on earth. After Muhammad’s death and the transition of many of his followers to Sunni orthodoxy, many of his proscriptions were abandoned and “soul food” was rein- corporated into the Black Muslim diet (Rouse 2004). But Muhammad’s fundamental message that “you are what you eat” endures. Black Mus- lims, following the traditions of Black Islam, can be found, for example, lauding the benefits of honey as a prophetic medicine that can help over- come the disproportionate health problems affecting Black Americans and praising the prohibitions on alcohol and drugs as fundamental to curbing the substance abuse that wreaks havoc on Black communities (Rouse 2004). Food choices and taboos thus remain a key technique of liberation in Black Islam.

I never heard Rabia invoke the term “slave food,” but I knew her in- troduction to organic zabiha meat to be informed by this history. She learned much of the history under the tutelage of Man- O- Wax, who was himself a vegetarian and encouraged healthy eating among youth.36 Her journey through knowledge of self can be charted in her consump- tion not only of food but of hip hop— The Fugees as well as local hip hop artists such as D- Nick the Microphone Misfit, who ran workshops with IMAN’s youth participants and whose song “Abnormality” features these lines:

from the lies, the scandal, the food pyramid the suckas that invented that need to do a bid you want freedom from disease and abnormality ’cause you don’t want this stuff affecting your reality.

Accordingly, Rabia’s learning through knowledge of self included the ability to identify inequality as systemic. Moreover, Rabia was tuned in to what healthy eating means in time. She was concerned about both fac- tory farm animals and food deserts, and she took her first step toward action with her mother. Rabia was consistently passionate about learn- ing and about being a part of social change. During the time I knew her, she drafted a number of social justice projects, including a campaign to

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address the lack of hygienic conditions in Cook County youth jails and an urban farming effort on the South Side. Not all of her projects were actualized, but they all demonstrated the way in which knowledge of self as hip hop epistemology enabled social understanding and action linked to Black Islam. By thinking and being a U.S. American Muslim through Blackness, Rabia made the final turn to Muslim Cool.

Fatema

It [the ’hoodjab] means [being] connected to a certain type of people or culture; people who are down with the hip hop scene, that whole Afro- centricity thing too, people who are very Afrocentric but not actually Af- rican. I think it’s cool because it connects you to not only a culture but also a way of thinking, and it can connect you to hip hop, because hip hop is a form of expression that opens you up— you are open- minded, you are fighting for people who don’t have a voice, and the very fact that you are wearing it but you are not from an African culture shows you can connect to African culture as well, and it has potential to make you a part of a larger movement.

In this comment, Fatema, one of my key teachers in the field, was responding to a question I had posed regarding a particular headscarf style, the ’hoodjab (described in detail in chapter 3), that is often worn in U.S. Black American Muslim communities and also by young U.S. American Muslim women, Black and non- Black, engaged in hip hop culture. I was visiting Fatema at the apartment that she shared with her brother, located near the university where she was a junior. I had met Fatema at IMAN, where she was working on community mapping projects and coordinating youth programming. Fatema described being drawn to IMAN because she was seeking out meaning in her life and “wanted to do more than going to weddings every weekend.” She was Pakistani U.S. American and, like Rabia, felt that most of her South Asian U.S. American Muslim peers were preoccupied by concerns that were “shallow when the world is much deeper.” She saw herself as differ- ent from her peers and was motivated to do something, but she did not think that something could happen in the “’burbs” where she grew up. Therefore, Fatema made a conscious choice to move outside the suburbs

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72 | The Loop of Muslim Cool

to be active in addressing “deeper” concerns. This move included trans- ferring to a university in the city of Chicago.

In the course of explaining why the ’hoodjab headscarf style was “cool,” Fatema reiterated Man- O- Wax’s hip hop trajectory, described earlier. She identified hip hop as “a form of expression that opens you up” and that connects to “that whole Afrocentricity thing” and “a larger movement.” Her use of the term “African” was not flippant nor a gloss but rather Diasporic and an indication of the Afrodiasporic roots of hip hop. She further explained that connecting to Blackness through hip hop, even when “you are not from an African culture . . . has potential to make you a part of a larger movement.” Thus as for OmarMukhtar and for Rabia, for Fatema hip hop was epistemology, knowledge of self that comes through learning in time and leads to action “fighting for people who don’t have a voice” through her participation in social justice efforts aimed at alleviating Black suffering.

Fatema, Rabia, and OmarMukhtar are three young U.S. Muslims who are stereotypically distant from Blackness— they are not only non- Black, but also the children of immigrants who grew up middle class and in the suburbs and are subsequently expected to acclimate, if not assimilate, to Whiteness. Yet it is precisely because of this distance that their stories most vividly illustrate how Muslim Cool works to cultivate U.S. Muslim identities through Blackness. At the same time, because of this distance, it would be easy to locate their self- making within a discourse of cultural appropriation, which I interrogate when I turn to Fatema’s headscarf in chapter 3. But here I follow Sharma (2010) to suggest an alternative interpretation for this non- Black Muslim self- making through Black- ness: as an extension of earlier traditions of Afro- Asian and Arab- Black American solidarity.

OmarMukhtar drew on the Black radical tradition to reorganize his conceptions of himself as an Arab U.S. American Muslim in ways that challenged his community’s sanction of Blackness. Likewise, the Black radical tradition looked to struggles in locales such as Algeria to re- conceptualize the Black struggle in the United States as part of a global anticolonial struggle. As Sohail Daulatzai narrates, anticolonial move- ments as depicted and disseminated in films like the Battle of Algiers provided “an alternative grammar of resistance and a unique language of revolt” for Black Power activists (Daulatzai 2012, 80). And in 2014,

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after Israel’s assault on Gaza and the protests that arose across the United States in the aftermath of numerous consecutive shootings of unarmed Black men and women, some U.S. Black American leaders again global- ized Black struggles in the United States by looking to Palestine. One hip hop example of this is a track by Beatnick and K- Salaam (an Iranian U.S. American Muslim) with Talib Kweli and M1 (of dead prez) called “Checkpoints: From Ghetto to Gaza.” This song represents an extension of an early tradition of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle (Lubin 2009).

Likewise, there is a tradition of Afro- Asian solidarity. U.S. Asian American activists such as Yuri Kochiyama and Grace Lee Boggs were critical actors in the Black Power movements of the twentieth century (Ho and Mullen 2008; Lee 2013). The “little red book,” Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse Tsung, and Communist China inspired the revolu- tionary activism of the Black Panther Party and other 1960s Black radi- cal activists (Kelley and Esch 1999). The technique and discipline of martial artists such as Bruce Lee influenced the development of hip hop dance (Schloss 2009), and the martial arts are a staple in U.S. Black Mus- lim life. Furthermore, martial arts as a philosophy of self- discipline and self- defense is a common theme in hip hop music and imagery (Banjoko 2004), most famously exemplified by the Wu Tang Clan.

In terms of specific Black and South Asian solidarities in the United States, Mufti Sadiq, the first Ahmadi missionary to the United States, proselytized to Black communities by connecting the South Asian struggle against British colonialism with the struggle against U.S. racism (Curtis 2009). In her work on hip hop desis in the twenty- first century, Sharma (2010) argues that engaging Blackness through hip hop is not a move to appropriate Blackness but a move that rejects notions of race and ethnicity that essentialize Asian Americans as a model minority and Black Americans as their antithesis. Thus, hip hop becomes a way to dis- rupt narratives that divide and conquer Asian U.S. Americans and Black U.S. Americans in order to prop up white supremacy.

Through Muslim Cool, Fatema, Rabia, and OmarMukhtar extended these legacies of solidarity through hip hop’s and therefore Black Islam’s emphasis on understanding and action. All three have now graduated from college and to a certain extent from IMAN, but they continue to embody Muslim Cool in their personal and professional lives, pursuing

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74 | The Loop of Muslim Cool

“the understanding of how to get justice, freedom, and equality” as well as “love, peace, and happiness.” Their interactions with real- life Black people in activist projects that directly confront the violence of racism helped to prevent the flattening of Blackness in their own conscious- ness. The relationships to hip hop and Black people that they developed through their activism meant engaging knowledge of self as Muslims traveling the loop of Muslim Cool.

Toward the end of OmarMukhtar’s reflection, he cited the Five Per- cent: “It’s like the RZA said— [this statement is] a Five Percent thing I like to carry around— ‘You need knowledge, wisdom, understanding, justice, freedom, equality, love, peace, and happiness.’” Like a sample that is looped to create a musical track, Yahya repeated these words— words in which the RZA is citing the Supreme Mathematics of the Five Percent— throughout his commentary. This citation is deeply significant because it traces the loop of Muslim Cool. Through hip hop, which is critically informed by Black Islam, U.S. Muslims turn to Black Islam as a way of thinking and a way of being Muslim.

My teachers demonstrate a relationship to the Islamic tradition and Muslim piety that has been made through the founding theologies and experiences of Black Islam. Notions of the Islamic tradition and Muslim piety have been “hot topics,” particularly in the aftermath of 9/11. The discourse of orientalism (Said 1979) and related concepts such as the “clash of civilizations” (Huntington 1993) construct the murky objects “the West” and the “Muslim world” (are they places? spaces? cultures? discourses?) as entities divided by fundamental differences of religion, politics, and a whole host of sensibilities. Critically, these differences presuppose and naturalize the superiority of the West. The attacks of 9/11 and their political, cultural, and discursive aftermath have led to an increased interest in this “difference.”

Anthropologists have generally responded to this interest by attempt- ing to undo the elisions between Islam and violence by sharing a more complex vision of Muslim life. In particular, work on piety (Mahmood 2005; Hirschkind 2009), building on the work of Talal Asad (1986, 1993, 2003), has sought to trouble the naturalization of (White)37 Western su- premacy through ethnographic inquiries into Islamist movements that articulate ways of being that are often explicitly oppositional to secular liberal humanism. Whereas Euro- American scholarship tends to pre-

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sume the universality of the secular liberalist notions of the nature of the self as autonomous and always seeking autonomy and of a “natural” teleology of history and human progress, these studies have critically highlighted the multiplicity of self- making. However, this work has been critiqued as treating piety or religiosity as the only or primary thing of interest to Muslims, for focusing on “paradigmatic models” as the epitome of piety with no room for ambiguity and ambivalence (Schielke 2009), and for taking pious practice out of its broader context and the conversations pious Muslims are having with other, related discourses (Deeb 2009).

Muslim Cool stands both within and outside the terms of this de- bate. My teachers would never refer to themselves or their aspirations as trying to be pious. The piety intervention focuses on embodiment, specifically on how piety manifests through efforts to perfect one’s per- formance of religious ritual. My teachers engaged in ritual practice to different degrees, but ritual was not what their piety hinged on. In fact for many, exemplified by OmarMukhtar, the quest for piety described in the anthropological literature distracts from the real point of being Muslim, which for them is advancing social justice. Further, paradig- matic models of piety can align with orientalist/secular imaginaries that would presume a necessary opposition between Islam and hip hop. Such opposition is necessary when pitting the Muslims against the West. But these are not the terms of debate for my teachers. While as Muslims they are also implicated in these debates, the frame of their engagement with hip hop was not “civilizational” but racial. Linking their Muslimness to Blackness, which is often absent in the popular and academic discus- sions of piety, their sense of Muslim identity was not forged in opposi- tion to “the West” but in opposition to white supremacy.

Emerging at the meeting of hip hop and Black Islam, like a hip hop sample Muslim Cool is composed through the loop of knowledge of self. Young Muslims are doing epistemological work— learning and pursuing knowledge of self through hip hop, which loops back to Blackness and Islam. For non- Black Americans of color like OmarMukhtar, Rabia, and Fatema, this move diverges from romantic notions of Americanization in which White middle- class normativity is a much sought after ideal (Sharma 2010). Young Muslims moving toward Blackness and using hip hop to form their Muslim identities are reorganizing their concep-

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tions of the self and the world and in the process challenging hegemonic forms of knowledge (Hill 2009) in U.S. American Muslim communi- ties in which many view hip hop and Black Muslim practices through the lenses of anti- Blackness. This is a powerful intervention by young Muslims across race and class whose relationships to Blackness, Black people, and hip hop are mediated through faith and activism.

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