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Muslim Cool

Muslim Cool Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States

Su’ad Abdul Khabeer

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York www.nyupress.org

© 2016 by New York University All rights reserved

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In the name of Allah

For the love of Muhammad

To honor the Ancestors

In celebration of my People

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Loop of Muslim Cool: Black Islam, Hip Hop, and Knowledge of Self

2. Policing Music and the Facts of Blackness

3. Blackness as a Blueprint for the Muslim Self

4. Cool Muslim Dandies: Signifyin’ Race, Religion, Masculinity, and Nation

5. The Limits of Muslim Cool

Conclusion: #BlackLivesMatter

Notes Discography Bibliography Index About the Author

Acknowledgments

Like a hip hop awardee at the Grammys, first and foremost I would like to thank God. I thank Allah for making all things possible and ask Allah to purify my intentions and accept my efforts. I thank my mother, Amina Amatul Haqq, for her many sacrifices and my grandmother, Carmen Weeks, for her many gifts. I am grateful for Sharifa, for my Abuela Gertrude, and for Kareem, Faatima, and Nafiisah (for cover ideas!), for Anika Sabree, and Saleemah Abdul-Ghafur who always answer my calls, and for Majida Abdul-Karim, Aisha Touré, Sajdah Sabree, Azizah Kahera, Maisha Aziz, Saudah Saleem, Jannah Abdur-Rahman, Sameera Fazili, Kamilah Munir, Siddeeqah Sharif, Tannaz Haddadi, Adnan Zulfiqar, and Kendric Nixon for always holding me down. I am forever in awe of and inspired by all the bold, brilliant, beautiful, Black believing women who built this thing, Al-Islam in America, with their bare hands, like my aunties Jameelah Jalal Uddin, Aaliyah Abdul-Karim, Kareemah Abdul Kareem, Jamillah Adeeb, Sadiyah Abdul-Hakim, Adele Saleem, Umilta Al-Uqdah, and Mama Rakiah Abdur-Rahim. I also offer deep thanks to other family and friends, far too many to name here, for always believing in me and teaching me the importance of this kind of work. I also thank Amir Al- Hajj Tahir Umar Abdullah, my loving accomplice in this beautiful struggle.

There are many folks in the academy who helped move this project from idea to reality. I am certain that without Carolyn Rouse’s support, this book would not be in our hands today. She always challenged me to think more deeply, describe more richly, and locate myself in this discipline. I thank Lawrence Rosen for “keeping it real,” Carol Greenhouse for listening and guidance, and John J. Jackson, Jr., for always making time for my ideas and taking them seriously. I also must acknowledge the rest of the faculty and staff in the Department of Anthropology and the now renamed Department of African American Studies (Go ’head!) at Princeton University for intellectual community. Alf Shukr to Charis Boutieri, Sami Hermez, and Erica Weiss for their intellectual fellowship and compassionate friendship, which included reviewing chapter drafts and fielding my writing anxieties. Special thanks also to John Voll at Georgetown University for support early on in my career. Furthermore, I owe great thanks to Amina Wadud, Aminah McCloud, Halimah Touré, Sulayman Nyang, Jon Yasin, Sherman Jackson, Amir Al-Islam, Zain Abdullah, and Jamillah Karim for modeling what it means to be Black, Muslim, and an engaged scholar.

I also want to give a special shout out to an amazing group of colleague-mentor-friends including my gurus Faedah Totah and Junaid Rana as well as Intisar Rabb, Zaheer Ali, Zareena Grewal, Hisham Aidi, Arshad Ali, Sohail Daulatzai, Maryam Kashani, Nitasha Sharma, Hussein Rashid, Edward Curtis, IV, Maurita Poole, Angela Ards, Jennifer Maytorena Taylor, Dawn-Elissa Fischer, H. Samy Alim, Sylvia Chan-Malik, Julianne Hammer, Rabiah Muhammad, James Braxton Peterson, Margari Azizah Hill, Maryam Griffin, and Tomiko Ballantyne.

My research and writing were supported by the Graduate School, the Center for African American Studies, and the Center for Arts and Policy Studies at Princeton University, the Department of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the College of Liberal Arts at Purdue University. I am deeply appreciative of Ellen Gruenbaum,Venetria Patton, Evelyn Blackwood, Cornelius Bynum, and all the faculty and staff in Anthropology and African American Studies at Purdue for their mentoring and support of my work. I also would like to extend sincere thanks to

Jennifer Hammer, Constance Grady, and everyone at NYU Press for recognizing the merits of my project and for a supportive publication process. Also, thank you Hanna Siurua for making copyediting painless and helping me sound good!

Of course, none of this would have been possible without the generosity of each of my teachers in Chicago and beyond. I have changed most of your real names in these pages yet whether I use your real name or a pseudonym I refer to you all as teacher. You are my teachers because I only know what I know because you allowed me to listen, to ask questions, to share my thoughts (even when we disagreed) and to be around you and yours (even when you thought the whole participant-observation thing was a bit weird). You are my teachers because you taught me and because I continue to learn from you.

I will be forever indebted to all of you, the amazing individuals I encountered in and through IMAN and in the U.S. Muslim community and the ummah, worldwide.

Jazakum Allahu Khairan

Introduction

Esperanza: Stuff is kind of mashed up, and now [Arab and South Asian U.S. American] 1 sisters are wanting to dress like the [U.S. Black American] sisters they see on stage. . . . It’s girls that are probably first generation here, trying to find the aesthetic that fits them that is not their mother’s or from their mother’s land, which I can sort of understand since I come from an immigrant [Dominican] background, but what happens is that they start picking from the people that are around them, like the magazine White culture, and then they want to add an urban element cause it’s a cool thing, cool to be from an urban environment, right? (Laughs) Su’ad: What is urban? (Laughs) Is that a euphemism? Esperanza: I don’t even know what it is. (Laughs) You wanna wear cargo pants? . . . See, I have a camouflage scarf, I’ve worn it only once because this Pakistani girl walked up to me like (mimics a voice) “This is so cool” and I was like [to myself] I can’t even pretend like that’s OK with me (Laughter). And it’s a girl that I love! Now I want to back this up by saying I have been wearing camouflage my whole life, I’m the camouflage queen! . . . I wear it a lot because I like it but also I feel like I can, it’s appropriate for me to wear it because my brother was in war, people! (Laughs) Like geez, this is my actual surname on my jacket. Anyway so this sister comes just really sincerely, “I really like your scarf, where can I get it from?” and I was kind of like, “Like, thank you,” but I don’t know really what else to say.

It’s a compliment but in another way it’s really a thievery because we don’t have much, right? Like where does culture come from? It comes from people who don’t have much. That’s where hip hop comes from, that’s where house music came from. That’s where tying your hair up [in a scarf], wearing fatigues, because you ain’t got no other clothes, right? So you got to make do with what you have, and when someone is taking that, you don’t have anything left because you don’t have much to begin with. You going home to your mansions —how many mansions did I visit in the last week, right?! You going home to silverware that’s really silver but you taking my scarf?! Just let me have something. (Laughter)

And I get it; you can’t really tell people what they can put on their body. I get that; but there is a certain level you can at least give due to where it’s done and at least try to do it authentically yourself. You have to know your boundaries and give knowledge and respect.

Esperanza is a single mother in her early thirties. She is a multimedia artist who loves to teach but also teaches to pay the bills. I met up with her at her home in Humboldt Park in Chicago, and after she let her kids know “we handling important business here,” we lounged and she shared her reflections on being raced, gendered, classed, and Muslim. Although Esperanza is a convert to Islam and was born and raised in Chicago and I was born to Muslim parents and raised in Brooklyn, we hit it off right away. This was because of the other things we had in common: Latinidad, being part of the hip hop generation, and having intimate knowledge of the joys and the frustrations of growing up working class in the ’hood. Indeed, our respective experiences of race, class, and gender as Muslim women were often parallel.

I had seen Esperanza at hip hop cultural events around the city, always observing folks, as artists are apt to do, before we formally met at an event at the Inner-City Muslim Action Network, IMAN. IMAN is a Muslim-run nonprofit that provides services, community organizing, and arts-based activism on the southwest side of Chicago. IMAN was a key site for me in the field just as it was a place of central importance for many of my interlocutors, who I refer to as my “teachers” because I drew on their generous sharing of their knowledge and experiences. These “teachers,”2 such as Esperanza, are the progenitors of a discourse, an epistemology, an aesthetic, and an embodiment that I call Muslim Cool.3 Forged at the intersection of Islam and hip hop, Muslim Cool is a way of being Muslim that draws on Blackness to contest two overlapping systems of racial norms: the hegemonic ethnoreligious norms of Arab and South Asian U.S. American Muslim communities on the one hand, and White American normativity on the other. For my teachers—U.S. Black, Latin@, Arab, and South Asian American Muslims engaged in hip hop–based activism—IMAN was a place where their intersecting identities, often rendered invisible by these hegemonic racial and religious norms, were visible and valid.

Esperanza: When it first started I was so excited to find IMAN. I was excited mostly because I came from an artist background and I came from a church background and since I became Muslim I never found that type of community and that type of outlet. Progress Theater was the first group I saw [and] I literally cried, I had no idea Muslims could even do this. I was like freaking out, I mean I didn’t just go to church, I was in church, it was for real! It was like people in the aisles, jumping up and down, so it just made me so happy!

When Esperanza saw Progress Theater perform at IMAN, she saw herself. The specific event was Community Café, which showcased performers who were generally Muslim, usually extremely talented, and predominantly working with hip hop and a sonic landscape that was charged with Blackness as a radical political perspective and expressive culture. Although not a hip hop group, Progress Theater, an ensemble founded by two U.S. Black Muslim women, fit right in: its storytelling exhibited a Black feminist aesthetic and its performances, which mixed theater, poetry, and song, were deeply grounded in Black expressive cultures, particularly those of the U.S. South. The ethnoreligious hegemonies of Arab and South Asian U.S. American communities would prescribe that Muslims could not “do that”; they could not engage Black expressive cultures as Muslims. Yet with Progress Theater and at IMAN, Esperanza found, the opposite was true: they could and they did.

IMAN is a site of Muslim Cool because it privileged Blackness as a politics and as an expressive culture of resistance and did so with a diverse constituency. Like my teachers, IMAN’s events and work include Muslims (as well as non-Muslims) who are U.S. Black, Latin@, Arab, and South Asian American from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds. Accordingly, race and class tensions are also part of Muslim Cool, and Esperanza’s subsequent experiences of cultural appropriation dampened her initial euphoria. IMAN, as a Muslim space, was affirming for Esperanza, but it was also a source of frustration. Esperanza wore camouflage because she liked it but also because racialized systemic inequalities had shut her family out of economic opportunity and shuttled her brother into “the service.” In contrast, the “Pakistani girl” who thought the camouflage was cool had access to a set of class-based and cultural privileges—she was educated and suburban and had more cultural authenticity as a Muslim. Accordingly, the Pakistani girl’s potential appropriation of camouflage was embedded in unequal power relations: Esperanza loved the girl and the girl loved her scarf but, as

Esperanza put it, all that love was fraught, “no matter how much Islam we have in common.” The camouflage-loving Pakistani girl was not merely a cultural interloper; she was also a

racialized and gendered Muslim subject navigating her identity at the crossroads of hip hop and Islam. The Pakistani girl in Esperanza’s story reminded me of Rabia, a young Pakistani U.S. American woman who was one of my key teachers in the field. I could imagine Rabia admiring Esperanza’s scarf with the same kind of unbridled enthusiasm, but in contrast to the first “Pakistani girl,” Rabia was an activist who worked in Englewood, a predominately Black neighborhood in Chicago.4 I asked Esperanza whether this made a difference:

Su’ad: Is there a difference, you think, with Rabia? Esperanza: It is a really weird balance because a lot of these sisters are darker than me, are darker than my children, but they have such a suburban White mentality, and they are trying to figure out the crossroads, but yeah, there is a difference for Rabia, now that she is going to work in Englewood every day, she is not as naive about the struggle, but she had to fight for that and she is still fighting for it because she is still that educated Pakistani girl from the suburbs, at the end of the day. But it’s the same on the other end: I could never really escape this no matter how much Islam we have in common. Even if I escaped this, even if I married a Pakistani man, even if I married Muslim and I married up and got real silverware, right? [Laughs] That camouflage would still be mine.

For Esperanza, Rabia was different because “the struggle” was not just a fashion accessory for her. However, she noted insightfully that this did not mean that Rabia, she, or any of us could escape the complex realities of race, identity, and power in the fight to contest hegemonies and overcome inequality. This insight is critical to understanding Muslim Cool: at the meeting of Islam and hip hop, intersecting notions of Muslimness and Blackness challenge and reconstitute the racial order of the United States.

I developed the concept of Muslim Cool through my long-term ethnographic research with young multiethnic Muslims primarily in Chicago, Illinois. I argue that by establishing connections to specific notions of Blackness, my teachers configure a sense of U.S. American Muslim identity that stands as a counterpoint to the hegemonic norms of Whiteness as well as to Arab and South Asian U.S. American communities. These connections are critical and contested interventions: critical because they push back against the pervasive phenomenon of anti-Blackness, and contested because questions of race, class, gender, and nationality complicate and trouble Muslim Cool’s relationship to Black identities and cultures.

I make three central arguments in this book. First, I argue that Blackness is central to the histories, engagements, entanglements, and experiences of U.S. American Islam. The term “Blackness” in my work refers both to the histories, traditions, and customs of Black peoples and to the circulating ideas and beliefs about people of African descent. My rendering of Blackness is Diasporic (Hall 1990) and polycultural (Kelley 1999) and as such conceptualizes Blackness as culture and discourse, which relies on and exceeds the body, Black and otherwise.5 I contend that Blackness shapes the individual Muslim experience in the United States and interethnic Muslim relationships as well as the terms of U.S. Muslim engagement with the state. Second, I make a case for the continuing significance of race and Blackness in the contemporary United States. The book focuses on interminority relationships to

articulate a narrative of race and racism in the United States that transcends the Black-White binary but also the fallacy of postracialism, which holds that racism, particularly anti-Black racism, is over and that any talk of race is actually counterproductive to the work of antiracism. I identify the ways in which race, and specifically Blackness, is marshaled in the work of antiracism. For Muslim Cool Blackness is a point of opposition to white supremacy that creates solidarities among differently racialized and marginalized groups in order to dismantle overarching racial hierarchies. Yet as the stories in this book illustrate, these solidarities are necessarily entangled in the contradictions inherent in Blackness as something that is both desired and devalued. The engagement with Blackness by young U.S. Muslims, Black and non-Black, is informed by long-standing discourses of anti- Blackness as well as the more current cooptation of Blackness in the narratives of U.S. multiculturalism and American exceptionalism. Accordingly, my third central argument is that any analysis of contemporary Blackness must contend both with the ways in which it is used to resist the logics of white supremacy and with its complicity in that supremacy.

A light-skinned Latina, Esperanza hesitated to consider herself Black. She explained by example, “I didn’t grow up eating those foods, I had to learn how to make macaroni and cheese as an adult.” Nevertheless, Progress Theater’s performance was still deeply meaningful to her. This was because Black expressive cultures, both U.S.-based and in the broader African diaspora, shaped her own experiences as a Latina who did not know how to make macaroni and cheese but who grew up on ecstatic evangelical church culture as well as house music and hip hop. Esperanza’s macaroni and cheese learning curve is reflective of the Chicago context in which Black is defined as having roots in the U.S. South. However, Blackness, in the discourse and practice of Muslim Cool, and as I use the term in this book, is not limited to Black traditions originating in the continental United States.

For example, as I describe in chapter 2, my teachers contest claims that “music is haram” (forbidden) by placing hip hop in an Afrodiasporic Islamic genealogy. This genealogy is constructed through historic Africa and its transatlantic diaspora to assert the religious permissibility of Black music. Likewise, the style of head wrapping that I describe in chapter 3 is a practice found outside the United States. Yet Muslim Cool’s relationship to place, specifically the United States, is not inconsequential. When multiethnic U.S. American Muslim women take up the Afrodiasporic head wrap tradition, this practice must also be interpreted with attention to the specificities of Blackness in the United States. Similarly, when U.S. Muslim hip hop artists travel abroad on the state-sponsored cultural diplomacy trips described in chapter 5, Blackness is entangled in its relationship to U.S. empire. Accordingly, the Blackness engaged in Muslim Cool is Diasporic—linked to the particulars of the Black experience in the United States as well as to questions of Black culture and politics that are in conversation with those of other Blacks elsewhere, particularly in other parts of the Americas.6

Muslim Cool is a way of thinking and a way of being Muslim that resists and reconstitutes U.S. racial hierarchies. This push and pull at the core of Muslim Cool is grounded in its relationship to hip hop. Hip hop, as an artistic form—expressed in DJing, emceeing, dance, and graffiti—and as a form of knowledge and cultural production—from ideas and language to fashion and style—is a site of critical contradiction and contestation. Perceptions of hip hop music and culture range wildly: hip hop is seen variously as deeply mass mediated and commodified and as a quintessential example of an expressive culture of resistance. The “hip hop wars” (Rose 2008) in the mainstream media and within the hip hop community reflect this kind of binary framework, with each side claiming to know what hip hop really is. However, hip hop is a traded commodity and an oppositional culture at the same time. Hip hop epitomizes what Stuart Hall described as the contradictory nature of Black

popular culture: it is simultaneously rooted in the lived experience of the African diaspora and appropriated in ways that are unrecognizable to that lived experience (1998). Importantly, my claim for hip hop’s rootedness in the African Diaspora is not a move to mark hip hop as “Black” in an essentializing way that erases, most specifically, the Latin@s, Black and non-Black, who were central to hip hop’s development (Flores 2000; Rivera 2003). Rather it acknowledges hip hop’s grounding in a Diasporic and polycultural Blackness (in which Latinidad is always an interlocutor, if not a participant) forged by involuntary and subsequent migrations and manifest in the aesthetics privileged in the music and culture (Rose 1994). Moreover, the contestation identified by Hall is not unique to Black popular culture, but it is a defining characteristic of the mass production of Blackness: the proliferation of Black expressive forms devalues Black life as often as it celebrates it.

The contradictions and contestations of hip hop are often depicted through the homonyms “roots” and “routes”: hip hop is rooted in Afrodiasporic expressive cultures and has traveled on routes far beyond its origins (Gilroy 1993; Peterson 2014).7 To the pair of roots and routes, I add the loop. I take “loop” from the hip hop sampling technique in which a selected piece of music is looped to play over and over as part of the creation of a new piece of music. Whereas roots and routes extend and splinter into multiple pathways, the loop extends and returns, not in a closure but in a cypher, the communal and competitive space in which hip hop culture regenerates and develops.8 The loop is a metaphor for the linkages between Islam, hip hop, and Blackness in the twenty-first century that create Muslim Cool: Islam, as practiced in U.S. Black American communities, shaped hip hop, which in turn shapes young twenty-first-century Black and non-Black U.S. Muslims who return to Blackness and Islam as a way of thinking and a way of being Muslim—as Muslim Cool. Like a looped musical sample defined by sonic repetition and variation, Muslim Cool is a site of critical continuity and change.

“My Mic Sounds Nice”: Interventions This book is an intervention in several existing literatures. Anthropological research has a long history of studying Muslim communities. The Muslim body (as well as Black and Black Muslim bodies) has served as material and conceptual territory, as labor, and as a specimen for the construction of Euro-American colonial projects—projects that made and were made by anthropology. Today, the anthropology of Islam has moved away from a primarily orientalist narrative and attempts to offer more complex pictures of Muslim life. This is a critical challenge to the post– 9/11 narrative of the “Muslim” as singularly backward and barbaric (Mamdani 2005; Mahmood 2005; Deeb 2006; Hirschkind 2009). However, although this work is important, much of it continues to focus on Muslims outside the United States and Europe, and this disciplinary emphasis on non- Western Muslims has an unintended effect: it reproduces the notion of Muslim as “other,” which ends up reifying the static notions of “us versus them” that this research intends to undo.9

These unintended consequences also resonate outside anthropology. Early scholarship on Islam in the United States told a diaspora narrative in which Muslims emigrated from an “Islamic homeland” to the “West.” The narrative centered on a bicultural clash between “American” and “Muslim” identities. Muslims were seen as analogous to other “ethnic” immigrants who face the challenges of integration and assimilation into the (White) American mainstream. This ethnicity-assimilation paradigm not only marginalizes nonimmigrants, replicating internal ethnoreligious hegemonies, but it can also elide the distinctions between different groups of immigrants.10 Moreover, it locates Blackness and critical race studies at the fringes of the study of U.S. American Islam.

In the field of hip hop studies, scholars have tended to study hip hop as a text. The most common methodologies include lyric analysis (i.e., what does the music say; Cobb 2007; Dyson and Daulatzai 2009; Neal and Forman 2012), critical examinations of representation (i.e., what sorts of images are produced and reproduced in hip hop; Morgan 2000; Hopkinson and Moore 2006), and hip hop as a discourse linked to narratives of race, class, gender, and sexuality under material conditions of inequality (Rose 1994; Rose 2008; Morgan 2009). The contributions these studies have made are significant and unquestionable; yet, as others have noted (Dimitriadis 2009) they have left a critical area of inquiry underexplored. When researchers venture outside studios, stages, and street corner cyphers to different sites of inquiry, such as family rooms and friendships, what does hip hop look like there?

This question can be extended to the site of religion, which has also, until recently, received inadequate attention within hip hop scholarship. The social, cultural, economic, and political landscape of 1970s New York City and the expressive cultures of the African diaspora are common themes in retellings of hip hop’s birth story. Yet these histories typically fail to account sufficiently for questions of faith, ethics, and spirituality in hip hop’s birth narrative (Pinn and Miller 2009). Building on earlier work (Pinn 1999, 2003), a new body of research is emerging around these questions (Miller 2012; Utley 2012; Miller, Pinn, and Freeman 2015). This scholarship successfully challenges narrow notions of religion and spirituality that would disqualify the “religious” in hip hop, but has yet to fully attend to Islam’s theoretical significance to the ways in which hip hop music and culture engage religion and spirituality.

In response to all these trends, Muslim Cool is an ethnographic study of Muslim life within the United States. It identifies the U.S. American Muslim experience as entangled in the workings of race, religion, and gender in the contemporary United States. It avoids reifying Islam/West dichotomies because it does not cast Muslims as peripheral or as outsiders who navigate assimilation but rather as actors whose lives and experiences are critical to the production and reproduction of the contemporary United States and the “West” more broadly. Further, while the ethnicity-assimilation paradigm continues to dominate some interdisciplinary approaches to the study of Muslims in the United States, this book joins a parallel body of scholarship in the study of Islam in U.S. America that pushes back against this tendency (McCloud 1995; Nuruddin 1998; Nyang 1999; Curtis 2002, 2006; Aidi 2009; Rouse 2004; Jackson 2005; Karim 2008; GhaneaBassiri 2010; Chan-Malik 2011; Grewal 2013). Like other contributions to this body of work, Muslim Cool offers an analysis that sees questions of race and Blackness as central to the U.S. American Muslim narrative.