Muslim Cool

Interviews with young Muslims in Chicago explore the complexity of identities formed at the crossroads of Islam and hip hop

This groundbreaking study of race, religion and popular culture in the 21st century United States focuses on a new concept, “Muslim Cool.” Muslim Cool is a way of being an American Muslim—displayed in ideas, dress, social activism in the ’hood, and in complex relationships to state power. Constructed through hip hop and the performance of Blackness, Muslim Cool is a way of engaging with the Black American experience by both Black and non-Black young Muslims that challenges racist norms in the U.S. as well as dominant ethnic and religious structures within American Muslim communities.

Drawing on over two years of ethnographic research, Su'ad Abdul Khabeer illuminates the ways in which young and multiethnic US Muslims draw on Blackness to construct their identities as Muslims. This is a form of critical Muslim self-making that builds on interconnections and intersections, rather than divisions between “Black” and “Muslim.” Thus, by countering the notion that Blackness and the Muslim experience are fundamentally different, Muslim Cool poses a critical challenge to dominant ideas that Muslims are “foreign” to the United States and puts Blackness at the center of the study of American Islam. Yet Muslim Cool also demonstrates that connections to Blackness made through hip hop are critical and contested—critical because they push back against the pervasive phenomenon of anti-Blackness and contested because questions of race, class, gender, and nationality continue to complicate self-making in the United States.

Su'ad Abdul Khabeer is Associate Professor of American Culture at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Muslim Cool: Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States. Her area of expertise is Black Islam, race, and Muslim youth.Dr. Su'ad Abdul Khabeer is Associate Professor and Director of the Arab and Muslim American Studies Program at the University of Michigan.

Marc Lamont Hill,author of Beats, Rhymes, and Classroom Life: Hip-Hop Pedagogy and the Politics of Identity:
Muslim Coolbrilliantly spotlights how Black Muslim youth construct and perform identities that embody indigenous forms of Black cultural production. Equally important, the text shows how these constructions are used to reimagine, reshape, and resist hegemonic and often anti-Black conceptions of Muslim identity. With masterful ethnographic detail, Abdul Khabeer offers a subtle and rich analysis of the complex relationships between race, religion, and state power. This book is a desperately needed intervention within Anthropology, Africana Studies, and Islamic Studies.

Aminah Beverly McCloud,DePaul University:
An intense and novel anthropological approach to the development of the relationship between African American Muslimsthe original American face of Islamand immigrant Muslims and their children. An absolute must-read.

Muslim Cool discusses much-neglected topics in the field of Islam in America; Khabeer's discussion of Muslim masculinity in the United States, for instance, is a contribution to a shockingly small bibliography on the topic.

The book in sum is an admirable approach to the circulation of Blackness, which few have taken up in the context of Muslims in the United States.

Because the text stays so close to her teachers words and theorizations while working through complex questions regarding power and religious and racial identity, it is accessible to both everyday readers and scholarly circles alike.

Khabeers study explores how young African American Muslim women and men who embrace Muslim cool use hip-hop styles of dress, music, dance, and spoken-word performance to assert their Muslim bona fides. In so doing, they are arguing against the anti-black biases of the dominant Middle Eastern and South Asian immigrant Muslim community in the United States. But theyre also arguing for their sense of belonging in the American national community that is normed as white even as it claims to be post-racial and multicultural.

A must read for any student of anthropology, religion, migration, or urban studies.

Where Chance injects spirituality into hip-hop, Muslim Cool injects hip-hop into spirituality. And in doing so, as Abdul-Khabeers Muslim Cool-hunting presents, its expanding the ways in which black history, culture, and politics get expressed, re-defined, and redeployed into new contexts.

AbdulKhabeer explores the rich relationship of hip-hop to Islam in her fascinating new work,Muslim Cool.

A skilled ethnographer, [Su'ad Abdul Khabeer] combines her poet's ear and thorough research in prose that flips the script on the anti-Black, anti-Muslim sentiment.

Muslim Coolcelebrates the spiritual grounding of hip hop and tries to tease apart its complex relationships with race and religion.