Rooted in Our Lives

by Rakin Fetuga of Mecca2Medina

The relationship between Islam and Hip-Hop is not a new phenomenon.

It is something that has been there since the beginning of the rap movement and possibly before. Rap is a way of speaking in rhythm and using rhyme it can be said it is a form of poetry. Rap is part of the Hip-Hop culture along with graffiti, break-dancing and body-popping.

When you go back to the period before rap started in the sixties and early seventies the first poets using this style in the US were The Last Poets. They were a group of political poets who used their poetry to talk about social issues, they were also Sunni Muslims. They are known as the Godfathers of the spoken word movement and heavily influenced the emergence of rap culture.

With the rise of the civil rights and Black Power Movements in The United States during the fifties and sixties a number of spin off Islamic sects were cultivated. One famous group of ‘Black Muslims’ that have quite a strong presence in rap are The Nation of Islam (NOI). Public Enemy who were the biggest selling Hip Hop band of its time in the eighties, were members of NOI. Their lyrics and stage performances often reflected their commitment to the African American struggle and their membership to this sect. Ice Cube who was in a Hip Hop group called NWA (Niggers With Attitude) later went solo, is now better known as a film actor and director also used to be a member of The Nation of Islam but later left the sect.

The Nation of Gods and Earths, also known as the Five Percent Nation of Islam or simply as the Five Percenters (FP), represents another side of the Black identity movement that mixes aspects of Islam, Judaism, Christianity and other beliefs. These forms of Islam have always had links with rap in the early days and still today you have members of FP who are rap artists such as groups like Wu-Tang, Rakim, Brand Nubians, Nas, Big Daddy Kane and Poor Righteous Teachers are all part of this movement. Some of their lyrics would use Islamic related rhetoric.

Sunni Muslims who are the largest group of Muslims in the world constituting of about 90% of all Muslims, differ on the issue of music. There are three main camps of jurisprudent belief when it comes to the acceptance or rejection of music.

The first camp states that Music is Horam (forbidden). The second group argue that music is fine as long as you talk about the religion and God. The third camp say that certain instruments are not allowed but as long as you don’t use those particular instruments you are okay to use rap to express your Islamic belief.

Because of this confusion Islamic rap in the Sunni communities took a long time to develop, but now with groups like Native Deen, Mecca 2 Medina, Hasan Salam, Miss Undastood Poetic Pilgrimage and The Blind Alphabets things are starting to change. For the first time you are seeing young men and women that follow the mainstream teaching of Islam picking up the microphone and talking about their faith.

The Hip hop movement was a unifying movement in America. It helped to unite the Porto Ricans and the African Americans and later the white middle classes. It helped the white middle classes understand a life that they would never lead. It helped others get a view into the mind of the poor in society, the helpless and the voiceless. Rap assisted these impoverished communities to get a voice. It also managed to unite the poor and downtrodden. The hip hop movement also spread the message of peace and unity.

Although in present times hip-hop has become extremely commercialised with some expressions of vulgarity, glamorisations of gangster life and promiscuity, now as an opposite reaction to this Muslim youth all over the world are picking up the microphone and spitting rhymes.

Some use their genuine talent not to rap about their clothes, big chains, cars and women. They are talking about Allah, The Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and their experience about being Muslim.

People always ask me why Muslim kids are using rap to express themselves. Well rap is the music of the youth. As urban music has become the largest selling music form in the world, rap which is a part of that has become ever more dominant in the ears of the young.

Rap has now also become the voice of the Muslim youth. I think this is a really positive development because at the same time we have radical clerics with distorted teachings going around trying to radicalize the youth, now there is an alternative mode of expression for young men and women to air their frustrations to write powerful poems and raps to entertain educate and inform the listener about their feelings.

It is often asked “Can rap really be put into Islam?” My answer is yes because rap is poetry with rhythm and the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) had his own official poet, Hasan B. Thabit who used to stand in the mosque and recite poetry. He also used to defend the Prophet against lies and slanders made against him by other poets that were against the rise of Islam.

The Link Between Islam and Hip Hop

By Shaykh Michael Mumisa
PhD Candidate & Special Livingstone Scholar, Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge.


For most people whose image and perception of Islam and Muslims is shaped by the media the terms “Arts and Islam” conjures up images of the Taliban in Afghanistan destroying precious works of art and locking up artists and other cultural agents.

And again for many people, including Muslims, the term Hip Hop is often associated with a materialist lifestyle and the ‘soft porn’ graphic music videos so common these days on a number of music channels.

Thus, the suggestion of any link between Islam and Hip Hop is bound to generate some confusion if not outright rejection and yet academics and writers in the US (Ted Swedenburg, Anaya McMurray, Suad Abdul Khabeer, and others), and me here in the UK have been writing about and exploring the “Islamic roots” of hip hop.

Islam has always been referred to as “the official religion of Hip Hop.” A large number of some of the best known Hip Hop artists today such as Everlast, Ghostface Killah, Mos Def, Lupe Fiasco, The Roots, Jurassic 5, Freeway, to mention just a few, are practising Muslims.

There has also been a rapid increase in the number of converts to Islam among young underground Hip Hop and Rap artists on the UK scene. There is no doubt that positive grassroots projects by artists and groups such as Mecca2Medina, Poetic Pilgrimage, Masikah, Mohammed Yahya, and others are contributing factors to the growing interest in Islam among UK’s young Hip Hop generation.

Unlike in the UK where Islam is still viewed by many as an “immigrant religion”, Islam is the US has always been considered “indigenous” to the religious and cultural landscape of America. There is an agreement among historians that most of the African slaves who were brought to the US and the Caribbean Islands were Muslims. According to Professor Thomas Tweed of the University of North Carolina, “American Muslim history is longer than most might think, extending back to the day that the first slave ship landed on Virginia’s coast in 1619.”

Thus, Islam has always been an integral part of African-American history and cultural expression (from Jazz to Hip-Hop). African-Americans continue to constitute a majority of the Muslim population in the US. It is not surprising that even those artists who may not appear to have any direct association with Islam employ Islamic terms or themes in their songs. For example, Foxy Brown’s Hot Spot (“MC’s wanna eat me but it’s Ramadan…”), 50 Cent’s Ghetto Quran, Jill Scott’s A Long Walk (“maybe we can talk about Surah 31:18”), to mention just these few.

Spoken word artists and poets (and today’s Rap artists) have always been important cultural agents in the history of Islam from the pre-Islamic to the classical and medieval periods. The poet functioned as the official ‘historian’ of the tribe (in the case of pre-Islamic society) or of the Muslim empire (in the case of the ‘Umayyad, ‘Abassid, and other Muslim societies).

According to the famous Afro-Arab scholar of the ‘Abbasid period al-Jahiz (776-869 CE), “every nation strives to preserve its history, culture, and stories in a number of ways. The Arabs of pre-Islamic society would employ poetry in an attempt to preserve their heritage [...]” (see his al-Hayawan, p.71-72). Another scholar Al-Marzuqi explains the status of poetry and poets in his commentary to one of the most famous works of classical Arabic poetry the Hamasa of Abu Tammam: “Such was the high status enjoyed by the poets in the pre-Islamic and Islamic eras including the early as well as final days of the two Islamic empires. God the almighty allowed it [poetry] to play the same role for Arabs that books played in other nations. It is the repository of their culture and the reservoir for their genealogies (see Sharh diwan al-hamasa, vol.1, p.3).”

Indeed it is not an exaggeration to say that Islamic theology and other related Islamic disciplines were shaped and directly influenced by poets and poetry.

The collection and compilation of poetry in Islam pre-dates some of the collections of hadith (the statements by and about the Prophet). In fact, almost all of the classical writers on the exegeses of the Qur’an made use of pre-Islamic and early Islamic poetry.

Today Hip Hop poets such as Amir Sulaiman, Muneera and Sakina of Poetic Pilgrimage, Warsan Shire, Mohammed Yahya, and others have been reviving the traditional role of poetry and poets in Islam. For many of the young British Muslims involved in hip-hop, the practice of sampling in the music can be seen as a metaphor for how to deal with the challenges they face with their own multiple identities, and how they can reconstruct a unique identity by sampling the various available cultures.

The use of Islamic themes in such sampled music from other, non-Islamic sources also suggests how Islam can and should co-exist with other cultures in a pluralist society.

Radical Middle Way brings the Dangerous Ideas Tour, Birmingham:

The launch of the Arts & Islam Hip Hop Debate!

This is the official launch of the Arts & Islam Hip Hop debate. its time to discuss and engage with one another on this topic! There will be articles uploaded here from academics, artists and people involved with hip hop. Do check back here soon....