>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington, D.C.
[ Pause ]
>> Good afternoon, everyone, and
welcome to the Library of Congress
and today's lecture, which is
entitled "Rebel Music: Race, Empire,
and the New Muslim Youth Culture".
This is being presented by the
music division and the concerts
from the Library of Congress series.
If you'd like to learn
more about our events,
feel free to grab a season
brochure and also visit us online
at loc dot gov slash concerts.
We're very excited for today's
lecture, which features Hisham Aidi
from Columbia University.
The lecture is being presented
in conjunction with the Library
of Congress exhibition "The
Civil Rights Act of 1964:
A Long Way Struggle for Freedom"
and also the Daniel A. P.
Murray African American Culture
Association, and the
songs of America.
So a bit about Hisham.
He received his Ph.D. in political
science from Columbia and has taught
at Columbia's School of
International and Public Affairs
and also at the Driskell Center for
the Study of the African Diaspora
at the University of
Maryland - College Park.
He is the author of "Reploying
the State", published in 2008,
and was also a consultant for the
UN Development Program's Human
Development Report.
As a journalist, he has
contributed to publications such as
"The Atlantic", "Foreign Affairs",
"Al Jazeera", and [inaudible].
He has also been a Carnegie Scholar,
and in 2010, he was a fellow,
a global fellow at the
Open Society Foundation.
His most recent book
"Rebel Music: Race, Empire,
and the New Muslim Youth Culture"
was published earlier this year
in 2014, and without
further ado, Hisham Aidi.
[ Applause ]
>> Good afternoon.
Thank you all for coming.
Thanks, Nick.
Thank you so much for
the invitation.
It's a pleasure.
It's an honor to be here.
So I'm going to talk for about 45,
48 minutes, and if we have time,
I'll show you some video
clips just to illustrate some
of the points that I'm making.
You can hear me fine?
OK. OK. Let me begin by giving
you an overview of the book.
This book grows out of a
disagreement that I had
over a decade ago with a
French scholar Oliver Roy.
Some of you have heard of Oliver
Roy, known here as Oliver Roy.
He's a well-known scholar
of global Islam
and the globalization of Islam.
In 2002, when I was still a graduate
student, Oliver wrote an article
in "The National Interest" arguing
that with the end of the Cold War,
the only radical ideological
alternative available
for western youths
today was global Islam,
what he calls deterritorialized
[phonetic] Islam,
explaining how the dirty
bomber [inaudible],
some of you may remember the
shoe bomber, Richard Reed,
had embraced [inaudible].
Roy wrote quote twenty years ago,
such individuals would have
joined radical leftist movements
which now have disappeared
with the end of the Cold War.
Now there are only two international
movements of radical protests,
the anti-globalization
movement and radical Islamists.
To convert to Islam today is a way
for a European rebel to find a cause
that has little to do
with theology unquote.
In other words, what he's
saying is that the popularity
of Islam among Muslim youth, among
youth period around the world has
to do with the crisis of the left.
It has to do with the
collapse of Communism.
That there is no movement, no
narrative of social justice.
There's something to that, but
it's not fully accurate, right.
So I wrote a piece in
response to him saying
that that's not quite true.
The idea of Islam as a post-Cold
War outlet ignores the century-old
interaction between Islam
and the Black Freedom
struggles of the New World.
Islamic history and
theology, as many of you know,
have an appeal among minorities,
have had an appeal among minorities
in the West since the early 1900's.
Some would say earlier, 1800's.
Roy would go on to write
a well-regarded book.
Became a best seller called
"Globalized Islam", 2004,
and he responds to me indirectly
saying, "Yes, racial minorities
in the US have been
known to embrace Islam,
but that was a local
American matter,
not an internationalist movement."
So this book is my answer
to Roy a decade late,
and I make several arguments.
One, it's not true
that the only radical
or internationalist
protest available
to western youth today is political
Islam or [inaudible] as Roy says.
There is the Black Freedom
movement in all its glory,
from Brazil to the
Caribbean to Harlem.
The cultures and freedom
of the African diaspora,
the so-called Black Atlantic
are inspiring youth movements
around the world.
Today, we have Black Panthers
or Black Panther style movements
in South India, New Zealand,
Sri Lanka, and for my purposes,
I look at Muslim youth movements
inspired by the Panthers
and Black Power, and there are
such movements in France, Brazil,
England, Greece, and Sweden.
In Sweden, there's a movement
called [inaudible], which is a,
sort of a local version of
the Black Panther party.
[Inaudible], too.
There is, as I said, at least a
century of political interaction
between black American and
the Islamic world starting
in the early 20th century.
You get movements such as the
[Inaudible] Science Temple,
the [inaudible] movement, the Nation
of Islam, and so forth that drew
on Islamic history to build
identity, mobilize politically,
making art, literature,
and in so doing,
creating a rich internationalist
heritage,
what I call the Black
Muslim archive.
This archive, this history of
Islam of the Black Atlantic,
is attractive to Muslim
youths today not only
because it is the oldest Islamic
presence in the west but also
because of its progressivism,
its radicalism.
The Muslim political
landscape, as many of you know,
at least we're talking
about this earlier,
the Muslim political
landscape today is dominated
by conservative movements.
You have the Muslim
Brotherhood at the center right,
[Inaudible] on the far right.
If you're a liberal Muslim,
liberal Muslims will
gravitate toward Sufism,
the so-called mystical branch
of Islam, but where do you go
if you're a young progressive
Muslim interested in issues of race,
inequality, anti-imperialism,
and feminism.
Why is there no Islamic left?
This is a question one hears
often from young Muslim activists,
and I would argue that the
Black Muslim archive seems
to fill this political vacuum.
To Muslim youths today, African
American Islam, as represented
by Malcolm X, offers a progressive,
internationalist alternative.
It links the local with the global.
It connects struggles
against racism,
the struggles against
imperialism in the way
that no mainstream
Islamic movement does.
It also provides an entry, an
alternative bridge to the west.
I argue that with the end of the
Cold War, and especially after 9/11,
the Black Freedom movement
is the alternative
for young progressive Muslims.
The third argument that I make
is that music is a powerful lens
through which to view
these interactions
in the emerging movements.
Music disseminates black history,
as James Baldwin once argued.
It is through music that Muslim
youth oversees, learn about Garvey
and Malcolm and Black
Freedom struggles.
Music has long been used
everywhere by youth to protest,
proclaim identity, and
interpret the world.
But the dominance [inaudible]
Islamist movement
with its opposition to music has
meant that debates about music
and its permissibility
and purpose are central
to contemporary Muslim
youth culture today.
Today, music is the realm
where Muslim diaspora conscious
and identity politics are most
poignantly debated and expressed.
Last but not least, music is also
a mechanism of social control.
Increasingly deployed by states to
quote unquote moderate Muslim youth.
As a neuroscientist, Steven
Brown argues in his book "Music
and Manipulation", "Through
its effective power and ability
to communicate ideas, music
can shape identity, ideology,
and group solidarity, and states aim
to control musical flows as a way
to homogenize mass behavior,"
and what we're seeing in Europe
and America today is that as Islam
reflected cultural forms reach the
mainstream, state officials,
counterterrorism specialists are
carefully watching, listening,
wondering if these music flows
are undermining national cohesion,
and how they can be incorporated
into a politics of
counter extremism.
So that's my preamble.
That's my very long introduction.
I just wanted to give you
a general idea of the book.
I'm trying to tell the story of
the western encounter with Islam
through the angle of black
internationalism and music.
I begin in Brazil,
looking at debates
about Afro-Brazilian
protests, identity in music.
I then look at North American
cities, European cities,
and then North African cities.
I talk about various types of music
- punk, rap, funk, [inaudible],
samba, jazz, and [inaudible],
etc., and particularly interested
in how governments are trying to use
music to promote a liberal Islam.
Yet, today, I am going to focus
on the historic relationship
between Islam and African
American music, the cultural
and political ferment that has risen
out of these musical encounters,
and how governments, American
diplomacy in particular,
has sought to use jazz during the
Cold War and hip hop during the War
on Terror to shore up its
position in the Muslim world.
So Islam and jazz, I go to
this in detail in the book.
I talk about Eric Hobbs'
mom and Eric Hobbs' mom,
the late [inaudible] historian
was one of the first people
to note the connections
between Islam and jazz,
noting that the expansion of
jazz around the world was similar
to expansion of Islam, and that also
he talks about the growth of Islam
within the jazz community
in the United States
and the cultural effects that had.
The story of Islam and jazz, to put
it briefly, begins in the 1910's
with the Great Migration.
The cultural ferment produced
by the Great Migration
and the Harlem Renaissance would
propel the rise of Islam and jazz,
two forces that spread rapidly
and concurrently in pre-
and post-War urban America.
And in a trend that still intrigues
historians and music critics.
After World War II, scores
of jazz musicians embraced
[inaudible] Islam,
a heterodox movement that appeared
in late 19th century India.
One of the earliest figures
was Art Blakey, who had studied
in West Africa and embraced
[inaudible] Islam, and in 1947,
he formed a group called
the Messengers,
a 17-member all Muslim
jazz band based in Harlem,
centered around the [inaudible]
Mosque in Harlem, right.
This is 1947.
The band was led by Blakey,
but it included others,
other artists such as
the late Bill Evans,
[inaudible] who passed
away a few months ago,
and then there were
other artists, right.
[Inaudible], the pianist; Kenny
Clarke, the drummer; McCoy Tyner,
so, who was known as [inaudible];
vocalist Dakota Stinton;
Lynn Hope, and so on.
In researching this book,
I had the good fortunate
of interviewing a number of these
Muslim jazz musicians, [Inaudible]
and others, and they all
had a similar story, right.
Their families migrated
from the Jim Crow South.
They arrive in the northern
ghetto as [inaudible] young men,
and in the northern
cities, they're exposed
to all these third worldist
ideas and ideologies, right.
[Inaudible] Afro-Asian
Solidarity, and so on.
And one of the people, you know,
when I talked to these gentlemen,
I would always ask, well,
what drew you to Islam.
Why Islam in particular, and one
of the jazz elders I interviewed was
Rasheed Akmed, who is in early 90's.
Lives in Chicago, and
is the patriarch
of the [inaudible] Muslim
community in America.
He went to high school with Miles
Davis, and throughout the interview,
he'd say, "But I was a
lot cooler than Miles."
Right. And he said, "Islam, like
jazz, gave us a way out," right,
and this was a common
answer that I would get.
Jazz, like Islam, gave us a way out.
Alright. Islam provided a
psychological and cultural escape
from the severity of
the northern ghetto.
Muslim prayer and dietary
rules provided structure
in a world suffused
by drugs and alcohol.
The Muslim faith and languages such
as [inaudible] and Arabic opened
up the cultural and political
worlds of Africa, Asia,
and then also struggling
for self-determination.
And by identifying
with the Islamic world,
the African American converts could
go from being a downtrodden minority
to being part of a
global colored majority.
Now there's an additional factor.
Adopting a Muslim identity
helped blacks
in America sidestep legal racial
barriers, especially down South.
The trumpeter Dizzie
Gillespie never embraced Islam.
He would become Baha'i ,
and to this day in New York,
there's the Dizzie Gillespie
Baha'i Center for Jazz, right.
He would become Baha'i, but
he understood the cultural
and political work that Islam did.
He noticed that the converts
who changed their names
and dons turban were
perceived as African
or Middle Eastern and
treated better.
In his memoir "To Be or Not to
Bop", there's a hilarious section
where he talks about how when
touring down South in the 50's,
the Muslim band members could
go into restaurants and bring
out sandwiches for
the rest of the group.
The Muslims were served because
they were seen as foreigners.
He specifically mentions how drummer
Kenny Clarke, who was Muslim known
as Liaqat Ali Salaam, the
only [inaudible] jazz artist
that I'm aware of, had a W for
white written on his union card,
and that helped him get through
certain situations as well.
Gillespie was also impressed
by the Muslims' discipline,
artistic, and personal.
He saw how their internationalist
outlook how expand
and regenerate their art and
how their interest in Africa
and the Orient opened
up new musical vistas
as church-raised musicians began
incorporating Eastern rhythms
into the syncopated
structure of the blues
and church-based gospel
numbers, right.
The [inaudible] as
an example of this.
He was a musician who would change
the face of jazz, blending music
from Africa and Asia
with bebop, hard bop,
and he would create the subgenre
known as world music jazz.
His story, again, is representative.
Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee,
he moves to Detroit as a boy,
and one day walking around the
[inaudible] market in Detroit,
a gentleman, a fellow
laborer, he used to work
at the Chrysler factory,
would give him an instrument,
the [inaudible] telling
him that King David used
to play this instrument
5,000 years ago, alright.
He would incorporate
the [inaudible].
He would incorporate other
instruments, the [inaudible]
and so on, and, again,
create us a new subgenre.
The research on Islam and African
American music sometimes begins
before jazz, starting
with the Reconstruction.
The historian Sylviane Diouf, who's
based at the Chamberg in New York
and wrote the seminal
book "Servants of Allah"
on Muslim slaves in America.
Argues, for example, she begins
with the blues, and she argues
that Muslim Koranic [inaudible]
as it's called influenced
the development of the blues,
and in her lectures, she will
play a call to prayer from Mali,
and then Levi [inaudible]
early 1900's blues song
from the Mississippi Delta,
and it's entirely possible
that Koranic recital
influenced the blues.
But I begin in the teens, in the
1920's because I'm interested
in the role of music and
political mobilization,
and it was with the Garvey
[inaudible] movement in the 20's,
and Marcus Garvey's Universal
Negro Improvement Association
that first produced political
anthems and references
to the Islamic [inaudible].
I refrain to Garvey as the child
of Allah, [inaudible] and so on.
From the 20's through the 50's, jazz
absorbed Islamic influence at home
and then abroad as
it spread overseas.
As many of you know, jazz
was introduced to Europe
by African American
troops during World War I.
In October 1918, the 369th infantry,
the black regimen from New York,
which included a 44-piece jazz
band, led by James Reese Europe,
one of Harlem's finest
bandmasters, landed in France
and sparked a cultural craze.
The Harlem Renaissance would
thereafter play out in Paris,
sparking the France
[inaudible] movement.
Jazz would also percolate down to
France's colonies in North Africa
and begin to mix with
local musical genres.
So you would get jazz,
these jazz clubs in Senegal
and Nigeria and Morocco and so on.
And in the book, I
have a chapter talking
about how jazz altered the musical
landscape in the [inaudible]
in the 1960's as itinerant American
jazz musicians adopted the rhythms
and instruments of the
[inaudible] Brotherhood,
which was then marginalized, making
now a music which was then, again,
very much on the margins, one
of the most popular genres
in North Africa today.
And the impact of these, I'll come
back in a moment to the impact
of these jazz tours culturally.
As jazz became the soundtrack
of an [inaudible] America,
policymakers and diplomats
took note.
After World War II, as British
and French colonies
gained their independence,
they found themselves wooed
by two superpowers eager
to expand their spheres
of influence.
Washington's efforts were
complicated, however,
by Soviet propaganda, which tended
to focus on racial discrimination
and protests in the American South.
And President Eisenhower, who
had been rather complacent
about civil rights, began
to see that internationally,
race was America's Achilles heel,
and the state department began
organizing high-profile jazz tours
to alter impressions.
The jazz tours were the
brainchild of Adam Clayton Powell,
the Democratic Congressman from
Harlem, who conceived of jazz
as a Cold War weapon after
attending the Afro-Asian Conference
of non-allied nations in
1955 in Bandung, Indonesia.
Powell was repealed by the third
world [inaudible] he heard,
and the claims of the
Soviet Union was better.
It was more progressive on
race than the United States.
Upon returning, he proposed to the
state department that bands led
by Dizzie Gillespie, Count Basie,
and Louis Armstrong be sent abroad
to improve America's image.
As Powell would tell Eisenhower,
one dark face from the US is
of as much value as millions
of dollars in economic aid.
Top diplomats welcomed this idea.
The main goals of the tours
were to bolster alliances
and persuade non-alliance
states that the US was different
from European colonial powers and
different from the Soviet Union,
and in March 1956, Gillespie,
Dizzie Gillespie and his arranger,
a young trumpeter named Quincy
Jones, embarked on the first tour.
Their first performance
took place in Iran
where three years earlier a
[inaudible] had reinstalled the Shah
to power.
Gillespie's 18-person band, 18-piece
band performed in Iran before moving
onto Syria, Lebanon,
and Pakistan and ending
in Turkey, Greece, and Yugoslavia.
The jazz tour specifically
targeted areas
where Communism was
gaining a foothold
and zones rich in oil and uranium.
As Penny Vonition [phonetic]
writes in her pioneering study,
"Sachetmo Blows Up the World",
the tours often moved in tandem
with covert CIA operations.
The jambassadors, as they were
called, were often dispatched
as first responders
to trouble spots.
In 1958, for example, John
Foster Douglas, extended a tour
that Dave Rubik's band
had taken into Iraq hoping
that while the jazz
ambassadors performed,
US officials could help quall
the discord within Iraq's,
within the Iraqi army's ranks.
As Quincy Jones, one of the
last living jazz ambassadors,
writes in his memoir,
"They sent us to every post
where there were problems.
We got nothing but raves.
We were the black kamikaze band."
Alright. At one point, you know,
[inaudible] would perform in Syria,
and she would perform the
Syrian national anthem, right,
and it would make a
great impression.
Hold on one moment.
Excuse me.
On Melba, in Damascus, [Inaudible],
one of the few women to participate
in the tours, would learn the
Syrian national anthem from a group
of school children, and
then perform her own version
to the delight of local audiences.
Likewise, also in Damascus, during
a performance at a fair in Syria,
Duke Ellington was
hailed with shouts
of [inaudible], long the Duke.
And a running joke among
the male ambassadors,
the male jazz ambassadors,
revolved around the perils
of flirting with local girls, right.
They wanted to sort of meet
women, but they couldn't.
Quincy Jones makes jokes about
this, which I won't repeat
to this audience [inaudible].
I was going to, then
I was, like, no.
These integrated bands visited the
Soviet Union and parts of Africa
and Asia in the Middle East.
Their performances at
generating good will
and getting citizen
[inaudible] to identify
with the American way of life.
The bands were intended to be
symbols of the triumph of democracy
with the jazz serving
as an embodiment
of America's liberal ideals and
its improvisational pluralism
and its universal race
transcending quality.
The irony, of course, is that
these band musicians were deployed
at a time when the US was
still a Jim Crow nation, right.
They're deployed to
improve the country's image,
but it's still a Jim Crow nation.
There was such opposition
to these tours at home
that when the jazz artists were
touring, state department officials
at home scrambled to
prevent images of the tours
from reaching southern
segregationists.
In this task, ironically, they
were aided by the [Inaudible] Act,
the so-called anti-propaganda law,
which was passed in 1948 by Congress
which then suspected that the
state department was staffed
with Communists.
The law prevented the output
of the US information agency
from being broadcast
to American audiences.
Nevertheless, the tours which ended
in the 70's are widely
considered a success.
Harvard scholar Ingrid Mason speaks
of the extraordinary
success of the jazz tours.
Pianist Dave Brubeck thought the
jazz ambassadors helped end the
Cold War.
I'm not sure these tours
brought down the Soviet Union,
but I do think their cultural
impact was quite extraordinary,
especially in the case of
artists like Brubeck, who met
and mentored young musicians.
In 2009, I was at the
50th anniversary
of Brubeck's [inaudible] record.
The album was recorded in 1959,
inspired by a Turkish
rhythm he heard walking
through the streets of Istanbul.
And I was there at
the 50th anniversary,
he brought on stage a number
of young Turkish musicians
that he had mentored
over the decades, right.
And there's a similar story of
Randy Westin settling in Morocco
and supporting [inaudible]
musicians,
and we were talking earlier,
earlier this summer in May and June.
I was in Cairo trying to dig
into an Egyptian jazz history,
and there's a long story there
of collaboration between Sun Ra
and Louis Armstrong and Quincy
Jones with local artists.
At any rate, the music
that they would create was
quite extraordinary.
Duke Ellington inspired by his time
in Iran would record a track
called [inaudible] on his
"Far East Suite" album,
which I recommend.
The jazz tours are deemed
to have been so successful
that they were revived after
9/11, but before I go into that,
some more musical history.
The intermingling between Islam
and African American
music would continue
through the 20th century
recording the social
and cultural changes afoot.
Beyond jazz, Islamic
motifs and notions
of pan-African solidarity
have been heard in soul music
since the 50's reflecting
[inaudible]
and Nation of Islam influence.
In the 60's, as members of soul
and R&B groups like the Delfonics;
the Five Stair Steps; the Moments;
Earth, Wind, and Fire; and Kool
and the Gang embraced Islam.
The ideas' intentions between
[inaudible] Islam and Nation
of Islam would find the
expression in their music.
An interesting, you know,
individual who's at the heart
of this is Kenny Gamble, right, in
Philadelphia known as [inaudible],
right, and he has brought, and he
has long sort of infused his music
with his ideas of self-determination
and self-reliance and so on.
With [inaudible] death in 1975, the
transition from the Nation of Islam
to [inaudible] Islam would
also be reflected in the music
of groups like Kool and the Gang.
The two brothers who started the
band, bassist Robert "Kool" Bell
and saxophonist Ronald Bell, grew up
in New Jersey, attending the Nation
of Islam's Muslim bazaars, and
they soon incorporated Nation
of Islam ideas about the
Orient and African spirituality
into their recordings with
songs like "Open Sesame"
and "Ancestral Ceremony".
After the Bell brothers embraced
Islam, the references changed,
and one morning after reading
a [inaudible] in the Koran
that celebrates life and the
creation of man, Ronald Bell,
[inaudible], wrote the
track "Celebration".
So it's one of the more
interesting details I've discovered
in researching this
book as Bell put it.
"So the initial idea for the
song came from the Koran.
I was reading the passage
where God was creating Adam,
and the angels were
celebrating and singing praises.
That inspired me to write
the basic chords everyone
around the world, 'Come
on, celebration'."
The song, inspired by Islam,
would go on to become an
international hit heard regularly
at ball games and political rallies
in the US and ironically was played
by the Reagan administration
on February 7, 1981,
to welcome home hostages held
by the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The genre, however, that that
I believe has absorbed the most
Islamic influence is hip hop, right.
Many of you are aware of this.
Islamic motifs and Arabic terms
have threaded the fabric of hip hop
since its genesis in 1973 when
[inaudible] founded the Zulu Nation.
[Inaudible] Group came
about in the Bronx
in the early 70's to
combat gang violence.
Founded the Zulu Nation
reflecting the range of Islamic
and quasi-Islamic ideologies
and cultures.
It co-existed for decades
in America's urban centers.
As hip hop sidelined disco and R&B,
the Islamic references would be
channeled into rap songs and videos.
The 1987 video [inaudible]
featured images of [Inaudible],
Muslim congregational
prayer, and so on.
In March 1991, the hip hop magazine
"The Source" devoted an entire
issue titled "Islamic Summit"
to the relationship
between Islam and hip hop.
In that golden age of politically
conscious rap, [Inaudible],
Public Enemy peppered their rhymes
with the Arabic phrases
invoking Islam, you know,
all kinds of [inaudible] and so
on, and excerpted the speeches
of Malcom X and Elijah
Muhammad as the Five Percent,
and then as the Five Percent Nation,
an offshoot of the Nation of Islam.
Gained [inaudible] in the 90's
mostly among youth in the northeast.
The movement's word play
found, literally found its way
into the lyrics of
Gang Star [inaudible].
As hip hop went mainstream
at about the same time,
these illusions were
broadcast around the world,
and that's what most
interests me, right.
As with the globalization of hip
hop, these illusions were broadcast
around the world, transforming
cultures and identities.
Through hip hop, Muslim youth
would be exposed to black history
and non-Muslims introduced to Islam.
Such is the prevalence of Islam in
rap that for many white hip hopers
in the US and Europe, acceptance
in the hip hop community comes only
with conversion to Islam, which is
seen as a rejection of being white.
By becoming Muslim, in effect,
an individual can transcend
his or her whiteness.
Think back.
This is reminiscent
of the jazz musicians
who when converting can get around
certain racial barriers, right.
The white rapper Everlast, for
example, formerly Eric Schrody
of House of Pain, claims that
conversion to Islam allows him
to visit areas in the
country he could never go
to as a non-Muslim white.
Curiously, his espousal
of Islam caused static
with another white rapper,
Eminem, right, who accused him
of becoming Muslim because
he has no skills and to deny
that he's a confused white
rapping Irish, alright.
Worth noting as well is that
it was also in the mid-90's
after the first Gulf War that Islam
goes global, not for the first time,
but you see a reglobalization of
Islam through migration in media.
You get the deterritorialization of
Islam that Oliver Roy talks about.
The Saudis after the Gulf War,
facing intense domestic opposition
for hosting American
troops, stepped up efforts
to export their [inaudible]
interpretation,
propagating a supposedly authentic
timeless Islam that is free
of all cultural innovation, openly
opposed to [inaudible] practice.
And, of course, this is when the
Internet enters the equation.
So the globalization of hip hop
and Islam converge and overlap
with all kinds of cultural
repercussions.
In fact, one could argue that in
the United States, it was hip hop
that paved the way for the rise
of the [inaudible]
movement in the mid-90's.
It was the Malcolm X fad
of the early 90's marked
by Afrocentrist hip hop
and Spike Lee biopic
that led many young Americans
to read the civil rights leader's
autobiography and become interested
in African and Islamic
history, right.
And there, after the Million
Man March, you get a decline
of the Nation of Islam, and that
interest would be channeled often
into the [inaudible] movement,
which in the early 90's
was being propagated
by young Saudi-trained
American born converts
who spoke perfect American
English and understood the issues
of social breakdown and urban
exclusion that drew inner city youth
to Islam, and some fascinating
[inaudible] influences would seep
into hip hop culture like
the rolled up pant legs.
In New York, they're called
tread high water pants, right.
The [inaudible] claim that the
earliest Muslim wore their pants
above the ankle, and
you see that style.
The Philly [phonetic] beard
with a low moustache
all would become popular
within the hip hop nation among
youth, Muslim and non-Muslim.
The Philly beard would
be popularized by,
Philly beard as it's
called, would be popularized
by the Philadelphia rapper Freeway.
In Philadelphia, it's simply
called the [inaudible].
And these styles would be
transmitted around the world.
The British journalist Richard Ready
says that across European cities,
you can see what he
calls the righteous look,
like the untrimmed beard, the
skullcap, the long-sleeved shirt
with Arabic writing, right.
And last year in Beirut, Lebanese
rapper Hussein Charafeddine,
known better as a Double A the
Preacher Man, was arrested in Beirut
by the Lebanese military.
They thought he was a [inaudible]
militant because of his beard.
He's actually [inaudible].
So why you wear a beard?
It's my Philly, he said.
So this was the relationship
between hip hop
and Islam in the 80's and 90's.
Hip hop would transmit black history
around the world, and just as reggae
in the 70's disseminated
Rastafarianism,
hip hop would broadcast African
American Islam and all its variants.
After 9/11, however, this
relationship changes and begins
to draw greater government scrutiny.
The turning point I believe was
when a young American by the name
of John Walker Lindh was
found behind enemy lines
in Afghanistan in October 2001.
Just how did this middle-class boy
from Marin County end
up joining the Taliban?
His online postings, experts
argued, offered a clue.
In hip hop chatrooms,
Lindh often posed as black,
adopting the name [inaudible]
or Professor J. Experts would trace
this, the, this young man's journey,
so called, to radicalism to the
age of 12 when his mother took him
to see Spike Lee's film "Malcolm X"
after which he read
the autobiography
and began listening to hip hop.
American and European officials
would thereafter note the centrality
of hip hop and Malcolm X to
Muslim youth politics and argue
that a moderate understanding of
the Malcolm X narrative is critical
to protecting at-risk Muslim youth.
OK. Now I want to show
you two clips.
What do I do?
Close this.
So I'm going to show you just
sort of twenty-second clip just
to illustrate what
I'm talking about.
So this is Gang Star who's
going to take the way.
This is one of the earliest tracks
that would have references to Islam,
to Malcolm X, and that
was a hit domestically,
but would also go overseas,
and its reference
to this day by rappers abroad.
I'm going to show you
just a 15-second clip,
and how it's inspired a certain
kind of European hip hop subgenre.
[ Music and Rapping ]
How do I shrink this?
Yeah. Let me show you
another track now.
This is. So when doing research
for this book, in Europe, artists,
Europe [inaudible], artists
often ask me that kind
of hip hop, '90, 1990's hip hop.
Where did it go and so on, but you
have that kind of political sort
of Afrocentrist hip
hop today in Europe,
and I'm going to play
a track by [inaudible],
who's a well-known French artist,
French Algerian who's a black
powerwright [phonetic], alright.
He has a beard, refers to it
as the Afro underneath my jaw,
and the track that you're going to
see is he's imaging a conversation
between Malcolm X and the
head of the Northern Alliance.
[Inaudible] on the day
before their assassination.
What would they talk to each
other, and his argument is
that they're both victims of empire
and so on, but let me play a clip.
But this is the kind of hip hop
that the French government
is worried about.
This is the kind of hip hop that
the French government's trying
to counter by promoting more
[inaudible] oriented rappers,
alright.
He's considered an underground
artist quote unquote.
Very popular, but he doesn't
get much mainstream radio play.
[ Music and Rapping ]
OK. I apologize there are no
subtitles, but the track is largely
about this encounter with these
two figures who are a product
of [inaudible], who
have risen in response
to American policy what
they would tell each other.
At any rate, what I was
saying is that, you know,
with John Walker Lindh, something
governments are paying close
attention to hip hop, right.
Let me close this so it
doesn't distract you.
So just to put this
thinking on policy context.
The American debate on extremism
is jihadist violence falls roughly
into two schools of thought,
and one camp is a realist
as the one camp is a coalition
of realists, leftists,
and post-colonists who think
extremism is a response
to an American policy
or set of policies,
and on the other side are those,
neoconservatives and liberal hawks,
liberal internationalists who
think Islam's violence grows
out of ideology and narratives
and not just opposition
to American action.
This debate is ongoing,
right, within the government
and national security,
the security community.
And if the real is the first camp,
advocate a less interventionist
foreign policy,
so-called offshore balancing
as a way to prevent extremism,
the liberals, liberal
hawks who think the roots
of violence are cultural or
theological are more likely
to advocate military intervention
and social engineering.
Regime change or modernization
of some sort,
and they spend a great deal of
effort studying Muslim scripture
and cultural traditions
to find a way
to disrupt the quote
unquote narrative, right,
and herein lie the roots of
the new public diplomacy.
Public diplomacy 2.0 that
uses music, art, social media,
and the discourse of diversity.
And this debate maps onto
yet another policy debate
within the foreign policy
community over whether Islamists
or Sufis make better
allies for the US.
The idea that Sufi Islam is more
moderate and flexible and compatible
with liberalism than the
interpretations of Islam that come
out of Arabia has an old colonial
pedigree and have found its way
into American academia and
the post-war years imported
by European scholars who
were establishing some
of the first centers for the
study of Islam in the US.
During the early years of
the Cold War, these scholars,
liberal orientalists, argued
that the US should support Sufi
brotherhood to promote modernization
and democracy in South
Asia, Iran, and North Africa
and to counter Arabcentric Islam.
But the realists, who
are less interventionist,
who are more concerned with order
and containing the Soviet Union,
argued that the Islamist
were more liable.
They had greater institutional
capacity
and ability for social control.
The realists, as we
know, won that debate.
So for forty years the US
would support Islamist groups
like the Muslim Brotherhood and
the [inaudible] Muslim World League
against Communism, third
world nationalism but also
against left-wing African American
Muslim groups within the US.
Alright. I mean, one of the
diplomats I interviewed,
they said back then we let
the Muslim World League open
up in America because we saw them
as a good way to counter some
of the black power
movements and radical,
the militant movements coming
out of urban city, urban areas.
And to this day, there's
this argument that you hear
that conservative Muslim groups,
[inaudible] in particular,
are seen as good for
urban development
with their self-help ethos and
transnational economic ties.
They're seen as able to
stabilize the ghetto, right.
This argument is ongoing.
This debate is ongoing.
I would recommend the
work of Sally Howell,
who writes about Detroit
and Dearborn.
She wrote a piece called
"Competing for Muslims"
on how local city officials actually
want conservative Muslim groups
because they help stabilize
areas and so on.
At any rate, that is the debate.
That's been the debate.
Historically, should we
support Sufis or Islamists?
After 9/11, however, as it became
evident that [inaudible] weren't
as apolitical or pro-American as
thought, Washington began looking
for a quote unquote
moderate Islam to back,
and would turn towards Sufism.
Government agencies, the
leading think tanks like Rand
and the Nixon Center, began
producing papers and policy memos
on how to mobilize Sufism
against [inaudible],
and their ideas were
put into practice.
Both the Bush and the Blair
government would begin
to promote Sufism as part of a wider
[inaudible] strategy that extended
from West Africa to South Asia.
In 2003, the National Security
Council established a program called
Muslim World Outreach with a
budget of 1.3 billion dollars aimed
at transforming Islam from
within, quote unquote.
And that is by supporting
organizations and Muslim countries.
Schools, radio stations,
publications that were
deemed moderate
and compatible with democracy.
This ideological project resembled
and was in some ways modeled
on the state department's
Cold War strategy
of supporting opposition currents
in the former Soviet Union except
that the post 9/11 campaign had
an explicitly theological agenda
to reform, aimed at reforming
Islamic religious thought
and practice.
Music would play a central
strategy, would play a central role
in the Sufi strategy,
as it was called,
and this Sufi policy was
deployed in a number of countries,
not simply by the US
and Great Britain.
Sufism would be mobilized in
Senegal, Morocco, Algeria, Ethiopia,
Pakistan, Chechnya, and elsewhere.
Given the [inaudible] opposition
to music and Sufism's use of song
and even dance for worship,
music after 9/11 came to be seen
as a quick and easy way to
distinguish between radical
and moderate Muslim, so called.
It became a lifestyle criterion.
And across the Muslim world
where regimes, not just the US
and Britain I emphasize, have
sought to mobilize Sufism,
Sufian-reflected musical practices
from Pakistan's [inaudible]
to Muslim hip hop,
have been deployed
to challenge Islamist narratives,
to draw youth away from extremism.
So it's within this context
that we should understand the
state department's music diplomacy
over the last decade.
Policymakers think music can
convey liberal discourse,
that can resocialize
at-risk Muslim youth.
So in 2005, the jazz
diplomacy initiative
of the Cold War was revived, and
a program called Rhythm Road,
a partnership of the state
department, Jazz at Lincoln Center,
and the Brooklyn Academy of
Music, the under [inaudible],
by Karen Hughes, the undersecretary
of state for public diplomacy,
introduced the program after
being appointed by President Bush
in the wake of [inaudible] and
resurgence of the Taliban and so on.
In 2005, state department begins to
send out hip hop envoys, rappers,
dancers, DJ's, to perform
and speak in different parts
of Asia and the Middle East.
Different groups.
The artists will stage
performances, hold workshops.
The hip hop ambassadors were
Muslim, talk to local media
about being Muslim in
America, and try to quote,
to try to correct the
prevalent misconception
that Muslims in the
US are oppressed.
That is what they're
trying to convey,
that Muslims in America
are well integrated.
For American diplomacy, hip
hop is the music of choice
for perception management
as it's called
and strategic communication
with young Muslims.
Why? Because of American hip hop's
long-standing relationship to Islam.
Because of that musical history
that I was talking about.
Neither hard rock nor heavy metal
has the same appeal to Muslims,
and if you look at the research on
music and interrogation in the Iraq
and Afghanistan, there is
rarely a mention of hip hop
with the exception of
Eminem's track "White America".
The songs used to breakdown
detainees were almost exclusively
hard rock and metal with tracks
like Slayer's "Angel of Death",
Drowning Pool's "Let the Bodies Hit
the Floor", and DSI's "F Your God".
Hip hop is used more
for cultural persuasion.
So it's not unusual today to read
state department reports that speak
of hip hop as a natural
connector to the Muslim world
and to hear planners
call for the leveraging
of hip hop in US foreign policy.
The hip hop diplomacy, I must
say, [inaudible] must emphasize,
fits into a larger effort to
showcase the civil rights movement
and the black freedom struggle
starting with the experience
of African Muslim slaves
in the American South.
Policymakers can see that the
war on terror and the range
of punitive policies
directed to Muslim communities
in the West have pushed Muslim
youth towards race activism
and the Black Muslim archive.
Thus, films like "Prince Among
Slaves", about [inaudible]
and African Muslim slaves who
ended up, an African Muslim prince
who ended up a slave in Mississippi,
are screened at embassies.
The 19th century narratives of
Muslims enslaved in the South,
the actual pieces of parchment with
the Arabic script are now exhibited
at diplomatic outposts, and
there's quite a bit on Malcolm X
in American public
diplomacy these days.
[Inaudible] report, authored
by the intellectual architects
of the Rhythm Road Program,
claims that hip hop resonates
with Muslim youth worldwide because
hip hop's pioneers were Muslims
who carry on an African
American tradition of protest
against authority, most
powerfully represented by Malcolm.
So jazz was deployed because it
represents American inclusiveness.
Hip hop is a diplomatic asset
because it represents
civil rights protests.
Just to contextualize the
current diplomatic interest
in Malcolm X. Malcolm is central
to Muslim youth consciousness
today as you saw in the video.
If Islam is the, if Islam is the
unofficial religion of hip hop,
as journalists like to say,
Malcolm X is the prophet
or at the very least
the patron saint.
His speeches are quoted.
His dress and demeanor are imitated.
If hip hop celebrates
the rise of the outsider,
the Nation of Islam
activists awesome trajectory
from street hustler to the
global arena, rising above any
and all states, free from
the shackles of patriotism
and national allegiance,
fearing only Allah is riveting
to young Muslims chaffing under
state domination in the ghetto
or its appendage, institution,
the prison.
Malcolm's religious and political
legacy has long been debated among
the Muslim youth.
Is he integrationist?
Is he separatist?
Is he pro-state?
Is he, does he not
believe in the state?
This debate is ongoing.
What's interesting is that
fifty years after his death,
the Muslim conversation
about the significance
of Malcolm has taken a distinct
theological turn, and [inaudible],
as he is often called, is gradually
becoming almost a saintly figure,
a [inaudible] whose life offers
personal and spiritual guidance.
Shifts [inaudible] religious
leaders now debate various aspects
of Malcolm's life.
His views on music,
marriage, parenting,
political participation, and so on.
Whether he was influenced by
Sufism or [inaudible] and so on.
One of the reasons Manning
Marable's biography of Malcolm X,
which came out in 2011
was controversial is
because Marable suggests
that Malcolm had been
influenced by [inaudible], right.
And government officials
are privy to this, right.
American and British officials
took particular notice of a video
that al-Qaeda released shortly
after Obama's electoral victory
praising Malcolm's militancy
and deriding the president.
In response, American
embassies from Nigeria
to Yemen began sponsoring
events on Malcolm's birthday,
celebrating Obama and
Malcolm X together,
accenting their meteoric rise
to international eminence
and relationship to Islam,
stressing that it was Malcolm X,
a symbol of a vital and open
America who made Obama possible.
The British government also began
to fund Muslim organizations
that had a quote unquote
moderate understanding of Malcolm,
focusing on his transformation,
following his pilgrimage to Mecca.
Peter Manderville, a
scholar who was a member,
who was until recently a member
of Hilary Clinton's
policy planning staff,
wrote that the resurging interest in
Malcolm X as seen in the aggressive
and confrontational lyrics
of British Muslim hip hop acts has
implications for national security.
He goes on to praise the work
of the British government
in funding a counter radicalization
hip hop project that sought
to mobilize British Muslim youth
around the more cosmopolitan
impulses of Malcolm X
after his break with the Nation
and subsequent global travels.
So various states, and I
discuss this in the book,
various states are trying to use
hip hop and the legacy of Malcolm
to socialize Muslim youth
in a particular direction.
Britain, France, Germany,
Saudi Arabia, and so on.
And then, of course, when the
[inaudible] began in 2011,
many of these, you know, and, you
know, when these revolts began,
and the musicians were
playing a prominent role,
and hip hoppers were playing
a particularly prominent role,
American officials behind
these programs felt vindicated,
saying that it was state
department hip hop initiatives
and the digital diplomacy that had
sowed the seeds of the Arab Spring.
And for these liberal
internationalists, you know,
who think discourse is the problem
and culture is a problem, you know,
they would advocate the
deployment of culture
and technology even further.
The debate about hip hop within
the foreign policy establishment
is fascinating.
One of the odder phenomena over
the last decade is hearing national
security elites, terrorism experts,
and career diplomats discuss
the finer points of flow, bling,
and the politics of cool.
The realists like the
leftists are skeptical
of these [inaudible] initiatives,
arguing that Muslim perceptions
of the US are still poor.
If you look at peer surveys,
because of US foreign policy,
but also because of
domestic policies directed
at Muslim communities.
As with the jazz tours, the
hip hop tours, and the state,
as with the jazz tours,
the hip hop tours
and the state department's recent
attempts to deploy the moral
and symbolic capital of the civil
rights movements have occurred
against the backdrop of
unfavorable media imagery.
Of Koran burnings,
anti-mosque rallies,
and accusatory Congressional
hearings, and, ironically,
the current cultural diplomacy
is inspired by the initiatives
of the civil rights movement
and civil rights era,
so are some of the security policies
targeted at American Muslims.
The NYPD surveillance
program is modeled
on the FBI's ghetto informant
program introduced in the 60's
to monitor black neighborhoods.
And also note the critics that while
state department officials were
touting the liberating
effects of hip hop and Facebook
on Muslim youth, the NSA was
using these very technologies
for surveillance and data gathering.
Ironically, it has
been law enforcement
and national security officials
who have raised the
most poignant questions
about the legality
of music diplomacy.
Sam Will Roscoff, a legal scholar
who directed the NYPD's
intelligence unit,
notes that the cultural
ambassadors sent overseas
by the state department are selected
according to a theological standard.
It is generally Sufi oriented
artists that are sent,
not Islamists, and he wonders
if this does not contravene
the establishment clause,
the Constitutional provision
that says the government should not
establish religion or take sides
in religious debates, in
this case, Muslim debates
about the permissibility of music.
Others are noting that these
performances may violate
anti-propaganda laws, some of
which are still on the books.
Performances are being uploaded
online where they can be viewed
and commented upon by American
audiences, allowing for people
to exchange views and so on.
And although the [inaudible]
Act, the [Inaudible] Act
which actually prohibited
[inaudible] broadcasting to America.
So the [inaudible] was amended
last summer to allow the BBG,
the broadcasting board of
governors that manages Voice
of American radio liberty, it was
amended to allow for broadcasting
to domestic audiences, right.
The reason it was amended was to
allow VOA Somali language broadcast
to broadcast to Minneapolis, right.
That's one of the reasons
it was amended.
Yet, still, unless explicitly
authorized by Congress,
such online interactions
between Americans
and non-Americans may violate the
publicity or propaganda writer
on strategic communications.
Some government websites,
such as [inaudible] dot com,
which is a department of defense
sponsored North African affairs
website, is designed to not allow
for two-way communications, right.
You're not allowed to
post comments and so on.
At any rate, that debate is ongoing.
The hip hop diplomacy
initiatives have sparked a debate
within the hip hop community, more
so outside the US over the purpose
of the music, whether rap
is protest or party music.
Is it the soundtrack
of, to the struggle
or the soundtrack of
American unipolarity?
But even beyond hip hop,
a debate about music
and state-sponsored
Sufism has been raging
across various musical genres.
And now [inaudible] rap and
[inaudible] are getting attentions
between Sufi artists
supported by the states
and Sufi artists reluctant
to be part of that project.
The whole debates about hip hop,
Sufism, and Muslim extremism,
I must say, has returned.
It's come back again.
You have former Islamists
like [inaudible] arguing
that he was partly
radicalized by rap, NWA,
and in particular their
track "F the Police".
[Inaudible] is a well-known British
Muslim activist, and that, again,
rap, that NWA led him to
Malcolm, and then from there,
he became a [inaudible] Islamist.
With the emergence of ISIS, there
is talk again of extremist rap
and the need for a
counter narrative.
"Political" in the last
month has run three stories
on whether Obama is
losing the propaganda war.
If the state department is
winning the Twitter war,
and the supposed role of [inaudible]
and radicalizing young Britons
and getting them to go
off to Syria and Iraq.
What I'm most interested in
the debate within the Muslim,
various Muslim communities, the
American Muslim community, British,
French, and so on on whether to
partake in cultural diplomacy or not
because for all the risks they
face and criticism they receive,
Muslim American community leaders
and artists still underline
the necessity of such programs.
The hip hop ambassadors,
I should stress,
have assumed some personal risks.
In July 2007, Toni
Blackman, the first artist
to be appointed hip hop
ambassador, who was driven
in an armored vehicle,
flanked by a convoy
of trucks carrying UN
[inaudible] to perform
in the largely Muslim rebel held
north of [inaudible], Ivory Coast.
In January 2006, she was attacked
on stage while performing
[inaudible], Indonesia.
She was shoved off stage.
In November 2011, a hip hop dance
troupe from Chicago was detained
in Pakistan, and their
venue, [inaudible],
was pressured to cancel their show.
Despite all this, many of these
artists still want to do this
because they see it as necessary
for Muslim integration in America.
There are Muslim leaders who contend
that patriotically representing
and defending your country overseas
can dampen Islamophobia at home
and help extract policy
concessions from Congress.
The critics, on the other hand,
find such programs manipulative,
using black music and
the civil rights movement
to rebrand America while
the government is infringing
on the civil rights Muslims,
civil rights of Muslims at home
and ordering drill strikes abroad.
Don't think so.
This debate echoes the
disagreement of the early 60's
between liberal integrationists
like Adam Clayton Powell
and Bayard Ruston and
radical internationalists
like Malcolm X and Paul Robson.
Bayard Ruston argued that you do
not criticize your country overseas.
All that does is inflame public
opinion against you domestically
and alienates important
domestic allies.
And on the other side was
Malcolm, who saw it as his duty
to counter state department
claims about racial progress.
He called it propaganda, and he,
like [inaudible] the
jazz ambassadors.
A similar debate is taking
place among young Muslims
in Europe and America today.
The conversation about music and
cultural diplomacy is a stand
in for a much larger debate
about integration, belonging,
and America's role in the world.
Thank you.
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc dot gov.