Globalized Muslim Youth in the Asia Pacific: Popular Culture in Singapore and Sydney by Kamaludeen Mohamed Nasir (review)

This book examines Muslim youth engagement with popular culture in Sydney and Singapore, two global cities of the Asia Pacific region. The author skilfully weaves together data from textual sources, cyberspace social networking websites, and ethnographic observation and interviews to produce a comparative transnational study of Muslim youth involvement in hip-hop, tattooing, and cultural consumption. Globalized Muslim Youth in the Asia Pacific situates Muslim youth in a global perspective without losing sight of the significant effects of state policies and projects on their responses in local contexts. It is a sociological study that draws upon contemporary theories of popular culture, youth and generations, globalization, and social power. Thus, this book is of interest to students and scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including global studies, culture studies, anthropology, and Islamic studies.

In the first chapter, the author introduces the topic of his study and the contribution it makes by focusing on Muslim youth and popular culture in Singapore and Australia, where Muslims are a minority, rather than in Malaysia and Indonesia or other Muslim-majority societies in the region. Moreover, Kamaludeen’s study shows us how we can seek to understand youth piety through discerning the ways it connects with global popular culture. Chapter 2 provides a theoretical discussion of factors related to analysing urban Muslim youth and popular culture, an explanation for his selection of research sites, and a detailed description of his methodology. The author underscores the importance of considering the complicated exchanges between the local and global, young Muslims’ religious and non-religious sensibilities, and the often-ignored influence of the state on processes of globalization. In addition to this globalized dimension, he points to the ‘sheer complexity that lies in the displays of piety within popular youth culture’ (p. 13). Kamaludeen cautions us not to assume that the blending of religion with popular youth culture results in a decline of religiosity and religious virtue, especially since the youth are becoming custodians of religion and actively producing reinterpretations of Islam. In addition, he avers that extant scholarly works inadequately account for the paradoxes of globalization, such as the simultaneous de-regionalization of religion and the persistent association of migrant Muslims with specific localities to which they are thought to ‘belong’.

The author completes the presentation of his interpretative framework with Chapter 3, which discusses the generational perspective on identity formation and the state’s attempts to mould an ideal Muslim youth identity. Drawing upon Bourdieu’s popular concepts of ‘habitus’ and social and cultural ‘capital’, he describes young Muslims’ efforts to form their identities within the dominant socio-political contexts of Singapore and Australia.

In the next three chapters, Kamaludeen shares the fascinating data he collected on Muslim youth and hip-hop, tattooing and cultural consumption, and reveals interpretations and new concepts for explaining his research findings. He informs us that Muslim youth of the September 11 generation, living in the Information Age, actively engage in localizing cultural flows from multiple sources and directions. The author demonstrates that in the context of the liberal state in Australia, Muslim youth in Sydney appropriate a broader range of hip-hop genres, including gangsta rap, and many of them also become poetic jihadi. In contrast, Muslim youth in Singapore, constrained by the authoritarian state, rarely engage in critical hip-hop and are more inclined to practise a personal struggle for excellence. Similarly, Muslim youth in Sydney, competing in a more open and less partisan situation, tend to organize their own self-styled gangs for which they create Muslim or ‘Islamic’ tattoos, while Malay Muslims in Singapore, coping with the predicament of the nationalization of Chinese gangs, often embrace identity markers associated with the dominant majority. I am not convinced that the concepts ‘bricolage’ (p. 136) and ‘carnival of signs’ (p. 146) help to explicate the creative processes Muslim youth enact in...