The Internet provides religious authorities with yet another medium in order to connect and attract new adherents. At the same time, and perhaps more importantly, the Internet provides a space for new interpretations and deliberations concerning religious practices without the direct supervision and interference of religious authorities. The intention of this paper is to highlight one specific aspect where this development is clearly seen, i.e. the Muslim hip-hop music video clips distributed and published online.
Hip-hop has become a vernacular for youth involvement and protest worldwide and is used by young people demanding to be heard whether they are at Maydan al-Tahrir in Cairo, among the Algerian immigrants in the French suburb Clichy-sous-Bois, or at the public housing project Queensbridge in New York. Through hip-hop these youngsters are given an opportunity to unite against perceived injustices both on a local and a global level alike.
Most protesting youth with a Muslim family background use a secular, political language to protest but far more than only the deeply devout Muslims make references to Islam. By fusing Islam with the African American aesthetics of hip-hop, they have created a monumental fusion of resistance.
The empirical material studied in this paper reflects this development and on top of the on-going internal religious debates on the legitimacy of music and the usage of images and depictions music clips are a fascinating topic for content analysis in several ways.
The visual aesthetics, the choices of pictures (or no pictures), themes and storylines supplementing the musical message can be used to mobilize and promote different traditions of interpretation of Islam. They also convey interesting insights in the negotiations and compromises of Muslim identities in the consumer culture logic of the modern society. Lastly, they can provide a route to analyze the articulations of alternative interpretations of Islam often, but not always, rooted in a deep social-justice activism that connects marginalized communities within and beyond the Middle East.
The paper analyses music video clips from Muslim hip-hop acts based in Denmark, Egypt and the United States. It stems from a larger research project that explores the complex relationship between Islam and the hip-hop culture in the intersection of the global religious consumer market and the development of a social-justice activism rooted in Islam.
Islam has not only changed hip-hop, more importantly; hip-hop has and is changing Islam.
Religious Studies/Theology
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