New muslim cool full movie

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.

Muslim Cool is a study of the relationship between race, religion, and popular culture. It also joins a growing body of work that has begun to explore Islam’s relationship to hip hop in the United States. These scholarly and artistic contributions analyze the role of Islamic theologies in the development of hip hop along with examining the role of hip hop in individual pathways toward conversion to Islam (Spady and Eure 1991; Swedenburg 1997; Floyd-Thomas 2003; Banjoko 2004; Aidi 2004, 2009; Alim 2005, 2006a, 2006b; Miyakawa 2005; Knight 2008; Taylor 2009; Davis 2010). Like these studies, Muslim Cool traces the ways religious identity is constructed through hip hop, but it also documents the particular epistemological impact of Islam and Muslim practice on hip hop music and culture. This impact, I contend, was fundamental to the development of hip hop ethics and activism. Muslim Cool advances hip hop scholarship by bringing ethnography to hip hop research which has historically privileged textual analysis and explores the hip hop narratives of young men and women, in a genre that typically privileges males.11

“People’s Instinctive Travels and Paths of Rhythm”: Muslims in Chicago and the United States

Precise demographics about Chicago’s Muslim community are scarce. The most extensive survey was done in 1997 by East-West University. This report estimated the total Muslim population of Chicagoland, which includes the city of Chicago and surrounding counties, to be 285,126 (Ba-Yunus 1997, 12). Nearly ten years later the Chicago chapter of the advocacy organization Council on American-Islamic Relations put the total population at approximately 400,000 (Inskeep 2006). The hundreds of thousands of Muslims who live in the Chicago metropolitan area come from a variety of backgrounds. Chicago’s Muslim community is U.S. Black American, AfroLatin@, Latin@, White, South Asian, and Palestinian American. Chicago Muslims also hail from Nigeria and the Balkans (Bosnia-Herzegovina, Albania, and Kosovo). They represent a variety of Muslim experiences and Islamic perspectives, including converts and those born to Muslim families, Sunni and Shi‘a Islam, Sufism, the Nation of Islam, and the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community. These communities, some of whom have had a presence in the area since the early twentieth century, live throughout Chicago’s north, south, and west sides as well as in its northern, southern, and western suburbs.

The diversity of this metropolitan Muslim community maps onto the Chicagoland landscape in fragments, mimicking the racial and ethnic segregation for which the city continues to be known (Massey and Denton 1998; Pattillo-McCoy 2000; De Genova and Ramos-Zayas 2003; Bogira 2011). Today, as depicted in classic sociological texts—Black Metropolis (Drake and Cayton [1945] 1993), The Ghetto (Wirth 1929), Gold Coast and Slum (Zorbaugh [1929] 1976), and others—Chicagoans live in neighborhoods segregated by race and class. According to the 2010 census, African American communities remain concentrated in the traditional “Black Belts” on the South Side and West Side of Chicago, while Latin@ neighborhoods are found squarely within the near northwest and southwest sections of the city. Furthermore, as White families continued to move to the outer suburbs over the last decade of the twentieth century, communities of color with U.S. and foreign-born residents made their homes in the abandoned inner suburbs. Urban patterns of residential segregation were thus replicated in the suburbs. Muslim immigrants and their U.S.-born children reside in immigrant enclaves within the city, such as the West Ridge neighborhood that is home to the commercial and cultural district of Devon Avenue, or within ethnic enclaves in the suburbs, such as the Harlem Avenue community in Bridgeview. Immigrant and second-generation U.S. American Muslims also live in wealthy, majority-White suburbs. In comparison, most U.S. Black American, AfroLatin@, and Latin@ Muslims continue to live in predominantly Black and Latin@ neighborhoods. These same neighborhoods are often located within or near areas of concentrated poverty (Brookings Institution 2003).

Even with their slightly higher levels of education and income,12 U.S. Black American Muslims live in segregated urban and suburban neighborhoods and are blocked from accessing the kind of advantages experienced by their South Asian and Arab U.S. American Muslim counterparts who live in White majority suburbs (Karim 2008). As a result of these residential patterns, racial segregation has become a fact of Muslim life in Chicago. From who runs the masjid (mosque) to whom parents consider suitable marriage partners for their children, institutional and community life is divided along lines of race and ethnicity.

Like the Chicagoland Muslim community, the U.S. American Muslim community is diverse. It represents more than eighty different countries and has origins in the African Muslim populations of

the transatlantic slave trade as well as Ottoman-era Muslim immigration to the United States. Likewise, divisions within the Chicagoland ummah (Muslim community)13 are a microcosm of broader divisions of race, class, and power that shape the national U.S. Muslim community. Tensions around race, class, and power in the U.S. Muslim community play themselves out across what community members call an “indigenous-immigrant” divide. The indigenous-immigrant divide describes a fissure between the three largest ethnic groups among U.S. American Muslims: U.S. Black Americans on the one side, and U.S. American Muslims of Arab and South Asian descent on the other. U.S. Black Americans are configured as “indigenous” or “more native” to the United States in comparison with their Arab and South Asian U.S. American counterparts, who are seen as “immigrants” to the country. The use of the term “indigenous,” which was first appropriated by U.S. Black American Muslims in the 1960s (Nyang 1999), is meant as a critical inversion of an ethnocentric prejudice that privileges “immigrant” Muslims over “indigenous” ones.

This prejudice links race, ethnicity, class, and religion into an ideological framework that marks “immigrant” Muslims as more religiously legitimate and authoritative than Black U.S. American Muslims, a phenomenon that Sherman Jackson identifies as “Immigrant Islam.” Jackson defines Immigrant Islam as the monopoly asserted by Muslim immigrants over the power to define Muslim identity and practice in the United States (Jackson 2005, 4). This claim to monopoly is based on the possession of ancestral ties to the “Muslim world,” and it “enshrines the historically informed expressions of Islam in the modern Muslim world as the standard of normativeness for Muslims everywhere” (Jackson 2005, 12).

Under these ideological guidelines, a Muslim of Arab descent, for example, is presumed to have proximity to the Islamic tradition, and her religious practices and perspectives are endowed with authenticity simply because she is Arab. By contrast, a Muslim who cannot claim immediate descent from the “Muslim world,” such as a U.S. Black American, is presumed to be new to the Islamic tradition, and her religious practices and perspectives have to be authenticated. Claims to proximity are a powerful form of cultural capital for Muslims in the United States who are geographically distant from traditional centers of Islamic learning yet entrenched in an ummah-wide crisis of the nature of Islamic authority today (Grewal 2013, 34). Immigrant Islam is an ethnoreligious hegemony grounded in this cultural capital, which makes the Muslim immigrant a religious and cultural normative ideal in the United States. This hegemonic norm holds internally within the U.S. American Muslim community as well as in certain state policies and popular narratives on Islam in the United States that rely on the Muslim-as-immigrant type. This state and media engagement endows further legitimacy on “immigrant” Muslims as Muslims over their “indigenous” sisters and brothers.

Muslims have a long history in the United States, beginning with the involuntary migration of enslaved African Muslims.14 So it is important to note that the rise of the ethnoreligious hegemony of Immigrant Islam is tied to the arrival of a particular cohort of émigrés: Muslims from the Middle East and South Asia who arrived in the United States in larger numbers after the loosening of racialized immigration quotas in 1965. Muslims from those regions had immigrated to the United States prior to 1965, but their communities did not yet represent the face of Islam in the popular imagination as they do today. Rather, in the mid-twentieth century U.S. Black American Muslims were the prototypical Muslims on the domestic front. This was due to the convergence of a number of factors, such as the powerful and visible organizational presence of Black Muslims in the antiracism movements of the twentieth century, the ability of certain Muslim communities to “integrate” racially and culturally into broader U.S. society, and the relatively small size of these Muslim immigrant communities and their

institutional life in comparison to contemporary numbers.15

Moreover, as American Studies scholar Sylvia Chan-Malik argues, the post-1965 demographic shift in the U.S. Muslim population precipitated diverging “and in many cases mutually opposed visions of Islam and the [U.S.] nation” (Chan-Malik 2011, 12) For U.S. Black Americans Islam was a spiritual tradition of resistance that was critical of the United States and designed to undo the racial logics of white supremacy, whereas South Asian and Arab U.S. American Muslims “saw Islam as a religious and cultural inheritance . . . [and] America as a land of prosperity and opportunity” (Chan- Malik 2011, 12). Critically, these perspectives, coming out of particular raced and classed positions, wield differential power and influence.

Classic U.S. American logics of anti-Blackness collide with these claims to religious authority and legitimacy. Ideologies of anti-Blackness that fuel anti-Black racism—the ideology in action—are grounded in the racial taxonomies of white supremacy. White supremacy advances notions of racial superiority and inferiority that privilege those identified as White as ideal—the culmination of human potential—and normative—the standard against which all other sentient beings are judged. White supremacy produces a racial logic that sets up a grid of associations in which Blackness, in relation to Whiteness, is always and already less-than, in terms of value, history and, most importantly, humanity. Blackness is also configured as morally deviant when juxtaposed against the idealized standard of normative Whiteness. Paradoxically this “deviance” is also positively valued as a site of the pleasures repressed by the standards of Whiteness. Accordingly Blackness marks leisure instead of hard work, erotic liberty in lieu of sexual restraint, a womanhood that is super heroic, and a Christianity, free from the strictures of the Protestant ethic, that talks loud and long to God. This is “an age-old image of blackness: a foreign, sexually charged, and criminal underworld against which the norms of White society are defined, and by extension, through which they may be defied” (Samuels 2004, 147–48).

Like all immigrants to the United States, Arab and South Asian migrants are encouraged to adopt ideologies of anti-Blackness as an immigrant rite of passage. They are primed to see U.S. Black Americans as less-than and deviant—a pathological and downwardly mobile population that is best avoided. Yet as non-Whites, Arab and South Asian U.S. American Muslims have their own complex relationships to Whiteness. Arabs and South Asians are racialized, as perpetually foreign and as alternately model minorities or enemies of the state (Jamal and Naber 2007; Sharma 2010). The racial logics of white supremacy in the United States discriminates against Arab and South Asian U.S. Americans while simultaneously incentivizing the adoption of anti-Blackness by yielding limited kinds of privilege and access when these non-White U.S. Americans successfully avoid Blackness. Since one-third of all U.S. Muslims are Black a consequence of this distancing has been to render Blackness necessarily “un-Islamic”: lacking religious authority and authenticity. Accordingly, the assertion of ethnoreligious hegemonies can work within the racial hierarchies of U.S. society to maintain the logic of white supremacy. This alignment with white supremacy has made the ethnoreligious hegemony of Arab and South Asian U.S. American Muslims one of Muslim Cool’s primary interlocutors. Instead of avoiding Blackness, Muslim Cool is a move toward Blackness in the construction of a U.S.-based Muslim identity.

The racial and ethnic bifurcation of the American Muslim community into “indigenous” and “immigrant” Muslims reveals critical tensions, but the terms themselves are imperfect designations. They elide the history and lived experience of, for example, third-generation Arab American Muslims or U.S. Black American Muslims with Caribbean immigrant parents. The terms also render U.S.

American Muslims who are indigenous to the Americas invisible, which reinscribes the erasure and violence of U.S. settler colonialism. I find value in Jackson’s overall theorization and acknowledge that these terms are efficient in writing and have become common in everyday U.S. American Muslim discourse. However, I do not use the terms “indigenous,” “immigrant,” or “Immigrant Islam” in this book. I find that they tend to obfuscate rather than illuminate the significant raced and classed power dynamics that lie at the core of the tensions between Black U.S. American Muslims and Arab and South Asian U.S American Muslims. Accordingly, in lieu of Immigrant Islam I employ the much more clunky phrase “ethnoreligious hegemony” of South Asian and Arab U.S. American Muslims and use “indigenous” and “immigrant” only in quotation marks when necessary to communicate how my interlocutors use those terms.

“Don’t Sweat the Technique”: Methodologies and the Field This book is based on more than ten years of research on Islam and hip hop, which I began before even considering a graduate education. I attended the first (and thus far the last) Islamic Family Reunion and Muslims in Hip Hop concert in 2003 which ignited my interest in the topic.16 My formal research includes twenty months of anthropology fieldwork in Chicago (from early 2007 to late 2008) and subsequent participant-observation research and interviews in Chicago, New York City, the California Bay Area, and the United Kingdom (2010–2015).

I went to Chicago at the invitation of Dr. Rami Nashashibi, executive director of IMAN. I met Nashashibi in the fall of 2006 at a meeting of young American Muslim activists and nonprofit leaders. We discussed our mutual projects: his (then) dissertation project on “ghetto cosmopolitanism” (Nashashibi 2009) and my interest in hip hop among young Muslims. At that time I had my sights set on conducting fieldwork in Morocco, but Nashashibi invited me to spend some time in Chicago, suggesting that IMAN’s work was directly related to my interests. I accepted the invitation and began fieldwork in January 2007 as the event coordinator for “Takin’ It to the Streets.” This event, known as “Streets,” is IMAN’s biennial community festival. It has become one of the largest community festivals in Chicago and features a wide range of activities, including speeches by local and nationally renowned Muslim and non-Muslim leaders, community service projects, children’s activities, sports tournaments, and musical performances. In 2007, the year I worked on the event, an estimated crowd of ten thousand people from just about all walks of life gathered from different parts of the city and the country to participate in the festival. Streets takes place in Marquette Park, where in 1966 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was greeted with rocks, bottles, and firecrackers during a march to protest residential segregation in the exclusively White neighborhood (James 1966).

The neighborhood surrounding Marquette Park is no longer predominantly White but rather U.S. Black American and Mexican American; however, the same issues of residential segregation and racialized inequalities continue to prevail in the neighborhood and throughout the city. Continuities between the past and the present made this site a symbolically meaningful location for the work that Streets was designed to do. With a goal to use art and education for community mobilization, IMAN’s staff and volunteers often described Streets as the embodiment of the organization’s vision of an American Muslim community that is critically engaged (Nashashibi 2005). This vision is defined by a commitment to “heal the ’hood.”17

IMAN’s commitment to heal the ’hood is a committment to antiracist work. This work includes

projects on the ground in the South Side of Chicago that seek to counter the material effects of anti- Black racism, such as the organization’s work on mass incarceration through a reentry program that provides skills and jobs for the formerly incarcerated. This work also included countering the ideologies of anti-Blackness as they circulate among U.S. American Muslims by centering the U.S. Black American experience as a critical site to critique the staus quo, within and outside the U.S. American Muslim community. Most specifically, by its support of arts-based activism through hip hop, Blackness became the means through which young Muslims, Black and non-Black, came to learn and incorporate that critique in their own self-making as Muslims.

I worked at IMAN for six of the twenty months I conducted fieldwork, but I continued to attend the organization’s events, specifically programming geared toward youth, after the end of my employment. I was also allowed to use the IMAN offices to conduct interviews with local Chicago Muslims whom I met in the field. This was possible because IMAN served as a central location of Muslim life in Chicago, even though it was not in the center of the city. I consider IMAN a central site of Muslim Cool, given that many of my teachers began their journeys of Muslim self-making through IMAN. But my research interests and the relationships I built with young Muslim women and men also took me all over Chicagoland, which includes the city as well as its northern, western, and southern suburbs.

In the field I had two core groups of teachers. The first group comprised 18- to 22-year-old youth leaders in arts-based social activism, primarily at IMAN.18 They were primarily Black and South Asian U.S. American Sunni Muslims. Almost all were born in the United States to Muslim parents. With this cohort of teachers, I conducted participant observation, structured interviews, unstructured interviews, and focus groups. I also spent time with key teachers at home and at school, at youth organizing meetings, and at a range of other activities. The second group was a slightly older cohort of young adults in their late twenties and early thirties, whom I also engaged through participant observation, interviews, and a focus group. Alongside my interactions with these two groups of teachers, I interviewed parents and older community figures who played important leadership roles in the Chicagoland Muslim community. I also attended a broad range of events, including banquets, fund- raisers, fashion shows, rallies, lectures, conferences, and jummah (weekly Friday congregational prayers), in the Black, South Asian, and Arab U.S. American Muslim communities of Chicago.

Muslim Cool results from an innovative methodological approach that brings performance studies as method and representation to anthropology. Performance ethnography consists of “staged, cultural performances . . . based on ethnographic data from the specific spheres of (a) the subjects, whose lives and words are being performed; (b) the audience, who witnesses the performance; and (c) the performers, who embody and enact the data” (Madison 2005, 172). The elements of performance ethnography are identical to those of more common ethnographic inscription: fieldwork, ethics, data collection and analysis, and thinking with, through, and without theory. However, as an embodied ethnography it is distinct from more common ethnographic practice because of the ways performance communicates “a sense of immediacy as well as the breadth and complexity” of the issues (Batiste 2005). Performance is visceral, in the moment, and—of particular import to those interested in public anthropology—accessible both within and outside the academy.

My use of performance ethnography as a methodological tool falls within the anthropological tradition of embodied knowledge. The practice of embodied knowledge resists the logocentrism that dominates the Euro-American intellectual tradition (Gilroy 1993). Instead of privileging the word, this practice identifies the body as a site of knowing. As Gina Ulysse reminds us, “the research

process is an embodied endeavor, one in which lived and felt experience, through all the senses, is integral to both the data collection process and the knowledge produced” (Ulysse 2008, 128–29). In anthropology, this tradition is vibrantly illustrated in the work of Zora Neale Hurston and Katherine Dunham. Both Hurston and Dunham were authors of artistic work that contributed to public discourse by challenging popular and academic narratives about Black people. These works were based on ethnographic fieldwork and bridged the gap between art and the academy.

Despite their groundbreaking contributions, Hurston and Dunham remain marginal figures in the anthropological canon (McClaurin 2001; Chin 2014). Their marginality is a result of anxieties about anthropology’s status as an “objective” science and the discipline’s failure to decolonize itself fully (Harrison 1997). Nevertheless, their practices of embodied knowledge are central to one of the discipline’s key methods, namely, participant observation. To do participant observation “you have to be there,” sharing time and space—even when confounding these categories through technology— with your interlocutors. This “being there” is not disembodied but rather requires the anthropologist to participate—to speak with, dance with, eat with, Gmail chat with, feel with (Hage 2009)—her interlocutors; through shared experience, knowledge is produced intersubjectively.

I enter this tradition with my performance ethnography piece entitled Sampled: Beats of Muslim Life. Sampled is a one-woman show composed of a series of movements or vignettes, akin to scenes in a play but without a linear narrative structure. The piece uses movement, theater, and poetry to ethnographically (re)present my research and findings. The title, Sampled, is a reference to the practice of citation found in both hip hop and the academy. Hip hop artists “sample” or take excerpts from previously recorded songs in the composition of their own music. Similarly, academic scholars are also expected to “sample” the ideas of other intellectuals in the process of constructing their own original contributions. Likewise, the narratives in my performance ethnography are samples— excerpts and examples—of multiple stories I encountered in the course of my fieldwork. The characters I play do not embody specific interlocutors; rather, they are embodied (re)presentations of the many young U.S. American Muslims I encountered and learned from in the field.

My performance ethnography, like this book, does not presume to speak for my teachers or assert possession of indisputable knowledge. Sampled is a performance ethnography constructed in my own words, yet drawn from an intersubjective production of knowledge. Its vignettes document, explore, and interrogate the key themes of Muslim Cool. Chapter 3 describes how I used performance ethnography as a method of data collection and analysis. Chapters 2 and 4 use Sampled as a means of representing the complex of contradictions and contestations that make up Muslim Cool.

“Where I’m From”: An Ethnographer with a Point of View Like hip hop, Muslim Cool also has roots and routes; it is both tied to place and deterritorialized. The places of Chicago and the spaces created by IMAN were critical locations in the construction of Muslim Cool as a way of being Muslim in the contemporary United States. At the same time, these ideas have taken routes far beyond Chicago and IMAN. The movement of Muslim Cool documented in this book has crossed boundaries of race and class, gender and nation. Likewise, following the pattern of Muslim Cool and my multiethnic activist teachers, I have also moved across multiple boundaries.

I moved across boundaries as an anthropologist who was born and raised Muslim in the United

States, a status I shared with most of my teachers. To some, this shared demographic fact makes me a “native anthropologist,” and with this title might come the assumption that I had unfettered access to my teachers and their community and perhaps “natural” insight as well as a lack of critical distance due to the ways in which my own identity and those of my teachers overlap. However, as many others have argued, these assumptions, which essentialize the “native” ethnographer, elide the complexities of position and power that shape the research experiences of all anthropologists (Narayan 1993; Ulysse 2008).

In the field, simply being Muslim was never enough. In fact, my race and ethnicity (Black and Latina), my gender (female), and my regional identity (reppin’ Brooklyn, New York!) as well as my religious community affiliations and my performance of Muslimness mediated my access—how I was seen in the field, what was said to me, and what was kept from me—as well as my own interpretations of my field site. For example, when I arrived in Chicago I was initially known as “the sister from New York,” and therefore it was not that I was a Muslim but my relationship to IMAN that afforded me entrée into some local communities.19 In other instances, when my IMAN affiliation showed its limitations, it was my relationship with congregations and prominent leaders in Brooklyn, New York, where I was raised that opened doors for me.

Taking my Black Muslim body into non-Black Muslim spaces also shaped the research process. The ethnoreligious hegemony described earlier marks the U.S. Black American Muslim as a Muslim with a lack of religious and socioeconomic pedigree. I confounded many of these assumptions because I did not convert to Islam, I spoke Arabic, I had studied Islam in the Middle East, and at the time I was pursuing a Princeton Ph.D. with a degree from Georgetown University in hand. While my non-U.S. Black American teachers were often engaged in activism in multiethnic Muslim and non- Muslim spaces, their home communities were much more segregated. Therefore, when I went home with them and met their parents, some of these assumptions about U.S. Black Muslims were circulating along with the expected range of parental concerns about a stranger spending time with one’s child.

In these situations, my different forms of “pedigree” were useful. For example, during a visit with one Pakistani American immigrant mother, my familiarity with a specific Sufi saint and the time I had spent in the Middle East not only made her more comfortable with her daughter spending time with me but in fact seemed to make her think I might be a good influence on her daughter. Had I lacked this pedigree, would the mother have eventually warmed up to me, despite my Blackness? Probably. But what was clear, in this situation and others, was that my Ivy League “pedigree” and my performance of a particular kind of Muslimness—through speaking Arabic, having studied in the Middle East, and wearing a headscarf (though not all were comfortable with my headscarf style)—mattered.

I also moved across boundaries as a hip hop head. In the hip hop community a “head” is someone who loves and is invested in hip hop. My love for and investment in hip hop comes from my relationship to the music and the culture. As a member of the hip hop generation, hip hop is the soundtrack to my life—there is a hip hop song to mark almost every significant moment in it. Moreover, growing up in Brooklyn and particularly being a teenager during the golden era of hip hop made my connection with it even more meaningful. I was Black and Muslim, being raised in a household with cultural nationalist leanings, and the music and culture of hip hop were replete with Islamic references and pro-Black and pan-African messages.

The kinds of linkages between Islam, Blackness, and hip hop that invigorate my teachers’ sense of Muslimness also shaped my own. In my pre–9/11 Brooklyn, to be a Muslim meant being known as

righteous and seen as someone to respect, a reverence that was reproduced in hip hop music and culture. This admiration for Islam and Muslims persists in most hip hop communities today, although beyond the borders of those communities the meaning of being a Muslim has shifted in critical ways. In the post–9/11 United States, to be a Muslim is to be known as a target of suspicion and seen as a threat. To be a Muslim also means to be racialized as “Brown” and not Black. Accordingly, the links between Islam and hip hop that were so paramount in my own upbringing have faded for many. Now, hip hop and Islam are often imagined as “worlds far apart,” and in the cases in which they come together the most popular narrative is one of hip hop as a tool of the so-called radicalization of young Muslims.

What I share with my teachers as well as where my knowledge diverges from theirs are what have motivated my interest and passion for this project. My analysis reflects the insights gained from firsthand on-the-ground ethnographic fieldwork, as well as forms of embodied knowledge I have gained by following the routes of Muslim Cool and drawing on the roots of “where I’m from.”

“The Blueprint”: Outline of Muslim Cool

Chapter 1, “The Loop of Muslim Cool: Black Islam, Hip Hop, and Knowledge of Self,” begins by tracing the loop of Muslim Cool: Islam, as practiced in U.S. Black American communities, shaped hip hop, which in turn shapes young twenty-first-century U.S. Muslims who return to Blackness and Islam as a way of thinking and a way of being Muslim. I illustrate the ways in which hip hop, Black Islam, and the history of Black subjection in the United States serve as prisms through which they interpret their own racialized locations as U.S. American Muslims. Chapter 2, “Policing Music and the Facts of Blackness,” examines the meanings of race and Blackness within U.S. Muslim communities by exploring the often fraught musical context of U.S. American Islam. In this chapter, I argue that Black music is targeted for two parallel tracks of regulation: disavowal and instrumentalization. I use these U.S. American Muslim debates around music to illustrate both the complexities of interethnic intra-Muslim relations and the ways in which these internal Muslim debates reflect primary engagements with Blackness in the United States today.

Chapters 3 and 4 explore Muslim Cool as racial-religious self-making that occurs at the complex intersections of race, class, gender, and style. Chapter 3, “Blackness as a Blueprint for the Muslim Self,” begins the discussion by investigating a specific headscarf style, the “’hoodjab,” to uncover how Blackness, interpolated through the ’hood, gives meaning, that is contested, to the female practice of Muslim Cool. Chapter 4, “Cool Muslim Dandies: Signifyin’ Race, Religion, Masculinity, and Nation,” explores the sartorial interventions of men I call Muslim dandies. I ask: how do Muslim men use dress to claim a U.S. American identity that directly confronts white supremacist ideas of Black pathology and likewise, hegemonic ethnoreligious aesthetics that render U.S. Black American Muslim men marginal in many U.S. American Muslim contexts?

Chapter 5, “The Limits of Muslim Cool,” moves the discussion from interracial and gender dynamics to the dynamics of Muslim Cool’s relationship to the state. It explores the ways Muslim Cool is entangled in neoliberal regimes of knowledge and power as well as U.S. imperialism. I trace the constraints that engagement in twenty-first-century arts and civic engagement culture places on my Muslim teachers’ aspirations to reproduce a Black radical alterity to reveal the limits of Muslim Cool’s resistance to hegemony. Muslim Cool concludes by reflecting on the relevance of the concept

to contemporary struggles against anti-Blackness.

“Stakes Is High”: Why Muslim Cool Matters At its core, this book offers an examination of the critical cultural reverberations that arise at the meeting of Blackness and Muslimness in the twenty-first century. This meeting articulates a far from postracial reality in which race and Blackness continue to be significant terms of engagement in the United States, shaping how individuals and communities understand themselves and position themselves vis-à-vis each other and the state. The convergence of Muslimness and Blackness influences how individual Muslims in the United States experience, articulate, and perform their religious identities. But this intersection has a meaningful impact on inter-Muslim relationships as well. Muslim Cool illustrates the critical importance of Blackness to all U.S. Muslim self-making, including those who move away from Blackness as well those who, like my teachers, move toward Blackness as a way of being Muslim. These cultural reverberations that shape individual and community self-making are critical markers of change and continuity into the ways U.S. Muslims are positioned and position themselves as racial subjects and racialized citizens.

For many, the categories “Muslim” and “American” are not racial categories: Muslim is a religious designation and American is a national identity. Yet paradoxically, many non-Muslim U.S. Americans’ understanding of who Muslims are in relation to the United States is framed by the question, “Why do they hate us?” The question is an indicator that these categories function as “racial projects” (Omi and Winant 1994, 56). “Muslim” is not simply a label of faith but rather a racialized designation, which mediates access to and restrictions on the privileges of being an American, itself also a racialized category.

In the late twentieth century, “Muslim” emerged as a racial category through historically specific processes of racial formation: older orientalist fantasies of the “exotic” east and white supremacist logics that privilege White and Christian citizens in the United States merged with the U.S. pursuit of economic and political dominance in resource-rich Muslim-majority nations. The convergence of these forces gave rise to what scholars call the “racialization of the Muslim” (Volpp 2002; Razack 2008; Jamal and Naber 2008; Maira 2009; Rana 2011). As a racial type, the Muslim is known through specific bodies—those with brown skin and “Middle Eastern” looks—and behaviors, such as prayer and the wearing of beards and headscarves. Importantly, these bodies and behaviors are not just markers of racial difference but also signals of the Muslim as a threat that have been used particularly since 9/11 to regulate and control Muslim bodies (Rana 2011). These signs of Muslim threat have come to serve as a shorthand justification for a regime of state surveillance in which U.S. American Muslims are monitored in their prayer spaces, charities, schools, homes, and even their intimate lives (Khera 2010; Cainkar 2011; Aaronson 2011).

In the United States, the category “Muslim” is racially triangulated against normative ideas of Whiteness and Blackness. Although U.S. American Muslims are racially and ethnically diverse, the Muslim as a racial type is non-White, “immutably foreign, and unassimilable” (Kim 1999) as well as non-Black, “mostly moderate and mainstream” (PEW 2007). This relationship to Whiteness and Blackness facilitates the further typing of the Muslim into the immutably foreign and unassimilable “Bad Muslim” on the one hand, and the moderate and mainstream “Good Muslim” on the other (Mamdani 2005; Maira 2009). The latter ideal type performs a middle-class respectability that is

valued in mainstream U.S. America, yet the “Good Muslim” is also routinely “Brown” and thus never quite escapes the tendency to conflate “Muslim” with “foreigner.” Accordingly, while U.S. American Muslims may experience the intersection of race and Muslimness in varied ways, the category “Muslim” continues to occupy a subordinate social position.

The racialization of the Muslim as Brown and foreign is a departure from the mid-twentieth century, when the “Black Muslim” was the dominant face of Islam in America (Curtis 2006). The Black Muslim designation was shorthand for the Nation of Islam and for a practice of Islam that was considered heterodox and seen as a dangerous form of Black protest. Like the “Muslim” of today, the Black Muslim was known by specific bodies and behaviors: black skin, bow ties, and preaching “hate.” Likewise, the Black Muslim was also under intense state surveillance under the COINTELPRO program (an FBI Counter Intelligence Program), which included the use of agent provocateurs to destabilize Black Muslim communities. Therefore, although the racial type associated with Muslimness has changed from Black to Brown, there is also continuity: the Muslim continues to be seen as a threat to the state that is managed not only through state surveillance but also through notions of multiculturalism.

Muslim Cool poses a direct challenge to this racialization of Muslims as foreign and as perpetual threats to the United States. It confronts the idea of a break with the past that is implied in readings of the contemporary moment as “postracial” and offers a more complex narrative of both the U.S. Muslim experience and the meanings and performance of Blackness today. Accordingly, Muslim Cool is not a portrayal of a multiethnic postracial utopia built through hip hop music. Rather, it problematizes the ways Blackness is used in U.S. American self-making as both a threat to America’s progress and a symbol of it. Muslim Cool is neither the story of a complete break with the past nor an easy tale of resistance but rather a charting of the powerful and dynamic ways in which Blackness and Muslimness merge to challenge and reconstitute U.S. racial hierarchies.

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 underneath 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 discussion,” “head” being shorthand for hip hop head. In hip hop communities, 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 identity 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 Muslim 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:

That’s the beauty in it to me, to see someone who just came here, that immigrated, 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 relevant to a “shorty” and to “someone who immigrated,” given its transcendent 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 ideals of self-determination, self- knowledge, and political consciousness as poor and working-class Blacks and Latin@s from the antiracist Muslim 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 epistemology through which the distinct yet historically rooted set of understandings, 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 Mississippi Delta, Clyde Woods theorizes the blues as epistemology. He argues that U.S. Black American conflict with “plantation powers,” namely, the White American moneyed elite, is “one of the defining features of African American social thought” (Woods 2000, 29). Blues music as an epistemology emerges out of this conflict as a “self-referential classificatory 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 powers” in the “North” who, like their southern counterparts, are participants 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 consumption 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 offering 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 introduction to Black Islam as key to “regaining a ‘knowledge of self’” that reoriented 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 of self, has been and continues to be central to hip hop as epistemology 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. Muslims, 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 journeys 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 alternative 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.

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 narrate. 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 programming and online courses on natural healing.

Given their different perspectives, I hoped that talking with them together would give me a fuller sense of the Muslim hip hop scene in Chicago. 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 disconnect 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 musician, 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 annual 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 to Man-O-Wax, to gravitate toward the larger Chicago hip hop scene “outside” the Muslim community.

Community Café, February 2012. Courtesy of Eve Rivera.

Stage Crowders. Courtesy of Eve Rivera.

Community Café, April 2012. Courtesy of Eve Rivera.

Man-O-Wax saw an obstacle to the creation of a Muslim hip hop scene in the many “divisions within the [Chicago] Muslim community: 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 different 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 Muslim communities in Chicagoland. Tasleem explained, “no one rapping at the time, or very few, were calling themselves Sunni Muslims.” This situation, Tasleem argued, differed from the contemporary moment, 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 defined 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 matters 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 connected 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 “Popmaster 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.

My first visit to IMAN took place in the fall of 2006, before I officially 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 organization’s executive director. During its early years IMAN served elementary 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 converted 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 country. 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 community development (CPAG 2010). The mural is named “Reflections of Good” and features mirrors shaped like tear drops along with arabesque 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 community engagement. IMAN, a Muslim-run organization, partnered with 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 community 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, written 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 national 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 organization is located. IMAN’s work in the ’hood includes not only the provision 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 publicly, 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 determined 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 material conditions of disadvantage become material for conceptions of the ’hood as a space inextricably tied to Blackness—were not lost on IMAN’s 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 American Muslim communities in Chicago and beyond.

As described in the Introduction, ethnic prejudices often drive tensions over religious authority and legitimacy within the U.S. American Muslim community, and they also shape the representation of this community vis-à-vis the state. These prejudices preclude the possibility of U.S. Black American Muslim leadership over the broader U.S. American 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 immigrants 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 relatively 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 Chicago, 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 critical 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 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 Retreat, 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 American Muslim community, but they have also been a creative space where artists collaborate during cipher sessions that are intimate and spontaneous, and a spiritual space where artists and scholars explore the connections 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 Retreat 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 community 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 chapter, 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.

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 Muslim 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 Muslim 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 [rapping, 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 popular culture. Yet it was through their relationship with IMAN that they turned to Black Islam and traveled the loop of Muslim Cool, reorienting what it meant for them to be Muslim and American in the contemporary 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. Shahidah 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 “yesterday.” 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.

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 contributing 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 different 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 conventions 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 primarily 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 conventions 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 observed, 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 suburban, 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 majority 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 immigrants, 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 entangled 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 fulfilled. 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 increasingly 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 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 girlfriends,” 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 identity, 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 Panther 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 understand the two together.”