Arts & Islam Hip Hop Debate

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.