The Grand (Hip-Hop) Chessboard
Race, Rap and Raison d’État
Hishaam Aidi
I
n November 2006, the ilm he Making of a Kamikaze by
Nouri Bouzid, a respected Tunisian director, was screened
to great fanfare at the Carthage Film Festival. he ilm, a
collaboration between the French Ministry of Foreign Afairs
and the Tunisian Ministries of Interior, Defense and Culture,
examines the grievances of Tunisian youth through the story
of a young hip-hopper named Chokri, better known by his
b-boy moniker, Bahta. he ilm opens in a coastal town
where Bahta and his crew—made up of other unemployed
youths—roam the streets, hounded by baton-wielding police,
looking for a spot to practice. he atmosphere is tense, the
frustration palpable. he United States has just invaded Iraq,
and satellite-channel broadcasts in homes and cafés speak of
occupation and resistance. A gangly, volatile youth, Bahta splits
his time watching television, dancing and seeking a boat to
smuggle him across the Mediterranean Sea to Italy. But due
to the Iraq war, the Italians have tightened their naval patrols;
very few harraga (boat people) are getting across. As doors
close in his face, and police maltreatment increases, Bahta
turns to petty crime, angry outbursts and wacky behavior, in
one scene moonwalking across a café loor in a stolen police
uniform, loudly promising all the patrons passports so they can
travel legally. He eventually falls in with a crowd of Islamists,
who drill him with sermons about the sinfulness of music,
democracy and the West, wooing him toward martyrdom.
Making was mauled by French critics—“unconvincing,”
“politically correct”—and not without reason: he characters
are caricatures, the break-dance scenes are routine and the pace
plodding. he Islamists’ tirades, which aim to show precisely
how a suicide bomber is made, are in particular need of editing.
Finally, the ilm’s posing of hip-hop and Islamism as mutually
exclusive opposites is very simplistic, overlooking the dense
relationship between the two countercultures: Islamists listen
to hip-hop, and rappers with Islamist—even jihadi—sympathies abound. he plot implies that both countercultures are
a reaction to authoritarianism, but as the ilm was produced
and marketed by organs of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s police
state, the question arises whether the regime’s preferred
counterculture—hip-hop—has become a mechanism of state
control. he most interesting parts of Making come when Loti
Abdelli, who plays Bahta, drops out of character and storms
of the set to confront ilmmaker Bouzid. he ensuing grainy,
Hishaam Aidi is contributing editor of Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Culture,
Politics and Society at Columbia University’s Institute for Research in African American
Studies. Aidi was a Carnegie Scholar in 2008–2009, and is currently a Fellow at the
Open Society Institute.
MIDDLE EAST REPORT 260 ■ FALL 2011
documentary-style footage purports to show “the making of ”
the ilm itself. Abdelli asks why he, an up-and-coming actor, is
being told that dancing is haram and why his character is being
turned into a terrorist. “Where are you taking this ilm? you’re
using this ilm to attack Muslims.” Worried it will land him
in trouble, he shouts, “I’m not your puppet!” Bouzid calmly
explains his secular worldview—religion and politics should
be kept separate—and Abdelli resumes his role.
It is unclear why Bouzid inserted these awkward snippets.
Perhaps he did so to signal that he had little wiggle room in
relecting the Ben Ali regime’s secular outlook and the Culture
Ministry’s vision of hip-hop as a counter to jihadi thought.
he ilm went on to win the regime’s accolades, including the
Golden Tanit at the Carthage exposition, which is put on by the
state. Praised for its exposure of the “process of brainwashing”
used by jihadi groups, Making would be shown in European
and North African cities. he Pakistani Ministry of Culture
co-sponsored a screening at the Tunisian embassy in Islamabad.
State oicials and diplomats introducing the ilm reiterated
the message that hip-hop is the antithesis of radical Islamism,
perhaps even the antidote to it.
What Making left out was not just the possibility of Islamist
hip-hop, but also of youth music directed against the regime,
and it was precisely those two trends that rose to the fore as
Ben Ali’s dominion began to crumble in late December 2010.
he regime had long harassed dissident rappers, banning
Mohammed Jandoubi—aka Psycho M—an artist with Islamist
sympathies, from the airwaves, in part for a track exhorting
listeners to pick up Kalashnikovs and shoot Nouri Bouzid
for his negative depiction of Islam in Making. In December,
Psycho M, who had a large following on Facebook, stirred
more controversy with “Manipulation,” in which he angrily
attacked Western imperialism, oicial Tunisian laïcité, the
country’s personal status code (which bans the headscarf in
schools) and a range of secular igures from Voltaire and Marx
to Nasser and Atatürk. By the time mass protests spread in early
January, other Tunisian rappers with varying political perspectives—DJ Costa, Armada Bizerta, Laky—had posted tracks
on Facebook capturing the growing rage and memorializing
Mohamed Bouazizi, the man who had set himself on ire. he
regime swiftly issued warnings to the artists and shut down
their Facebook pages. At 3 am on January 6, the police burst
into the home of Hamada Ben Amor, 22, the rapper known
as El General. His track, “Mr. President” (Rais Lebled)—an
open letter to Ben Ali excoriating the lack of freedom and
25
anti-veiling laws—had become the unoicial anthem of the
revolt. Ben Amor was locked up for three days. he authorities
banned his song, blacked out his MySpace page and cut of
his cell phone service, but Al Jazeera had already snatched up
the recording. It would resound from Tahrir Square in Egypt
to Pearl Circle in Bahrain.
Much has been said about the role of rappers in the Arab
revolts. French media spoke of “le printemps des rappeurs,” and
Time magazine gave the title “Rage, Rap and Revolution” to
its cover story on the “Arab youthquake.” Time would go on
to name Ben Amor one of the “100 Most Inluential People of
2011,” ranking him higher than President Barack Obama. It is
true that, as security forces rampaged in the streets, artists in
Tunis, Cairo and Benghazi were writing lyrics and cobbling
together protest footage, beats and rhymes, which they
uploaded to proxy servers. he impromptu songs were then
played at gatherings and solidarity marches in London, New
york and Washington; exile opposition groups and Muslim
communities responded with musical tributes. Five Muslim
American rappers fronted by Omar Ofendum uploaded the
track “#jan25” in support of the Tahrir Square protesters
on February 6; the song received 40,000 hits on youTube
overnight. “I heard ‘em say the revolution won’t be televised,”
Omar led of. “Al Jazeera proved ‘em wrong; Twitter has ‘em
paralyzed.” he “rap loop” between protesters and the Muslim
diaspora galvanized youth on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean,
but the role of music should not be exaggerated: Hip-hop did
not cause the revolts anymore than Twitter or Facebook did.
he countries in the region with the most vibrant hip-hop
scenes, Morocco and Algeria, have not seen revolts. Moreover,
the cross-border spread of popular movements is not a new
phenomenon in the Arab world; the uprisings of 1919, which
engulfed Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, occurred long before the
advent of the Internet, social media or rap.1
What is intriguing is that Arab states saw hip-hop as a
threat, monitoring and censoring local rappers, long before
the 2011 upheavals began. And they were not alone. In the
last decade, as hip-hop has emerged as a political force
among youth, regimes across the world have intervened to
promote some sub-styles and sideline others, in an attempt
to press-gang the genre to disparate political ends. In 2002,
the Cuban Ministry of Culture founded the Cuban Rap
Agency, along with the magazine Movimiento, to create
a “revolutionary” hip-hop sound that would give voice to
the “downtrodden of the world,” and to make sure tracks
suspected of “ideological deviation” were given no airtime.
In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez funds hip-hop schools around
the country, and invites Bolivarian raperos onto his Sunday
television show, “Aló, Presidente.” In the US, Michael Steele
has tried to give the Republican Party a “hip-hop makeover”
to bring its ideas to “urban-suburban hip-hop settings.” he
US Army, in partnership with he Source magazine, has used
hip-hop culture in its “Taking It to the Streets” campaign to
recruit African-American youth.2
26
Governments are also sending hip-hop culture to far-lung
corners of the globe. From its putative birthplace in the Bronx,
hip-hop has traveled to become, at once, a means of protest
and a tool of public diplomacy, counter-terrorism, democracy
promotion and economic development. It is in the postSeptember 11 “war on terror” and in Western states’ dealings
with Muslim-majority states and Muslims in Europe that
government mobilization of hip-hop is most noticeable. While
European states are using the genre to integrate and “moderate”
their Muslim populations, the US has made hip-hop part of its
outreach to the Muslim world. he very music blamed for a
range of social ills at home—violence, misogyny, consumerism,
academic underperformance—is being deployed abroad in the
hopes of making America safer and better liked. he oicials
behind the sundry hip-hop diplomacy initiatives invariably
point to the success of jazz diplomacy during the Cold War as
evidence of the “smart power” potential of music.
“Sound Diplomacy”
After World War II, as French and British colonies gained their
independence, they found themselves courted by two superpowers eager to expand their spheres of inluence. Forty such
countries had become sovereign states by 1960, but Washington’s
eforts to attract them into its orbit were complicated by Soviet
propaganda, which focused on racial discrimination and strife
in the American South. Images of the killing of Emmett Till
and the violent backlash to Brown v. Board of Education were
broadcast around the world, and President Dwight Eisenhower,
who had been rather complacent about civil rights, began to
see that, internationally, race was America’s Achilles’ heel. he
State Department commenced organizing high-proile jazz
tours to alter impressions. he tours were the brainchild of the
Democratic Congressman from Harlem, Adam Clayton Powell,
who conceived of jazz as a Cold War weapon after attending the
Afro-Asian Conference of Non-Aligned Nations in Bandung,
Indonesia in 1955. Powell was repelled by claims that the Soviet
Union was more progressive on race than the US, as well as
the hird Worldist rhetoric he heard at the conference. Upon
returning, he proposed to the State Department that bands led
by Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie and Louis Armstrong be sent
abroad to improve America’s image. As Powell would explain
to Eisenhower, “One dark face from the US is of as much value
as millions of dollars in economic aid.”
Top diplomats welcomed the idea. The main goals
of the tours were to bolster alliances and persuade nonaligned states that the US was different from European
colonial powers and the Soviet Union. “Before long, jazz
will become an arm of this country’s foreign policy in such
places as the Far East, Middle East and Africa,” observed
the New York Times in November 1955. “Bands will go into
countries where communism has a foothold.” 3 In March
1956, Dizzy Gillespie and his arranger, a young trumpeter named Quincy Jones, embarked on the first tour;
MIDDLE EAST REPORT 260 ■ FALL 2011
their first performance took
place in Iran, where three
years earlier a CIA-backed
coup had reinstalled the
Shah in power. With the
Sov i e t Un i o n e x p a n d i n g
into the Middle East and
an insolvent Britain unable
to keep troops in Greece,
the US assumed the role of
containing Communism
and protecting oil resources
in the region. Gillespie’s
18-piece band performed in
Iran before moving on to
Syria, Lebanon and Pakistan
and ending in Turkey, Greece
and yugoslavia. The jazz
tours targeted areas where
Communism was gaining a
foothold, and zones rich in
oil and uranium; as Penny
Von Eschen writes in her
pioneering study Satchmo
Blows Up the World, the tours
often moved “in tandem with
cover t CIA operations.” 4
The “jambassadors” were
o ften d ispa tc hed a s first
responders to trouble spots.
“They sent us to every post
where there were problems
and we got nothing but
raves: We were the black
k a m i k a z e b a n d ,” w r i t e s
Quincy Jones in his memoir.
“The American embassy in
Athens was getting its ass
kicked, being stoned by the
Cypriot students, so they
rushed us over there from
Karen Hughes, undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, dances with a Moroccan hip-hopper in Marrakesh in 2006.
JALIL BOUNHAR/AP PHOTO
A n k a r a , Tu rk e y, a n d t h e
Greek people loved it.” 5 In
1958, John Foster Dulles extended a tour sending Dave embodiment of America’s liberal ideals, in its improvisational
Brubeck’s band into Iraq, the only Arab state in the anti- pluralism and its universal, race-transcending quality. he irony,
Communist Baghdad Pact, hoping that while the jazz of course, is that these black musicians were deployed to improve
ambassadors performed, US officials could help quell the country’s image and legitimate policies at a time when the
US was still a Jim Crow nation. Vast swathes of the American
the discord within the Iraqi army’s ranks.
Integrated bands led by Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Duke public opposed the tours, in fact, leading the State Department
Ellington and Benny Goodman visited the Soviet Union and to disguise their full extent. yet the tours, which ended in the
parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East, their performances 1970s, are widely considered a success. Pianist Brubeck, for
aimed at generating good will and getting citizenries to identify instance, thinks the jazz ambassadors helped end the Cold War.
In 2005, the jazz diplomacy initiative was revived in a
with “the American way of life.” he bands were intended to be
symbols of the triumph of democracy, with jazz serving as an program called Rhythm Road, a partnership of the State
MIDDLE EAST REPORT 260 ■ FALL 2011
27
Department, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Brooklyn Academy
of Music and the Kennedy Center. Karen Hughes, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, introduced the program
after being appointed by President George W. Bush in the
wake of Abu Ghraib and the resurgence of the Taliban. Since
its inception, Rhythm Road has included jazz and “urban/
hip-hop” music, recognizing hip-hop’s dominance and role as
a “global musical language.” he program today also invites
bands of other genres to audition—bluegrass, country, gospel,
Cajun, zydeco and folk—but the initiative still relies heavily
on black music.
In 2005, the State Department began sending “hip-hop
envoys”—rappers, dancers, DJs—to perform and speak in
diferent parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Toni
Blackman, a poet, was the first such “hip-hop ambassador.” Other groups that have been sent are Chen Lo and
the Liberation Family, Legacy, the Vice Versa Alliance, the
Reminders, Native Deen and Kokayi. he tours have covered
the broad arc of the Muslim world, with performances taking
place in Senegal and Cote d’Ivoire, across North Africa, the
Levant and Arabia, and extending to Mongolia, Pakistan and
Indonesia. he artists stage performances and hold workshops;
the hip-hop ambassadors who are Muslim talk to local media
about being Muslim in America.
he choice of jazz, during the Cold War, was not simply
due to its international appeal. As von Eschen suggests, the
State Department felt African-American culture could convey
“a sense of shared sufering, as well as the conviction that
equality could be gained under the American political system”
to peoples who had sufered European colonialism.6 Similar
thinking underpins the “hip-hop diplomacy” initiative. he
choice of hip-hop, widely derided as libertine, to represent the
US in a rather conservative part of the world is not self-evident.
yet the State Department planners who are calling for “the
leveraging of hip-hop” in US foreign policy lay stress on “the
importance of Islam to the roots of hip-hop in America.”7 A
Brookings report authored by the program’s architects notes
that hip-hop began as “outsiders’ protest” against the American
system, and now resonates among marginalized Muslim
youth worldwide; from the Parisian banlieues to Palestine to
Kyrgyzstan, “hip-hop relects struggle against authority” and
expresses a “pain” that transcends language barriers. Moreover,
note the authors, hip-hop’s pioneers were inner-city Muslims
who “carry on an African-American Muslim tradition of protest
against authority, most powerfully represented by Malcolm x.”
he report concludes by calling for a “greater exploitation of
this natural connector to the Muslim world.”
Islam’s central role in hip-hop has been amply documented.
Islamic motifs and Arabic terms have threaded through the
genre’s fabric since its genesis in 1973, when Afrika Bambaataa
founded the Zulu Nation, relecting the range of Islamic
and quasi-Islamic ideologies and cultures that have coexisted
for decades in America’s urban centers.8 In March 1991, he
Source magazine devoted an issue, titled “Islamic Summit,” to
28
the relationship between Islam and hip-hop. In that golden
age of “politically conscious hip-hop,” Rakim and Public
Enemy peppered their rhymes with Arabic phrases invoking
Islam—“al-hamdu lillah,” “al-salam ‘alaykum”—and excerpted
the speeches of Malcolm x and Elijah Muhammad. As the
Five Percent Nation, an ofshoot of the Nation of Islam,
gained ascendancy in the 1990s, mostly among youth in the
Northeast, the movement’s wordplay found its way into the
lyrics of Gang Starr, Poor Righteous Teachers and Brand
Nubian. As hip-hop went global around the same time, these
allusions were transmitted around the world. In the 2000s,
Sunni Muslim artists—Mos Def, Lupe Fiasco, Busta Rhymes,
Q-Tip, Rhymefest and others—became popular, exposing
mainstream fans to Islamic references like salat (prayer), zakat
(alms) and shahada (profession of Muslim faith). American
hip-hop’s relationship to Islam is thus inextricably linked to
the century-long presence of Islam in the American inner city.
References to Islam and Arabic terms are so legion that, for
many young Americans weaned on hip-hop, rap videos and
lyrics provide regular exposure to Islam. And Muslim youth
abroad are keenly aware that, as popular wisdom has it, “Islam
is hip-hop’s oicial religion,” and that Muslims like Busta
Rhymes and Mos Def are some of rap’s biggest players.
State Department publications show that diplomats are
aware of this “Muslim hip-hop” history and the kinship Muslim
youth feel for these artists. he hip-hop ambassadors program
its into a larger efort to showcase America’s model integration
of Muslims, to demonstrate, as the State Department book
Muslims in America (2009) says, “that Muslim Americans
are endowed by right with the same freedoms, privileges and
responsibilities as other Americans.” In late 2002, the State
Department began producing public service announcements—
wherein Muslim American professionals spoke of the religious
tolerance in America—that were televised in Muslim-majority
countries. he aim was to show that the “Muslim American
population is an extraordinary mosaic,” that post-September
11 “fears and suspicions” had dipped and that integration
was proceeding. “Distinctions that possibly loomed larger
elsewhere are instead in America ‘diluted’ in the deep pool
of pluralism that characterizes American society,” declares
Muslims in America. African-American Muslims igure prominently in the State Department’s public diplomacy initiatives in
the Muslim world, because of their long presence in America
and the broad appeal of their culture and history. Muslims in
America describes African-American Muslims as “indigenous,”
and comes with a “mini-poster” displaying mostly AfricanAmerican entertainers who are Muslim—comedian Dave
Chappelle, rappers Q-Tip, RZA of Wu Tang Clan and Mos
Def, pianist Ahmed Jamal and Ronald Bell of Kool and the
Gang. Not surprisingly, a signiicant number of the “hip-hop
ambassadors” sent to the Muslim world—like Native Deen
and the Reminders—are African-American Muslims.
he deployment of African-American Muslims to show how
economically and politically integrated Muslims are in America
MIDDLE EAST REPORT 260 ■ FALL 2011
Louis Armstrong receives a triumphal welcome in Dusseldorf in 1952.
is ironic on multiple levels: African-Americans constitute the
least aluent segment of the American Muslim community,
and are geographically the most segregated, with signiicant
numbers concentrated in inner-city areas and prisons. his
community—at least since Mike Wallace’s 1959 documentary,
he Hate hat Hate Produced—has also been portrayed as
extremist, separatist, illiberal and “not really Muslim.” yet
over the last decade, diplomats have begun to celebrate the
“indigenous” African-American Muslims, perhaps in a realization that as with the jazz tours, what is maligned at home
can yield dividends abroad. Adam Clayton Powell may have
recoiled at the hird Worldism on display at Bandung, and was
fully aware that a number of jazz musicians sympathized with
it. Some had espoused Ahmadi Islam, and others, like Dizzy
Gillespie, were card-carrying members of the Communist Party.
But Powell—and liberal internationalists in Foggy Bottom—
believed jazz diplomacy could advance American interests and
aid the civil rights struggle. So the jazz artists were dispatched,
while State Department oicials at home scrambled to prevent
images of the tours from reaching southern segregationists. In
this task, ironically, they were aided by the 1948 Smith-Mundt
Act, which barred the output of the US Information Agency
from distribution within the US. he legislation passed when
Congress suspected that the State Department was stafed with
Communists. It remains in efect, and prohibits media outlets
inanced by the US government—like the Arabic-language TV
channel al-Hurra—from broadcasting at home, to “prevent
MIDDLE EAST REPORT 260 ■ FALL 2011
ALBERT GILLHAUSEN/AP PHOTO
the government from aiming propaganda at its own citizens,”
as the Washington Post explains.9
“Perception Management”
he divergent attitudes of State Department liberals and
Southern nativists toward Islam rose to the fore during the
summer 2010 anti-mosque controversy. In May of that year,
a pipe bomb exploded at a mosque in northern Florida. It
was the opening salvo of the Tea Party movement’s campaign
against the construction of mosques, which spread slowly
from Florida to Tennessee, Kentucky, Kansas and Texas. After
President Obama spoke in support of the construction of an
Islamic center in lower Manhattan, the anti-mosque campaign
turned into a furor, reaching northern states. Republican
leaders and radio personalities across the country denounced
the president. Soon “Leaving Islam” ads began appearing
on buses and taxis in major cities (“Fatwa on your head? Is
your family threatening you? Leaving Islam? Got Questions?
Get Answers.”) Agitators started showing up at mosques and
proposed mosque sites—from Staten Island to San Diego—
often led by Tea Partiers or the activists of ACT! for America,
a Florida-based outit whose aim is to prevent the imposition
of shari‘a in America. he anti-mosque protests had familiar
themes: Members of a local Tea Party chapter would appear
at Friday congregational prayers with picket signs that read
“No Sharia in America,” bringing dogs along and blaring the
29
A 2009 concert by Minneapolis bluesman Bernard Allison in the old theater in Constantine, Algeria.
song “Born in the USA” by Bruce Springsteen. he fever-pitch
rhetoric soon morphed into violence, with pipe bombs tossed
at mosques in Tennessee and upstate New york, worshippers
pelted with pork and headscarves yanked of women’s heads.
he outpouring of rancor against Muslims was worse than
what followed the September 11 attacks, when President Bush
had declared Islam “a religion of peace,” embraced Muslim
leaders and cautioned against scapegoating “our Muslim
neighbors.” he Republican Party of 2010 suddenly adopted
an overtly harsh stance toward Islam, relecting a shift of
strategy. Gearing up for midterm elections, GOP candidates
sought to inject the mosque issue into their local races.10 he
Republicans’ new policy toward American Islam was also a
(delayed) reaction to the election of Obama, who had shifted
the “rhetorical framework” of American diplomacy and made
diplomatic overtures that infuriated the Republican base. In
August 2010, 20 percent of the American public thought
Obama was Muslim, and 52 percent of Republicans believed
he was planning to impose Islamic law on America.11
Since September 11, Muslim activists had focused their
political energy on challenging state repression—policies of
deportation, rendition, proiling, wiretapping—but the antimosque campaign, spearheaded by the Tea Party, the most
dynamic segment of the Republican base, led them to shift
gears. hey launched a campaign to raise awareness about
the Muslim presence in America, starting with the history
of Muslim slaves brought to the New World from the 1500s
onward. At the multiple rallies (and counter-rallies) at Ground
Zero, a ubiquitous sign on the “pro-mosque” side showed a
picture of an African in a white robe next to a sketch of a
slave ship, under large red letters, “Islam Has Been in New
york for 400 years.” Activists pointed to the African Burial
30
ALFRED DE MONTESQUIOU/AP PHOTO
Ground, discovered in 1991 at Broadway and Reade Street, a
few blocks from the proposed mosque site, and recounted the
story of Mohammah Baququa, a sailor and slave who in 1847
escaped from a Brazilian ship docked in lower Manhattan, and
went on to write he Biography of Mahommah G. Baququa, an
important slave narrative that begins with a description of his
Muslim upbringing in Bergoo (now northern Benin).
Muslim Americans of immigrant background have taken
a keen interest in the history of Muslim slaves in America,
especially their written narratives, the Arabic texts that these
West Africans left behind. Until recently, it was historians of
the antebellum South who studied these texts—the writings
of Ayub bin Suleyman (known as “Job the Son of Solomon”),
Omar ibn Said of North Carolina, Bilali Mohamed of Sapelo
Island—to understand the lives of Muslim slaves and how their
literacy and Muslim identity often challenged racial hierarchies
and ideologies.12 Today, the children of immigrant Muslims
are showcasing these marvelous parchments in Arabic script
to underline that Islam was present at America’s founding
and hence is “indigenous.” he State Department has also
developed an interest in the history of Muslim slaves.
In the midst of the mosque furor, Imam Faisal Abdulraouf,
then the leader of the Park 51 Center, was sent on a diplomatic
tour of the Persian Gulf to, in the White House’s words, bring
“a moderate perspective to foreign audiences on what it’s like
to be a practicing Muslim in the United States.” Raouf was
recruited in February 2006 by Karen Hughes and had traveled
widely in the Middle East and Asia, presenting conservative
groups like Hizb al-Tahrir with his Sui approach to Islam and
arguing that American liberalism accords with the fundamentals of shari‘a. Raouf, like other Muslim good will ambassadors,
believed that patriotically representing the US overseas could
MIDDLE EAST REPORT 260 ■ FALL 2011
dampen anti-Muslim sentiment at home and build political
support for his institution building. (Despite his diplomatic
services, when the time came, Hughes asked the imam to
move the mosque as a “sign of unity” and “courtesy.”) he
imam’s public diplomacy—and his mosque project—divided
the Muslim American community, often along North-South
lines, with many disliking his overseas defense of American
liberalism at a time of extreme political duress (partly fomented
by his project). Muslims in the South resented his insistence
on building a center close to Ground Zero, when they, below
the Mason-Dixon line, were catching the brunt of the backlash.
While Imam Raouf was touring the Gulf, hip-hop envoys
were visiting other parts of the Islamic world. In July 2010,
State Department-sponsored break-dancers were doing shows
in Morocco and Algeria; in September, rappers Tyson and
Kumasi were performing in Indonesia. Along with these tours,
ilms about Islam and hip-hop in America were screened at
US embassies in Asia and Africa. he ilm New Muslim Cool
about a Puerto Rican rapper who embraces Islam popped up
at US embassies in Jordan, Iraq, Angola and Bahrain. Another
ilm shown in Senegal, Gambia and Bangladesh was Prince
Among Slaves, which tells the extraordinary story of Ibrahima
Abdal Rahman, who was born in 1762 to the king of Timbo,
ruler of the Fulbe people in today’s Guinea. he prince rose
to take command of his father’s army, when at the age of 26,
he was captured in war and hauled across the Atlantic, ending
up on an auction block in Natchez, Mississippi. His royal
background and literacy would lead to his manumission in
1828, whereupon he traveled north and spoke to large audiences about his conversion to Christianity, writing in Arabic
script for fascinated Northerners to raise money to buy his
children’s freedom. In addition to ilms, the actual narratives
of Muslims enslaved in America are exhibited at diplomatic
outposts. US embassies in Nigeria and Qatar have displayed
the 13-page Arabic text written by Bilali Muhammad in 1829,
a leather-bound collection of sheets in North African Arabic
script, while the US mission at the UN has showcased Omar
ibn Said’s text from 1836.
Ironically, the last time these writings drew government
attention was in the mid-nineteenth century, when the young
American republic sought to make inroads into the Muslim
parts of Africa, speciically the Barbary Coast and the area that
would become Liberia. Ibrahima, the aforementioned Fulbe
prince, would gain his freedom because President John Quincy
Adams, Secretary of State Henry Clay and the American
Colonization Society (which took up his cause) thought his
manumission could further US interests. Clay believed that
Ibrahima, once freed, could be “returned” to Morocco (his
Arabic script apparently betrayed North African inluence) and
used as a bargaining chip to release Americans held captive
by Sultan ‘Abd al-Rahman II.13 he American Colonization
Society’s interest in Muslim slaves is fascinating. his organization, founded by Clay in 1817 to “repatriate” African slaves
to Liberia, saw Muslim slaves with their Arabic literacy as a
MIDDLE EAST REPORT 260 ■ FALL 2011
valuable tool for opening up West Africa to US economic
and religious interests. America’s African Muslims were seen
as natural intermediaries in dealings with the Muslims and
pagans of the West African Coast; the Muslim slaves had (at
least nominally) embraced Christianity, were indebted to the
US for their newfound freedom, and could help spread the
gospel and American civilization in Africa. As the repatriation movement grew in inluence, literate Muslim slaves and
their narratives gained greater political signiicance in the
US. Some would feign conversion to Christianity, and the
American Colonization Society (or the Royal Africa Company
of England) would send them to Liberia and Sierra Leone
bearing Arabic-language Bibles.14
Today, as the US is trying to consolidate its position across the
Saharan belt, the African-American Muslim is again emerging
as an intermediary. It is curious that Washington would adopt
this policy at a time when numerous Americans suspect that
the country’s irst black president is a secret Muslim and join
campaigns to ban shari‘a in American cities and restrict the
building of mosques and Islamic schools. As with the jazz tours
of the 1950s, the conservatives warning of “creeping sharia” today
would probably be displeased to know that the State Department
is exhibiting Arabic slave narratives to show that Muslims have
existed in America since the sixteenth century, or that photographs
of the Wu Tang Clan grace State Department brochures. And the
idea of the African-American as intermediary with the Muslim
world is not limited to public diplomacy. “African-Americans are
emerging in popular culture as leaders of the American nation
and empire,” writes the literary critic Moustafa Bayoumi, noting
a sub-genre of ilms—he Siege, he Kingdom, he Traitor and
the HBO series Sleeper Cell—that portray “blacks at the helm” of
a liberal American imperium, people who, because of their past
sufering, can achieve a level of human communication with Arabs
and Muslims that whites cannot.15
European governments are also sending their Muslim citizens on diplomatic missions. he British Home Oice sends
young British Muslim professionals and former extremists (who
have been “de-radicalized”) on tours to Pakistan and Egypt to
speak to young audiences about the successes and freedoms of
Muslims in Britain. European states have also started sending
their Muslim hip-hop artists to perform in Muslim-majority
countries. The French and German embassies in yemen
have sponsored festivals and workshops (called “Common
Beats”) that bring French-Muslim and German-Muslim
rappers together with their yemeni counterparts. he British
Council twice dispatched the hip-hop duo, Mecca2Medina, to
perform in northern Nigeria, an area of high sectarian tensions.
Following a 2007 performance in Kano, one of 12 Nigerian
states under shari‘a law, the head of the morality police who
scour the streets for “un-Islamic” behavior, publicly praised
the rap duo for being Western yet pious. he British Council
also began organizing hip-hop workshops in Tripoli, and
sponsoring Electric Steps, “Libya’s only hip-hop band,” as a
way to promote political reform in that country.
31
In front of the Martin Luther King grade school in Villiers-le-Bel. SIPA VIA AP IMAGES
In Europe, however, more than for diplomacy, governments
are using hip-hop to integrate their Muslim minorities, and in
so doing, they are bumping up against US hip-hop initiatives.
Uncle Sam in the Banlieues
he Wikileaks cables that probably stirred the most anger
in European capitals were those wherein US diplomats
castigated allies—France, Britain, Holland—for mistreating
their Muslim minorities. Since the arrests of “twentieth
hijacker” Zacarias Moussaoui and “shoe bomber” Richard
Reid, US oicials have been concerned about the alienation
of European Muslims, which they fear may seep across the
Atlantic. he cables show diplomats generally unimpressed
with European eforts to combat this “new threat,” and reveal
that US embassies were funding Muslim groups in various
European cities. In August 2006, the US embassy in London
sent a cable to Washington stating that “little progress” had
been made in combating extremism and warning of rising
tensions between the Muslim community and the government. Follow-up reports stressed that while Muslims make
up only 3 to 4 percent of Britain’s population, outreach
to this audience is vital to US interests. he US embassy
subsequently established a project called “Reverse Radicalism,”
32
focusing on “at-risk” youth to help “raise the standard of
dialogue on extremism and promote understanding between
Britain’s Muslim and non-Muslim communities.”
he embassy also organized cultural activities, including
the “Ramadan Festival” (irst held by the US embassy in
Amsterdam), to highlight the diversity of British Muslims and
invited various American Muslim artists. he cables stressed
the importance of performances by American Muslims. “he
message their performance would send—of American Muslims,
proud to be both ‘American’ and ‘Muslim’—is a powerful
message that would open British Muslim eyes to American
cultural and religious diversity,” notes one missive, “as well
as encourage relection on the part of the British Muslim
community in a positive, self-deining direction.” Explaining
why the US-based “Allah Made Me Funny” comedy troupe
should be invited, an oicer says its “positive messages” would
likely reach “thousand[s] of British Muslims, including the
disproportionately high youth population.” he integration
of American Muslims—contrasted with the segregation of
Muslims in Europe—is ofered as evidence that America is
not at war with Islam.
he London cables also describe the embassy’s eforts to
reach “moderate” Muslim communities that “lack the institutional infrastructure to actively mobilize against radicalizing
influences.” There is little agreement, however, on what
“moderate” means. he British press was unhappy with the
embassy’s “secret campaign” to de-radicalize British Muslims,
and especially with the embassy’s outreach to mosques considered “radical” in Britain, such as the Finsbury Park mosque in
northern London, frequented by both Moussaoui and Reid.16
In December 2010, Ambassador Louis Susman drew criticism
from conservative Britons and secular British Muslims for
visiting and expressing his “great admiration” for the East
London Mosque (a mosque that allegedly hosted Anwar
al-Awlaqi some years ago), and inviting its youth to participate
in embassy-funded trips to the US.17 Dispatches from the US
embassy in Amsterdam describe similar displeasure by Dutch
oicials and Dutch Muslim leaders worried that the embassy’s
outreach programs see European Muslims as a “collective
problem” and “associate the integration of European Muslims
primarily with eforts to counter radicalization.”
But it is, perhaps not surprisingly, in France that the State
Department’s activities have triggered the most outrage. he
dispatches from Paris are blunt in their appraisal: “he French
have a well-known problem with discrimination against
minorities.” Some cables read like descriptions of pre-civil
rights America: “he French media remains overwhelmingly
white.... Among French elite educational institutions, we are
only aware that Sciences Po has taken serious steps to integrate.”
he thrust of the correspondence argues that the French
approach to assimilation has not worked, because of an “oicial
blindness to all racial and ethnic diferences.” Institutions
are “insuiciently lexible,” unable to relect the country’s
changing complexion. And the fear is not only that young
MIDDLE EAST REPORT 260 ■ FALL 2011
French Muslims will gravitate toward extremism—Washington
“takes seriously the potentially global threat of disenfranchised
and disadvantaged minorities in France”—but that ethnic and
racial conlict will weaken France. “We believe that if France,
over the long term, does not succeed in improving prospects
for its minorities and give them true political representation,
it could become weaker, more divided and perhaps inclined
toward crises…and a less efective ally as a result.”
he US embassy staf acknowledge France’s reluctance
to accept the American model of integration or to “partner”
with the embassy, but the cables describe numerous outreach
projects involving exchange programs, tours, festivals, conferences and media appearances to raise awareness among state
and non-state actors about America’s civil rights movement
(“sharing of our American experiences in managing diversity”).
hrough such eforts, and by pressing the French government
and NGOs to improve the lot of French Muslims, the embassy
has tried to alter French Muslim perceptions of the US, to show
that America respects Islam and “is engaged for good in the
Arab-Muslim worlds.” By explaining how America manages
diversity, the embassy’s outreach aims to inspire “a workable
French model for addressing ethnic conlict” and help France
live up to its egalitarian ideals. “While direct development
assistance…is not likely to be available for France,” notes one
cable, there should be funds available “to address the consequences of discrimination and minority exclusion in France”
through exchange programs, grants and media intervention.
he author underscores that, given France’s self-image, “such
an efort will continue to require considerable discretion,
sensitivity and tact on our part.”
hese depictions of France as a prejudiced country in need
of American aid and tutelage were not well received. France
has long viewed itself as being immune to American-style
racial politics, priding itself on providing refuge, since the late
nineteenth century, to African-Americans leeing discrimination. he cable that drew the most indignant response
from French state oicials was written by then Ambassador
Craig Stephenson, at the height of the Parisian civil unrest
in November 2005: “he real problem is the failure of white
Christian France to view its dark-skinned and Muslim compatriots as citizens in their own rights.” Speaking on a television
show, former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin scofed,
“his [cable] shows the limits of American diplomacy.” He
added that US diplomats were wrongly reading the banlieues
crisis through their own history, and viewing France’s urban
crisis through a religious prism. he French media, in turn,
was riled by revelations that the US had since 2003 been
deeply involved in the integration process—pushing to shift
the media discourse, to get French leaders to rethink their
“terminology” and “intellectual frameworks” regarding minority
inclusion, to generate public debate about “airmative action,”
“multiculturalism” and hyphenated identity, to reform French
history curricula and to encourage French museums to exhibit
the contributions of minorities.
MIDDLE EAST REPORT 260 ■ FALL 2011
French journalists expressed anger at this exercise in US
“soft power,” saying that the “head-hunting” of future Muslim
leaders constituted “direct interference” that was infringing on
French sovereignty and undermining the authority of French
institutions. When the US ambassador, Charles Rivkin, a
former Hollywood executive, brought actor Samuel L. Jackson
to visit a community center in the banlieue of Bondy, and
Jackson, addressing a group of youth, compared their struggle
to the hardships of his childhood in segregated Tennessee,
French media resented the comparison. Another awkward
moment came at the unveiling of a painted mural for the civil
rights leader Martin Luther King at the Collège Martin Luther
King in Villiers-le-Bel, another restive Parisian suburb, when a
group of African and Arab children stood around Ambassador
Rivkin and sang “We Shall Overcome.”
But it is the embassy’s efforts to empower “moderate”
Muslim voices that have infuriated the French, for again,
one state’s “moderate” is another state’s “extremist.” One of
the Muslim organizations supported by the embassy was the
online magazine Oumma.com, described by the ambassador as
a “remarkable website.” French conservatives, who see the site
as extremist because of its alleged sympathies for the Muslim
Brothers, charged that the American right and French Muslims
were allying to undermine French laïcité. The embassy’s
hip-hop diplomacy program, whereby French rappers are lown
to the US, to spend time in Harlem and meet with artists and
civil rights activists, has also raised hackles.18 One of the artists
invited by the State Department was rapper Ekoué Labitey of
La Rumeur, one of the groups that Nicolas Sarkozy, as minister
of interior, had sued for libel for their lyrics about the brutality
and impunity of French police.
“Jihadi Cool”
One of the odder phenomena of the last decade is hearing
national security elites, terrorism experts and career diplomats
discuss the iner points of “low,” “bling” and the “politics
of cool.” American and European terrorism experts have
increasingly expressed concerns over “anti-American hip-hop,”
accenting the radicalizing inluence of the genre. Noting that
the Shabaab, the Somali-based Islamist group, uses “jihad
rap” in its recruitment videos, Jessica Stern writes in Foreign
Afairs, “he irst- and second-generation Muslim children I
interviewed for a study of the sources of radicalization in the
Netherlands seemed to think that talking about jihad was
cool, in the same way that listening to gangster rap is in some
youth circles.”19 Others have advocated mobilizing certain substyles of hip-hop against “jihadi cool.” Warning that Osama
bin Laden’s associate Abu yahya al-Libi has made al-Qaeda
look “cool,” one terrorism expert recommends that the US
respond “with one of America’s coolest exports: hip-hop,”
speciically with a “subgroup” thereof. “Muslim hip-hop is
Muslim poetry set to drum beats,” he explains. “Add in the
emotional parallels between the plight of African-Americans
33
French rapper Abd Al Malik, right, after winning the best male artist award at the Victoires de la Musique, Paris, 2008.
and, for example, impoverished Algerians living in ghettos
outside of Paris or Palestinian refugees in the West Bank and
the analogy becomes even clearer.”20 But it is unclear how
“Muslim hip-hop” will exert a moderating inluence: Will a
performance by an African-American Muslim group trigger a
particular calming “afect” pushing young Muslim men away
from extremist ideas? Nor is it clear what constitutes “Muslim
hip-hop”: Does the fact that Busta Rhymes is a Sunni Muslim
make his music “Islamic”?
In Europe, hip-hop is being enlisted in a broad ideological
ofensive to counter domestic extremism. As in America, some
of the biggest stars on the European hip-hop scene are Muslim,
the children of immigrants and/or converts, a number of whom
have been embroiled in controversies about freedom of expression, national identity and extremism. Britain became the irst
country to deal with the issue of “Muslim hate rap,” when, in
2004, the song “Dirty Kufar” was released online by rap group
Sheikh Terra and the Soul Salah Crew. he video, splicing
together images from Iraq, Palestine and Chechnya, praises
Osama bin Laden and denounces Bush, Tony Blair, Ariel
Sharon, Husni Mubarak and Saudi Arabia’s King ‘Abdallah as
“dirty inidels.” he track drew the attention of the Home Oice
and Labor MPs, who saw the lyrics and imagery as advocating
violence. In 2006, Aki Nawaz of the popular hip-hop-techno
group Fun-Da-Mental released an album “All Is War,” with a
34
FRANCOIS MORI/AP PHOTO
cover depicting the Statue of Liberty hooded and wired like an
Abu Ghraib prisoner, and a song (“Che Bin Pt 2”) comparing
bin Laden to Che Guevara. Two MPs called for his arrest.21
Realizing the inluence of hip-hop, when in April 2007 the
Home Oice introduced PREVENT, an initiative to stop British
Muslim youth from being lured into violent extremism, it made
sure that hip-hop igured prominently. Muslim organizations
in Britain receive PREVENT funding to organize “Spittin’
Light” hip-hop shows, where American and British Muslim
rappers with “mainstream interpretations” of Islam parade their
talents. he initiative is directed at younger Muslims, who may
not be associated with mosques or other religious institutions.
PREVENT’s advocates claim that “art and culture can provide
Muslims with an acceptable outlet for strong emotions.”
Other European governments are worrying about hip-hop
and extremism. In Berlin, the Tunisian-German rap star
Bushido, who has won awards from MTV, angered many with
the verse, “I am a Taliban…. I have set your city on ire.” In the
Netherlands, the government is at a loss over what kind of rap
to support. In 2007, there was a controversy surrounding the
Dutch-Moroccan star Salah Eddin and his video “Het Land
Van” (“his Country Of ”), in which he describes being Muslim
in an increasingly conservative country and lists what he likes
and does not like about the Netherlands. Among other things,
he does not like racial proiling and the red-light district—“this
MIDDLE EAST REPORT 260 ■ FALL 2011
land that sells women behind window panes.” he rapper irst
appears clean-shaven in a plaid shirt; as the video progresses,
his facial hair grows longer until, by the end, he is wearing
a scraggly beard and an orange Guantánamo jumpsuit. he
uproar was not only about this content, but the fact that Salah
Eddin had received a grant from the Dutch Ministry of Culture
for the video’s production. Voters complained that their tax
money was underwriting radicalism, and government oicials
felt duped: hey had given Salah Eddin a grant thinking he was
“moderate,” but he turned out to be “radical.” (A right-wing
media watchdog in the US has leveled a similar critique at the
State Department after studying the lyrics of Chen Lo, one
of the “hip-hop envoys,” and inding his patriotism wanting.)
European oicials (along with US embassy oicials) are
scrutinizing hip-hop practices in their cities’ immigrant neighborhoods, trying to decide which Muslim hip-hop artists to
legitimate and which to push aside. he debate over hip-hop,
Europe’s dominant youth culture, stands in for a much larger
debate about race, immigration and national identity. With
many of the biggest stars being Muslim, the disputes over
which Muslim hip-hop artists are “moderate” or “radical” are
also disagreements over what kind of Islam to allow into the
public space. his debate is playing out most poignantly in
France, the country with the largest Muslim community in
Europe, the second largest hip-hop market in the world and a
place whose traditions of laïcité aggressively restrict expressions
of religion in the public sphere.
“Hamdoulah Ça Va”
Hip-hop has long encapsulated France’s anxieties about
both American domination and Islam. In the 1990s, fear of
Americanization, and the introduction of English words and
phrases through music, led to the establishment of national
quotas to protect the French language. he 1994 Carignon
media law required that a minimum of 40 percent of musical
programming on radio stations be by French musicians
and 20 percent by contemporary French artists. his quota
actually encouraged the growth and commercialization of
French hip-hop, as FM mega-stations shifted their playlists
from Anglophone-dominated pop and rock to rap, where
they thought the French-language quotas could be met more
easily. French record labels began expanding their hip-hop
portfolios and sending scouts into the banlieues looking for
talent.22 hus, ironically, a law designed to protect the “French
identity” from Americanization, helped promote the French
form of an American genre, one that now ampliies the voices
of religious and ethnic minorities seen as a domestic threat to
national identity.
As part of its cultural policy, the French government has
actively promoted hip-hop, at the local and national level,
bringing rappers onto the stage of the National Opera of
Bordeaux, sponsoring concerts and funding local institutions in
troubled neighborhoods. he French government has invested
MIDDLE EAST REPORT 260 ■ FALL 2011
in hip-hop partly in an efort to recognize marginalized cultures
and identities and partly to foster a hip-hop conducive to
integration. yet the question is what kind of hip-hop best aids
integration, and which rappers to invite to the Grand Palais.
As sociologist Loïc Lafargue de Grangeneuve notes, “hip-hop
policy” in France tries to discover artists and promote them as
role models for the banlieusards, yet successful hip-hop artists
rarely appreciate being held up by politicians as models of
successful integration, often because government validation
separates them from their base. Moreover, as he notes, the
“instrumentalization” of hip-hop culture risks emptying the
genre of its political power and generating a diferent kind of
contestation23—between rappers validated by the state and
those who are not. Precisely this process is occurring in France,
as seen in the interplay between Abd Al Malik and Médine.
Probably the most celebrated French hip-hop artist of the
last decade is French-Congolese rapper Abd Al Malik. A former
street hustler raised in a housing project outside of Strasbourg,
he embraced Islam as a teenager, joining the Islamist Tablighi
Jama‘at. He then achieved some notoriety with his rap group
New African Poets, before embracing Suism and shifting from
gangsta rap to spoken word poetry (le slam). Malik’s poetry,
accompanied by rifs of jazz and la chanson française, speaks
of the value of hard work, education and the power of “spirituality.” In his music and his autobiography, May Allah Bless
France (Qu’Allah benisse la France), Malik extols the Republic’s
values—liberté, egalité, fraternité—saying they should be
reinvigorated. He says the notion of laïcité is broad enough
to include an Islamic spirituality. Malik has won all kinds of
artistic and non-artistic plaudits; he is raved about by elites
as a Muslim role model and a symbol of a new multicultural
France, la France pluriel.24 In January 2008, the Ministry of
Culture awarded Malik the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres,
one of France’s most prestigious cultural honors. As hip-hop
gains public acceptance and rises to the level of high culture,
French cultural and political elites are carefully monitoring the
kind of Islam that is being difused over the rap airwaves, and
Malik’s music embodies the kind of Islamic piety that can be
permitted into the French public square.
If Malik’s music makes no political demands, his would-be
rival, Médine, a popular “undergound” hip-hop artist, hits all
the issues that the Sui poet evades: the social exclusion of nonwhite French youth, conditions in the banlieues and Western
depredations in the hird World. Sporting a bald dome and
ierce beard, Médine raps in harsh, halting tones over hard-core
instrumentals, about colonialism, Malcolm x, Afghanistan, the
PATRIOT Act, police brutality and segregation. His videos
show graphic images of war, street protests and waterboarding.
His critiques of the French model of integration are blunt and
forceful, the gist being that France’s urban and youth crisis
must be understood in light of the country’s colonial past
and Western imperialism in general. Médine, unlike Malik,
is not particularly vocal about his own religiosity, speaking
more about rights for Muslims. yet the mainstream media
35
has largely ignored him, and some radio stations boycott him,
saying he promotes a Muslim communautarisme. he more
overtly pious Malik is celebrated, in part because he declares
his love for the Republic, sees Islamic identity as compatible
with the Republic’s values and, while he refers to the country’s
colonial past, is not enraged at the French state. Médine’s
confrontational manner, however, resonates more widely with
France’s disafected youth than does Malik’s approach. he
more praise showered upon the clean-shaven Sui poet, the
less appeal Malik’s brand of low and Islam has, with critics
speaking of the rise of “lackey” hip-hop and “good Muslim”
rappers versus “bad Muslim” rappers.25
US embassies have slowly inserted themselves into this
delicate dance between European governments and their
hip-hop counter-publics. he Wikileaks cables released thus
far do not explicitly speak of hip-hop diplomacy, or rap
as a tool for de-radicalization. One dispatch from the US
embassy in London describes the arts as “an important way
to reach potentially hostile audiences” and recommends the
screening of two ilms, New Muslim Cool and Deen Tight, both
of which describe minority converts who discovered Islam
through hip-hop. But hip-hop is at the heart of US embassies’
outreach to Muslim communities. Farah Pandith, the State
Department’s special representative to Muslim communities,
has agued that hip-hop can convey a “diferent narrative” to
counter the foreign “violent ideology” that youth are exposed
to.26 Muslim American rap artists are invited to perform at
embassies in Europe. Local artists are invited to the embassy.
he ambassador to France has sponsored hip-hop conferences,
inviting rappers to his residence, including the controversial
K.ommando Toxik (who at the US embassy performed a
tribute to two boys who were killed by the French police in
November 2007, an incident that triggered a wave of riots).
Western states have a long history of intervening in the
Muslim world to protect and empower religious minorities. In
the nineteenth century, the French sheltered the Maronites, the
Russians patronized the Orthodox Christians and American
missionaries in Syria courted the Druze. he great powers
assumed the protection of these religious minorities in part to
expand their inluence in the region. his practice continues,
in diferent forms, to this day, but it is unprecedented for allied
Western states to court each other’s minorities. And yet the US
is spending millions of dollars to win the hearts and minds of
Europe’s disafected Muslim communities, often vying with
European states’ own local outreach eforts. If the aim was
to create positive impressions of the US, the efort seems to
be working: European Muslim activists appreciate the brutal
candor of the cables. In France, in particular, perhaps because
of the country’s contentious alliance with the US, positive
opinion of the US has risen sharply since 2008. But the State
Department’s outreach to Muslims, conceived in response to
Europe’s “nativist surge,” seems to be further inlaming the
right, who see Washington’s rap-infused initiatives as infringing
on their sovereignty and are even more chary of their Muslim
36
compatriots’ allegiance. If European Muslims are often accused
of being loyal to their land of origin or some transnational
Islamic movement, now they are suspected of being a ifth
column of the United States (just as religious minorities in
the Muslim world are). French right-wingers are warning of
a Muslim “Trojan horse,” comparing the State Departmentsponsored trips taken by young French Muslims to the US to
the Soviet-sponsored trips of the 1920s and 1930s that took
French intellectuals to Russia to experience the beneits of
socialism irsthand.27 Overheated as such rhetoric may be, it
seems true that the US counterinsurgency initiatives in Iraq,
Somalia and Afghanistan now have a kinder, gentler corollary
directed at Western Europe’s urban periphery.
And the US embassies are not the only ones pursuing Muslim
outreach strategies. Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan and
a host of Arab states are also monitoring their diasporas in
Europe, assertively promoting interpretations of Islam and
trying to win the support of Europe’s Muslim populations.
he Great Game of the twenty-irst century—the ideological
and geopolitical tussles centered around post-colonial Africa
and the Middle East—is increasingly playing out in Europe’s
immigrant neighborhoods.
“Soundtrack to the Struggle”?
Following a rap crew’s 2010 performance in Damascus, Hillary
Clinton was asked about hip-hop diplomacy. “Hip-hop is
America,” she said, noting that rap and other musical forms
can help “rebuild the image” of America. “you know it may be
a little bit hopeful, because I can’t point to a change in Syrian
policy because Chen Lo and the Liberation Family showed
up. But I think we have to use every tool at our disposal.”
he hip-hop diplomacy programs launched by the US and
European governments aim to rebrand their states and push
Muslim youth away from extremism, but the US initiative is
more ambitious, trying to promote democracy, development
and even alter the behavior of other states. Unlike the European
states who promote certain kinds of hip-hop over others, the
US government’s approach to hip-hop at home is mostly laissez
faire. But at the international level, US hip-hop diplomacy is
more interventionist. “you have to bet at the end of the day,
people will choose freedom over tyranny if they’re given a
choice,” Clinton observed, stating that cultural diplomacy is a
complex game of “multidimensional chess.” “Hip-hop can be
a chess piece?” asked the interviewer. “Absolutely!” responded
the secretary of state.
Liberal analysts see the jazz tours of the 1950s and 1960s
as a success. By showcasing racial progress, jazz diplomacy, it
is argued, countered Soviet propaganda and created positive
impressions of the United States. But hip-hop is not jazz; the rap
stars of today are not the jazz greats of the 1950s and 1960s; and,
for all the parallels drawn, the “war on terror” is not the Cold
War. he jazz tours resonated with people across Africa, the
Middle East and South Asia because the post-war US was seen
MIDDLE EAST REPORT 260 ■ FALL 2011
as an anti-colonial power, a counterweight to French, British
and Italian dominance. Indeed, the US did parry European
colonial thrusts in Libya in 1950 and the Suez Canal Zone in
1956. Moreover, the civil rights struggle resounded globally; the
black freedom movement was seen as an ally of the decolonized
world. Its sounds—jazz, in particular—had a powerful moral
appeal, as jazz musicians, inluenced by the Afro-Asian unity
discourse of Bandung and the Nation of Islam, wrote compositions like “Uhuru Afrika” and “Freedom Now Suite” linking
the civil rights movement with anti-colonial struggles in Asia
and Africa. But the honeymoon with America slowly came to
an end as Cold War politics led to myriad interventions and
proxy wars, and the US gradually became, along with France
and Britain, the backer of a repressive state system extending
from the Barbary Coast to Pakistan. As the US relationship
to the region changed, and the Vietnam war wore on, the jazz
ambassadors would ind themselves increasingly challenged by
local audiences on their role in the American foreign policy
establishment. Von Eschen describes an incident in Algiers in
April 1967, when young Algerians asked jazz ambassadors how
they, as African-Americans, could represent a country that was
“committing atrocities” in Vietnam.
he jazz tours would continue in the Soviet bloc, as did Voice
of America broadcasts of jazz behind the Iron Curtain. And
black internationalism did not lose its appeal in the Muslim
world. hrough the 1970s, Africans and Asians languishing
under authoritarian rule appreciated the statements of
solidarity from the Student Non-Violent Coordinating
Committee, TransAfrica, the Black Panthers, Jesse Jackson,
Randall Robinson and other black leaders. Ordinary people
fasted ahead of Muhammad Ali’s big fights. As hip-hop
emerged, its beats and lyrics, as the public diplomacy experts
correctly note, would quickly resound with Muslim youth.
But the best-loved music was the politically “conscious,”
Afrocentric hip-hop of the 1980s and early 1990s that paid
tribute to Africa, Asia and Islam. At some point in the mid1990s—critics debate the precise date—“conscious” hip-hop
would be sidelined by commercial rap, a form more concerned
with the acquisition of wealth than solidarity with the postcolonial world.
And while references to Islam remain legion, they are not
necessarily political or lattering. In December 2002, Lil
Kim appeared on the cover of OneWorld magazine wearing a
burka and a bikini, saying “Fuck Afghanistan.” 50 Cent’s track
“Ghetto Quran” is about dealing drugs and “snitchin’.” Foxy
Brown charmed some and infuriated others with her song “Hot
Spot,” saying, “MCs wanna eat me but it’s Ramadan.” More
disturbing was the video “Hard” released in late 2009 by the
diva Rihanna, in which she appears decked out in military garb,
heavily armed and straddling a tank’s gun turret in a Middle
Eastern war setting. An Arabic tattoo beneath her bronze bra
reads, “Freedom hrough Christ”; on a wall is the Qur’anic
verse, “We belong to God, and to Him we shall return,” recited
to honor the dead, and not an uncommon wall inscription
MIDDLE EAST REPORT 260 ■ FALL 2011
in war-torn Muslim societies. he point is that not all Islamalluding hip-hop resonates with Muslim youth. hose hip-hop
stars—Lupe Fiasco, Mos Def, Rakim—who are beloved among
Muslim youth are appreciated because they work their Muslim
identity into their art and because they forthrightly criticize
US foreign policy. On his latest album, Lupe raps: “Gaza Strip
was getting burned; Obama didn’t say shit.” But none of these
gentlemen are likely to be invited on a State Department tour.
he Cold War jazz tours were never popular among progressive black intellectuals. Frantz Fanon and the Guyanese
historian Walter Rodney both resented how Louis Armstrong
and others were used as “emissaries of the Voice of America,”
how the music of “oppressed black people” was transformed
into “propaganda.”28 Similar charges are leveled at the hip-hop
diplomacy program today—though they are laced, in some
cases, with ad hominem attacks upon the artists themselves.
he artists, it should be noted, have assumed some personal
risk. In July 2007, as part of the Rhythm Road program, Toni
Blackman was driven in an armored vehicle, lanked by a
convoy of trucks carrying UN blue helmets, to perform in the
largely Muslim, rebel-held north of Cote d’Ivoire. In January
2006, she was performing for an outdoor audience in Medan,
Indonesia, when a throng of men on motorbikes carrying
what the New York Times described as “anti-American banners”
drove into the concert area, clambered onto the stage, shoved
Blackman aside and began shouting anti-American statements
into the microphone. he concerts are often seen as an attempt
to sugarcoat unpopular policies, and African-American rap
artists are asked about their newfound role as good will ambassadors. he Muslim hip-hop envoys are particularly aware of
the way they are perceived overseas. One member of Native
Deen expressed the ambivalence he felt when irst approached
by the State Department: “‘Should we do it?’ ‘Should we not
do it?’ Some people were saying, ‘y’all are going to be puppets,
going over there saying: Everything’s OK. We’re bombing your
country, but we have Muslims, too!’”29
Realists have little illusion about the role that hip-hop
can play in power politics. Samuel Huntington, 15 years ago,
cautioned policymakers not to put too much faith in “cultural
fads”: “Somewhere in the Middle East a half-dozen young men
could well be dressed in jeans, drinking Coke, listening to rap,
and, between their bows to Mecca, putting together a bomb
to blow up an American airliner.” As with the jazz tours, it
is the liberal internationalists who believe in the geostrategic
potential of music. US embassies across the developing
world are reaching out to hip-hop groups, supporting artistic
communities as a development strategy, which is causing friction between US-backed artists and “independent” artists. In
Bolivia, for instance, following the protests of October 2003
against water privatization and a gas export scheme, the US
embassy and various development agencies began supporting
indigenous hip-hop groups in the restive city of El Alto, in
competition with the Cuban and Venezuelan embassies, which
were also reaching out to rappers. Claims that the US Agency
37
PHILIP SCOTT ANDREWS/THE NEW yORK TIMES/REDUx
concerned about how to protect their music
from corporate power, but now that the music
is being used in diplomacy and counterterrorism, the conversation is shifting. “Hiphop at its best has exposed power, challenged
power, it hasn’t served power,” says the Londonbased “underground” rapper Lowkey. “When
the US government loves the same rappers you
love, whose interests are those rappers serving?”
hese clashing visions of hip-hop are playing
out in hird World cities like Tunis and El Alto,
and in immigrant neighborhoods in the West.
Hip-hop NGOs that use music for pedagogy,
anti-war activism, neighborhood stabilization
and “grassroots diplomacy,” institutions like
Gangway Beatz of Berlin, the Brooklyn-based
Existence is Resistance and the Rebel Diaz Arts
Collective in the South Bronx, all of whom
invite artists and youth from similarly marginalized neighborhoods in other countries, operate in the same areas where local
authorities and foreign embassies are pushing their own hip-hop
initiatives. he Rebel Diaz Arts Collective, the Bronx’s irst “hiphop community center,” advocates for immigrants, organizes
workshops and leads anti-war protests, for instance staging
a rap concert outside the School of the Americas in Georgia.
Rebel Diaz receives some money from Citgo, the Venezuelan
oil company, which provides subsidized oil to the Bronx. Not
too far from the collective is the Bronx Museum, whose State
Department-funded “smARTpower” initiative sends cultural
ambassadors to countries, among them Venezuela, to improve
America’s image.
he debate about hip-hop and US “soft power” has not
led to a backlash against the genre, just to more criticism of
American hip-hop and the increasingly frequent claim that
non-American rappers are rap’s true standard bearers. In the
Arab world, Islamists and others have long denounced hip-hop
as foreign and corrupting, but in 2011, local hip-hoppers have
been embraced and celebrated for their role in the revolts. After
Ben Ali’s ouster, Tunisian rappers—then only known online—
were invited on television. he Popular Democratic Party, an
opposition group that joined the new Tunisian government,
organized a massive concert for these rap heroes. Following
Mubarak’s departure in Egypt, Hamada Ben Amor was invited
to perform in Tahrir Square, but he could not travel because he
did not have a passport. Meanwhile, no less a igure than Chuck
D, the iconic headman of Public Enemy, has lent support to the
argument that “international” hip-hoppers are more faithful
to the music’s mission than their American counterparts. In
January, while visiting South Africa, “the godfather of hip-hop”
wrote a scathing open letter to American hip-hoppers, blasting
its ruling elite for their materialism, arrogance and lack of
commitment to community, noting that the balance of power
had shifted. “he world has parity now and have [sic] surpassed
the USA in all of the basic fundamentals of hip-hop.”
Native Deen (from left, Naeem Muhammad, Joshua Salaam and Abdul-Malik Ahmad).
for International Development was funding some rap groups
to prevent another “Octubre” exacerbated long-standing
tensions between that organization and the Bolivian state,
leading analysts to speak of the “geopolitics of Andean rap.”30
Most curious is the claim that just as jazz embodied and
disseminated democratic values, hip-hop diplomacy in the Islamic
world is promoting democracy and fostering dissent because the
music expresses a tradition of African-American Muslim protest,
represented by Malcolm x. By all accounts, the hip-hop envoys
avoid political issues in their embassy performances; local authorities will often carefully comb through lyrics ahead of time. yet
Maura Pally, assistant secretary of state for educational and cultural
afairs, contends that when yemeni youth enter the gates of the
embassy in Sanaa and witness a hip-hop show, the experience is
“opening minds” and altering perceptions. he critics retort that,
after the show, the youngsters are still aware that US power is fully
behind the dictatorship under which they live. And this is the crux
of the growing debate over hip-hop diplomacy: Proponents claim
that hip-hop can have the same liberating and rebranding efect
as jazz did in the 1950s, somehow overlooking Washington’s close
alliances with the authoritarian regimes of North Africa and the
Middle East. he Cold War is not the “war on terror.” he US
could use jazz to “sell” America behind the Iron Curtain and foster
dissent in Soviet-backed regimes, but can American “soft power”
liberate people in US-backed tyrannies? he hip-hop initiatives
may be more successful in generating good will in Europe, where
Muslims are marginalized, but do enjoy some rights, or in a
non-allied dictatorship like Burma, where rap artists are heavily
censored, than in authoritarian regimes backed by US hard power.
he hip-hop diplomacy initiatives have sparked a heated
debate over the purpose of hip-hop: whether it is “protest music”
or “party music”; whether it is the “soundtrack to the struggle,”
as the immensely popular Lowkey titled his latest album, or to
American unipolarity; whether to accept embassy assistance or
not; and what it means that states—not just corporations—have
entered the hip-hop game. Hip-hop activists have long been
38
MIDDLE EAST REPORT 260 ■ FALL 2011
Hip-hop today is everywhere, unlike jazz in the 1960s. It is
readily available over the Internet, and there are rich hip-hop
scenes in cities worldwide. As a result, American hip-hop emissaries do not draw the crowds that the “jambassadors” did. he
oicials organizing the hip-hop tours will concede that Kokayi
and the Vice Versa Alliance do not have the star power of
Gillespie, Armstrong and Ellington, but they insist that the artists
are portraying an unseen side of America and that the diversity
they embody can alter perceptions. Diversity is the buzzword of
hip-hop diplomacy, encountered again and again in reports and
speeches. For State Department oicials, the hip-hop initiatives
in Europe and in Muslim-majority states exhibit the diversity
and integration of post-civil rights America. he multi-hued
hip-hop acts sent overseas represent a post-racial or post-racist
American dream, and exhibit the achievements of the civil rights
movement, a uniquely American moment that European leaders
and others can learn from.
But it is unclear how persuasive this racialized imagery
is. Muslims do not resent the US for its lack of diversity.
Where perceptions are poor, it is because of foreign policy as,
well as, increasingly, domestic policies that target Muslims.
Perhaps the greatest irony of the State Department’s eforts to
showcase the model integration of American Muslims, and
to deploy the moral and symbolic capital of the civil rights
movement, is that these tours—as with the jazz tours—are
occurring against a backdrop of unfavorable (and racialized)
media images of Qur’an burnings, anti-mosque rallies and
accusatory Congressional hearings, as one of most alarming
waves of nativism in recent American history surges northward. he anti-mosque movement has now morphed into a
larger “anti-sharia” movement, says the Southern Poverty Law
Center. hirteen states from South Carolina to Arizona to
Alaska have introduced bills banning Islamic law. he Texas
Board of Education passed a resolution rejecting high-school
textbooks that are “pro-Islam [and] anti-Christian,” and a
similar campaign is underway in Florida. American Muslims
are also facing a rising tide of discrimination and a hostile
media climate that will no doubt worsen as the 2012 presidential campaign kicks of. As for the Democrats, maybe it is
politically easier to be photographed with Muslims in Paris
singing “We Shall Overcome” than to challenge the organized
bigotry brewing at home.
At any rate, the chessboard is convulsing. he revolts in
Tunisia, Egypt and Libya have rippled across the Mediterranean,
stirring Muslim enclaves in European cities—self-immolations
have occurred in Amsterdam, Palermo and Marseilles—and
rattling European governments and far-right parties that fear a
lood of refugees. Western states, scrambling to calibrate their
foreign policies and public diplomacy, are concerned with the
low of peoples across the Mediterranean, but increasingly with
musical lows, and the possible impact of North Africa’s revolutionary lyricists on Europe. Twice in 2011 to date, to much
protest, BBC Radio1 xtra tuned out the words “Free Palestine”
in a song by the rapper Mic Righteous, saying that “an edit was
MIDDLE EAST REPORT 260 ■ FALL 2011
made to Mic Righteous’ freestyle to ensure that impartiality
was maintained.”30 Given the purported role of rap in the Arab
revolts, hip-hop diplomacy will continue to be used as a bridge
to the democratic youth movements. It is too soon to tell if the
revolts will usher in a new era in relations between the US and
the Arab world, or between Europe and North Africa. Hopes
that the Libya intervention presaged a realignment of US power
away from the oppressor to the oppressed are increasingly
giving way to the resigned realization that the 2011 tumult
may very well produce a softer, but still compliant authoritarianism. If the latter, perceptions will remain poor, and no
dose of black music or “diversity talk” will change that. ■
Endnotes
1 Lisa Anderson, “Demystifying the Arab Spring,” Foreign Afairs (May/June 2011).
2 Whitney Joiner, “he Army Be huggin’ It,” Salon.com, October 17, 2003.
3 New York Times, November 18, 1955.
4 Penny von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), p. 5.
5 Quincy Jones, he Autobiography of Quincy Jones (New york: Doubleday, 2001), p. 14.
6 Von Eschen, p. 77.
7 Cynthia Schneider and Kristina Nelson, Mightier than the Sword: Arts and Culture in the
US-Muslim World Relationship (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, June 2008), pp. 48, 57.
8 See Zaheer Ali’s documentary project, “Beats and Risalahs,” which premiered on PBS on
June 23, 2009.
9 Washington Post, June 23, 2008.
10 Politico, August 15, 2010.
11 Washington Post, August 31, 2010.
12 See, for instance, Allan D. Austin, African Muslims in Antebellum America: Transatlantic
Stories and Spiritual Struggles (London: Routledge, 1997). Historian Michael Gomez argues that
“the most lasting [and] most salient impact” of Islam in colonial and antebellum America “was its
role in the process of social stratiication within the larger African-American society.” Michael
Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: he Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial
and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), p. 60.
13 Terry Alford, Prince Among Slaves (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
14 See Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, A History of Islam in America: From the New World to the New
World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
15 Moustafa Bayoumi, “he Race Is On: Muslims and Arabs in the American Imagination,”
Middle East Report Online (March 2010).
16 Telegraph, February 4, 2011.
17 Wall Street Journal, December 1, 2010.
18 Le Figaro, March 4, 2010.
19 Jessica Stern, “Mind Over Martyr: How to Deradicalize Islamist Extremists,” Foreign
Afairs (January/February 2010).
20 Jefry Halverson, “Rap Is Da Bomb for Defeating Abu yahya,” COMOPS Journal,
September 14, 2009.
21 Ted Swedenburg, “Fundamental’s Jihad Rap” in Asef Bayat and Linda Herrera, eds., Being
Young and Muslim (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
22 Paul Silverstein, “Guerilla Capitalism and Ghettocentric Cosmopolitanism on the French
Urban Periphery” in Melissa S. Fischer et al, eds., Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Relections
on the New Economy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).
23 Loïc Lafargue de Grangeneuve, Politique du hip-hop: Action publique et cultures urbaines
(Paris: Presses Universitaires Mirail, 2008), p. 226.
24 Jeanette Jouili, “Rapping the Republic: Who Should Muslim youth Listen To in Secular
France?” unpublished paper presented at the Amsterdam School of Social Research, University
of Amsterdam, October 2010.
25 Faycal Riad, “Un truc de malade: Abd Al Malik, ou la pétainisation du slam,” Les Mots
Sont Importants (January 2009).
26 Farah Pandith, “Muslim Engagement in the Twenty-First Century,” speech at the Atlantic
Council’s South Asia Center, April 21, 2010.
27 Erwan Ruty, “Etats-Unis: à quand le retour du (vrai) plan Marshall pour les banlieues,”
Presse et Cité, July 8, 2010.
28 See Frantz Fanon, “his Africa to Come” in Fanon, Toward the African Revolution (New
york: Grove Press, 1967), p. 178; and Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
(Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 2009), p. 26.
29 New York Times, July 22, 2011.
30 Johana Kunin, “El rap político boliviano,” iDebate (May 2009).
31 Asked why the BBC plays the classic reggae tune “he Israelites” without edits, a BBC
spokesperson said: “Drekker’s 1969 track ‘Israelites’ was an apolitical song about Rastafarianism
which has not been played in the stations for years.” he Muslim News (London), May 27, 2011.
39