Black Star, Crescent Moon: The Muslim International and Black Freedom beyond America

3. Return of the Mecca: Public Enemies, Reaganism, and the Birth of Hip-Hop

89 New York City, and by extension the United States, got remixed by the influence of Islam well before the idea of 9/11. But this time it was through hip-hop culture. For Muslim MCs in the 1980s, New York City and its surroundings were reclaimed by its Black inhabitants in more ways than one. In the lexicon and imagination of Black Islam, New York was rechristened via Islam’s holiest sites, with Harlem becoming Mecca and Brooklyn becoming Medina. Harlem was named Mecca for many reasons, one of which had to do with Black Islam’s prophetic voice—Malcolm X—making Harlem sacred ground, where he, through Islam, would connect Black peoples in the United States to the larger Third World of Africa and Asia as he cast his verbal stones at the evils of white world supremacy. It is no surprise, then, that Malcolm X would also become hip-hop’s prophetic voice, as his influence and the embrace of Black Islam in hip-hop culture were forged out of a crucible of post–Civil Rights America and the expansion of U.S. empire abroad, a volitile period when the “Black criminal” and the “Muslim terrorist ” became the domestic and foreign threats, respectively, to U.S. national security. 3 return of the mecca Public Enemies, Reaganism, and the Birth of Hip-Hop Man what happened to us? Geographically they moved us from Africa We was once happiness pursuers Now we back stabbing, combative, and abusive The African and Arab go at it they most Muslim We should be moving in unison. —Nas and Damian Marley, “Tribes at War” As Black Power raged and urban rebellions roiled U.S. cities in the mid- to late 1960s, U.S. state agencies saw these rebellions as the domestic front in a broader war against popular people’s movements throughout the Third World. During this period, marked by retrenchment and a backlash against the perceived gains of the Civil Rights movement, U.S. federal, state, and local authorities mobilized a broader campaign to silence and destroy these movements and any possibility of their reemergence in the future. From the 1960s and into the twenty- first century, COINTELPRO, Nixon’s “law and order” mantras, and Reagan-Bush-Clinton policies in the “War on Crime” gave birth to an urban police state, while a new “carceral imagination” gave shape to the “Black criminal” as a defining threat to U.S. domestic security.1 And as U.S. empire extended European colonialism into the Muslim Third World and intensified its already existing dominion in the late 1960s, the emergence of the “Muslim terrorist” within mainstream political discourse and popular culture defined Islam and the Muslim Third World as a fundamental threat to U.S. national security. As a kind of “prehistory” to the current “War on Terror,” U.S. foreign policy in the Muslim Third World of Palestine, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere constructed Islam and the figure of the “Muslim terrorist” as a fundamental threat that came to haunt U.S. political discourse beginning in the 1970s and 1980s and extending into the 1990s with Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations ” thesis and, of course, the post-9/11 era. When the hypernationalism of the post–Civil Right backlash created the “Black criminal” and the “Muslim terrorist” as threats to U.S. national identity, it was through the presence of Malcolm X and the embrace of Black Islam that hip-hop artists responded, using their collective exclusion as both Black and Muslim to tap into a deep vein of Black internationalism that not only challenged domestic racism but also imagined Black belonging beyond the United States, into Africa and the Muslim Third World. By crafting an alternative community of belonging that has given contour to the Muslim International, Black cultural activists in hip-hop challenged U.S.-based racial control and domination, and they also linked these struggles with the expansion of U.S. empire abroad, extending and inflecting a long-standing tradition 90 | Return of the Mecca of internationalism that has been a hallmark of Black radical practice and Black political thought in the post–World War II era. Hip-hop culture, then, stands as a powerful example of what Amiri Baraka referred to as the “changing same” of Black music.2 For it was through the historical in...