Muslim Cool: Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States by Su’ad Abdul Khabeer (review)

In the late 1990s, I converted to Islam and registered with the Nation of Islam (NOI). As a committed member, I joined the Fruit of Islam on the busy intersections of Black and Latino communities in a suit and bowtie to push the Nation’s signature publication, The Final Call.¹ On the long drives across the city, we’d pump ourselves up with the rhythms of Muslim hip-hop artists like Poor Righteous Teachers, Brand Nubian, and Rakim.² For me, the music was critical to my experience as a Latino Muslim in a primarily Black Muslim organization. It cut across the differences of our backgrounds and afforded me a common point of aesthetic pleasure and solidarity with my fellow Muslims. In the beats and lyrics of hip-hop artists, I learned that even though I wasn’t a Black Muslim, I could still be at home in Black Islam.

As my experience suggests, the links between hip-hop, race, and Islam have been in some ways central to the meaning and experience of Muslims in the United States. Yet despite the significance of these connections, they have been generally ignored within the scholarship on American-Muslims, that is, until now. In Su’ad Abdul Khabeer’s first monograph, Muslim Cool: Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States, we find a timely and insightful contribution to the literature on US Muslims. Concerned with the intersections of Blackness and Islam in the constitution of Muslim experience, her book is a critical intervention in the debates on Islam that throws the significance of race in the lives of Black, South Asian, and Arab Muslims into sharp relief.

Khabeer’s key concept is Muslim cool, which she locates at the intersection of hip-hop and Islam and describes as “a way of being Muslim that draws on Blackness to contest two overlapping systems of racial norms: the hegemonic ethnoreligious norms of Arab and South Asian US American-Muslim communities on the one hand, and White American normativity on the other” (p. 2). The idea is analytically profound and historically illuminating. It provides a way of theorizing Islam that weaves race, religion, and music into one conceptual knot while demonstrating the centrality of Blackness to Muslim experiences in the US context. With Muslim Cool, Khabeer seeks to advance two interrelated arguments: that Blackness is central to the histories, experiences, and engagements of US American-Islam and that inter-minority relationships demonstrate the continuing significance of racism in contemporary America (p. 5). Throughout her text, Khabeer provides persuasive arguments for both claims.

As an ethnography of race and religion, the text covers substantial ground. The chapters move the reader across diverse spaces and events that reveal the many routes of Muslim Cool. One of her principal sites is the Inner City Muslim Action Network (IMAN), which provides a powerful setting for the opening chapter of the book: The Loop of Muslim Cool: Black Islam, Hip Hop, and Knowledge of Self. Located on Chicago’s Southside, IMAN is one of the better-known examples of Muslim community engagement providing free health and employment services, reintegration programs for formerly incarcerated men, and community arts events. Of its many functions, however, Khabeer emphasizes IMAN’s focus on the arts as a critical opening for understanding Muslim Cool. Specifically, she argues that its support of arts-based activism through hip-hop facilitates Blackness as a means through which young Muslims, Black and non-Black, can learn and incorporate a racial critique in their own self-making as Muslims (p. 17). To make her point, Khabeer offers a rich theoretical discussion on the epistemology of hip-hop and underscores its significance in the lives of Muslims working for IMAN. Using in-depth interviews with volunteers, she suggests that IMAN functions as a critical space where the common experience of hip-hop facilitates a turn toward a Black...