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"“The War of First-Names": Music and Islam in France
Abstract
In recent years tendencies of islamisation are to be found in the music of Muslim migrants of the French suburbs (the banlieu). This development can be seen as a reaction towards the majority society who accuses the Muslims of not being willing to integrate into the French society and bases this lack of will on the religion of Islam as non adaptable to a laic system like France. Therefore the terms Arab and Muslim are used interchangeable and the integration issue is more and more based on religious difference instead of ethnicity. This is mirrored in popular music of young French of migrant descent. The themes of the songs of the rebellious young of the eighties, like the group carte de séjour, were racism and citizenship, which coincided with the foundation of the beurs movement and organizations like “sos racisme”, but in the nineties due to the increasingly anti-Islamic and very successful rhetoric of the extreme right wing party of the Front National, political American-style banlieu Hip-Hop merged with Elements of Algerian Raï and incorporated increasingly allusions to Islam in an apologetic or rebellious provocative manner. The present contribution will demonstrate the stages of this development and show how the islamisation of banlieu music has led to the spread of Islamic themes into a variety of different musical genres. They are now to be found in French chanson, political and militant hip hop, but also in Sufi hip hop of an artist like Abd al-Malik or the new songs of the female artist Diam’s whose recent conversion to Islam led to a media outburst. In its final analysis the contribution will then talk about specific codes of this music scene and discuss if it is part of a global popular culture (or subculture) of resistance or a specific French counter culture of young Muslim migrants.
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Europe
Sub Area
Islamic Studies