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Chapter 1. Hardcore Muslims: Islamic Themes in Turkish Rap between Diaspora and Homeland
- University of Texas Press
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at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Islam had, according to various estimates, between 900 million and 1.4 billion adherents in more than fifty countries, making it the second-largest religion in the world. Rap music and hip-hop youth culture have also, in their brief history, achieved global status, as the essays in Tony Mitchell’s edited volume Global Noise (2001b) illustrate. It is perhaps not surprising that the long-standing world religion Islam1 and the more recently global musical genre of rap have intersected in various ways.2 Both the religion and the musical style have spread over the globe as people and ideas move around and people use the material and expressive resources at their disposal in practices of identity construction . It is not necessarily contradictory or paradoxical that some people may find it useful and compelling to imagine their identities using both Islam and rap music. Recent research on globalization and popular culture provides a framework for exploring how people may create and explore Muslim identities through rap music. Researchers have explored local adaptations and uses of globally circulating culture, especially focusing on cases where these uses are by people in places perceived to be geographically or socially marginal or peripheral to an imagined white Euro-American cultural “center.” Some key terms in this discourse—each with its own nuances or implications—include “cultural reterritorialization,” “indigenization,” “domestication,” “glocalization ,” and “creolization” (Appadurai 1996; Bennett 2000; Hannerz 1992; Mitchell 2001a; Slobin 1993; Solomon 2005a). While such accounts have focused on how local actors have reinterpreted and locally emplaced the objects and genres of global popular culture—how Afro-American rap music and hip-hop youth culture are locally emplaced in Tokyo, Istanbul, and Sydney , for example—comparatively less attention has been paid to the other side of the glocalization coin—how locally significant issues and discourses are adapted to and embodied in these globally circulating cultural forms. chapter 1 hardcore muslims: islamic themes in turkish rap between diaspora and homeland thomas solomon 28 thomas solomon In this chapter I explore some of the ways Turkish rappers have imagined Islam. By “imagining Islam,” I mean the ways in which people go beyond issues strictly pertaining to faith and doctrine to creatively imagine their own identities as Muslims.3 I examine “Islamic” themes in Turkish rap lyrics , comparing rappers living in Turkey to those in the Turkish diaspora in Germany, and I discuss some of the differences between the uses of Islam in Turkish rap in songs from these two different settings. I use three Turkish rap groups, one from Frankfurt, Germany, and two from Istanbul, as case studies of the different subject positions self-consciously Muslim rap groups can create through their music. I explore these issues primarily through the discussion of rap song texts, but also draw on ethnographic fieldwork in Istanbul . I argue that there is no one genre of Turkish “Islamic rap,” but rather that “Islam” is a sign that can be deployed in different ways to various cultural and political ends, and I suggest that the signs “Islam” and “Muslim ” as deployed in these rap songs cannot be equated with a unitary “Turkish Muslim” identity or with any particular political or religious ideology.4 turkish rap in the turkish diaspora Turkish-language rap and hip-hop are a transnational movement. Accounts of the history of Turkish rap describe how it started not in Turkey, but in Germany, practiced by members of the Turkish “guestworker” (Gastarbeiter ) community, especially in, but not limited to, the cities of Berlin and Frankfurt (Diessel 2001; Kaya 2001; Robins and Morley 1996).5 Rappers who use the Turkish language are also active in Holland, France, Switzerland, England, and the United States. In Europe, especially in Germany, Turkish hip-hop was created in a context of sociocultural marginality, reflecting very real experiences of racism and social exclusion (Çağlar 1995; Çınar 2001; Kaya 2001; Robins and Morley 1996). During the early 1990s Turks in Germany experienced a wave of physical and psychological attacks by neo-Nazis, skinheads, and other xenophobic , racist far-right groups. Besides the everyday racism and xenophobia directed at them, Turks in Germany have also been the target of violent racist attacks, infamously including a series of arson attacks on Turkish homes during the early 1990s, as in the events described in the following news report: On November 23, 1992, two Skinheads, aged 19 and 25, firebombed two houses in Mölln, Schleswig-Holstein, killing...