A hip hop head raised in New York reflects on Eid al-Adha and 9/11
Firstly, Eid Mubarak to my Muslim fam.
Second, for those of you who don't know what Eid is (or that there are two of them) and haven't Googled it yet, from Wikipedia:
Eid al-Adha (Arabic: عيد الأضحى ʿīd al-aḍḥā, [ʕiːd ælˈʔɑdˤħæː], "Festival of the Sacrifice"), also called the "Sacrifice Feast", is the second of two Muslim holidays celebrated worldwide each year, and considered the holier of the two. It honors the willingness of Ibrahim (Abraham) to sacrifice his son, as an act of submission to God's command, before God then intervened sending his angel Jibra'il (Gabriel) to inform him that his sacrifice had already been accepted. The meat from the sacrificed animal is divided into three parts. The family retains one third of the share; another third is given to relatives, friends and neighbors; and the remaining third is given to the poor and needy.
Ibrahim/Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his child is included in the the Tanakh and the Old Testament, as well. I'm not a religious scholar but, I'm pretty sure this is why Islam, Christianity and Judaism are sometimes referred to as "Abrahamic religions." These three religions share so much in their religious texts, in their origin stories. And then there are a couple key places where there is total disagreement.
Before I go too far off on a religious studies tangent, let me get to the point. Let me get to what I've been thinking about. Why has Islam pretty much disappeared from hip hop? It's been on my mind ever since I read this excellent piece on the matter from a couple years ago.
From Genius.com's Rap Stats, plotting the frequency of words appearing in rap songs from 1988 through the present day.
I listened to Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth's debut album Mecca and the Soul Brother, start to finish, for the first time in a while recently. I was prepping for 90s night at Madrone and I was feeling nostalgic for some Golden Era hip hop. Mecca and the Soul Brother is also just an excellent album and worth listening to any time. It was one of the most critically acclaimed albums of 1992 and, depending on who you ask, it's considered one of the greatest hip hop albums of all time. Personally, I'd definitely place it in at least the top 20. I also loved Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth extra as a kid because they were from Mount Vernon, just one town over from Yonkers where my family lived before we moved across the Hudson River to Nyack.
As a kid, I didn't think anything of the nearly constant references to the Quran, to Allah and Mecca — not just in Mecca and the Soul Brother, but hip hop writ large in the 90s. Check out the intro, the very first few lines of the Pet Rock and C.L. Smooth's album:
To know the truth is to know the self
To know the self is to know the Mecca
The Mecca's not a state of mind or a place
Mecca is a way of life
It is the answer to all confusion
The attribute I'd die for
Abdullah, Mohammed
Makes way for the return of the Mecca
Salaam
In hindsight, I likely didn't think anything of the heavy presence of Islam in Mecca and the Soul Brother (or any hip hop song for that matter) because America wasn't taught and conditioned to be Islamaphobic yet. I didn't grow up with the media telling me I should be afraid of my neighbor Ulysses because he's a brown, bearded, Arabic-speaking man. I didn't grow up with people with people hurling racial epithets at me like "Aye-rab," towelhead, or sand n***** because I'm ambiguously brown. (No, I'd have to wait until my late twenties for those.)
Teenagers in this country today have only lived in an America that generally fears Islam, that equates a faith with terror. That makes me tremendously sad; not to mention angry. America today ignorantly vilifies a group of people representing almost a quarter of the world (in 2010, there were 1.6 billion Muslims). America condemns the violence aimed at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon while committing acts of violence on its own people. Just yesterday, a Muslim woman in New York was set on fire. America has held on to, and invested in, its fear of Muslims in a way that keeps us in a hateful holding pattern. Literal investments have been made in Islamaphobia. From 2008-2013 alone, over $200M was been spent stoking fear and hatred towards Muslims in the US. Personally, as an American, I think there are far better investments we can make with a couple hundred million dollars. How about we commit funding to education rather than perpetuating ignorance?
If, as a country, we've deployed hundreds of millions of dollars to promoting Islamaphobia, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that Islam, once a prominent force and inspiration in hip hop, is virtually nonexistent.
