While many
Islamist jihadists
Jihadism is a neologism which is used in reference to "militant Islamic movements that are perceived as existentially threatening to the West" and "rooted in political Islam."Compare: Appearing earlier in the Pakistani and Indian media, Wes ...
view
hip-hop negatively due to its
Western
Western may refer to:
Places
*Western, Nebraska, a village in the US
*Western, New York, a town in the US
*Western Creek, Tasmania, a locality in Australia
*Western Junction, Tasmania, a locality in Australia
*Western world, countries that id ...
origins, there have also been examples of
hip-hop songs with
With or WITH may refer to:
* With, a preposition in English
* Carl Johannes With (1877–1923), Danish doctor and arachnologist
* With (character), a character in ''D. N. Angel''
* ''With'' (novel), a novel by Donald Harrington
* ''With'' (album ...
pro-jihadist lyrics, and of jihadists embracing hip-hop and
gangsta
Gangsta may refer to:
Urban culture
* Gangsta rap, a subgenre of hip hop music that evolved from hardcore hip hop and purports to reflect urban crime and the violent lifestyles of inner-city youths
* Gangster, a member of a gang
* Hip hop fashi ...
culture as a way of attracting Westerners to join their organizations. The phenomenon is sometimes known as "
Jihad Cool
Jihad Cool is a term used by American security experts concerning the re-branding of militant jihadism into something fashionable, or "cool", to younger people through social media, magazines, rap videos, clothing, propaganda videos, and other mea ...
" and includes music, clothing, magazine, videos and other media.
Notable examples
German rapper
Deso Dogg
Denis Mamadou Gerhard Cuspert (18 October 1975 – 17 January 2018), also known by his stage name Deso Dogg and his ''nom de guerre'' Abu Talha al-Almani, was a German rapper who became a member of the Islamic State.Mekhennet, Souad. "Osama’s n ...
later took the names Abu Talha al-Almani
and Abou Maleeq, and joined ISIL in 2014.
British-born
Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary
Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary ( ar, عبد المجيد عبد الباري; born 16 June 1991) is a British former rapper and Islamist militant from Maida Vale, West London. He is the son of Adel Abdel Bari.
After circulation of video footage relate ...
rapped under the name L Jinny, is the son of Egyptian militant
Adel Abdel Bari. Jinny once
tweeted
Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...
a photo of himself holding a man's severed head, with the words "Chillin' with my homie or what's left of him."
One American rapper,
Omar Hamaami, who later joined
al-Shabaab, released a song with the lyrics "Bomb by bomb, blast by blast, only going to bring back the glorious past."
In 2006,
Aki Nawaz
Aki Nawaz (born Haq Nawaz Qureshi) is an English singer, rapper and musician and part of the band Fun-Da-Mental. He is best known for his controversial lyrics.
Profile
In the 1980s, using his proper name Haq Qureshi, he played drums with the ...
of the group
Fun-Da-Mental
Fun-Da-Mental is a British-based multi-ethnic hip-hop– ethno-techno– world fusion music group formed in 1991. The group is notable for its energetic fusion of Eastern and Western musical forms, for its outspoken political stance, and for i ...
released an album with lyrics comparing
Osama bin Laden to
and depicting the
Statue of Liberty as an
Abu Ghraib prisoner.
Analysis
Kamaludeen Mohamed Nasir's book, ''Representing Islam: Hip-hop of the September 11 Generation'', states that the unproblematic internalisation of gangsta hip-hop has led to what these rappers are calling a ''G-had''. The phenomenon of jihadi rap has been around since at least 2004, when the song "
Dirty Kuffar" was released.
Anthropologist
Scott Atran
Scott Atran (born February 6, 1952) is an American-French cultural anthropologist who is Emeritus Director of Research in Anthropology at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique in Paris, Research Professor at the University of Michigan, ...
argues that the phenomenon results from a search for "sacred values" and what
Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke (; 12 January NS.html"_;"title="New_Style.html"_;"title="/nowiki>New_Style">NS">New_Style.html"_;"title="/nowiki>New_Style">NS/nowiki>_1729_–_9_July_1797)_was_an_NS.html"_;"title="New_Style.html"_;"title="/nowiki>New_Style">N ...
called "the sublime"; a "quest for greatness, glory, eternal meaning in an inherently chaotic world".
Political historian
Mohamed Mahmoud Ould Mohamedou argues in his book ''A Theory of ISIS - Political Violence and the Transformation of the Global Order'' that the choreography and the soundscape (notably the nasheeds) of the transnational re-imagined and 'remixed' violence of the Islamic State partly borrows from the urban culture of hip-hop.
Amil Khan has cited Douglas McCain as yet another example of this phenomenon, and said that both Islamism and gangsta rap foster a "sense of grievance towards wider society" and "focus on vengeance and fetishize violence as a way of redressing the balance". Khan says that while researching young Islamists in London, he found that they looked to the works of
50 Cent and
Tupac Shakur
Tupac Amaru Shakur ( ; born Lesane Parish Crooks, June 16, 1971 – September 13, 1996), also known as 2Pac and Makaveli, was an American rapper. He is widely considered one of the most influential rappers of all time. Shakur is among the b ...
for inspiration. Khan argues that what sets ISIL apart from other jihadist groups, and makes it far more dangerous as a result, is its ability to harness hip-hop to "bestow on its struggle a counter-culture sense of subversive 'cool' that mainstream political parties and even commercial brands might envy." ISIL's marketing methods and overall strategies are also reminiscent of those used by street gangs.
Hisham Aidi has written a book, ''Rebel Music: Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Youth Culture'' describing the phenomenon of Islamist hip-hop. Aidi also mentions that the United States and other Western governments have attempted to use hip-hop and
Sufi music
Sufi music refers to the devotional music of the Sufis, inspired by the works of Sufi poets like Rumi, Hafiz, Bulleh Shah, Amir Khusrow, and Khwaja Ghulam Farid.
Qawwali is the best-known form of Sufi music and is most commonly found in the ...
to ''fight'' terrorism by deradicalizing young Muslims.
See also
*
Taqwacore
Taqwacore is a subgenre of punk music dealing with Islam, its culture, and interpretation. Originally conceived in Michael Muhammad Knight's 2003 novel, '' The Taqwacores'', the name is a portmanteau of "hardcore" and the Arabic word "taqwa" (Ø ...
References
{{reflist
Jihadism
Religious hip hop
Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant mass media
Hip hop
Music and politics