Description
The global Muslim popular culture is key to identity formation. As many young Muslims are caught between seemingly contesting national, religious and ethnic identities, we see how they have artfully fostered a third way by cultivating a global pop culture where faith emerges as the foundation of their shared identity. Through art, sports, social media, and digital technology, Muslim youth culture has inspired a global consciousness beyond state borders and national identities. Broader conversations about strengthening solidarity and cultivating third spaces for expressing their shared beliefs, creativity, and experiences have fostered a youth culture that gives new shape to what it means to be a Muslim youth today. This “ummatic” pop culture thrived under a generation of youth referred to as the September 11 generation. As the world grows increasingly interconnected, what avenues are Muslim youth exploring to nurture an ummatic youth culture, and how are these emerging transformations in global Muslim popular culture informing the identities of Muslim youth worldwide?
Dr. Kamaludeen Mohamed Nasir is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Nanyang Technological University Singapore. From 2023 to 2024, he was a Visiting Professor and the Malaysia Chair of Islam in Southeast Asia at Georgetown University. His extensive research focuses on the sociology of religion, cultural sociology, and the sociology of youth, with a particular emphasis on how young Muslims engage with popular culture and navigate their identities within the context of nationalism. Dr. Kamaludeen has authored several influential books, including Globalized Muslim Youth in the Asia Pacific and Representing Islam: Hip-Hop of the September 11 Generation, which explore the intersections of Muslim youth culture and state policies. He is finishing a book called Football and Islam: Negotiating Identity in the Global Game.
The discussion and subsequent Q&A session was moderated by Dr. Usaama Al-Azami, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
Date: October 12, 2024, at 11 AM ET.
Colloquium Summary
Main Presentation (Dr. Kamaludeen Mohamed Nasir)
Introduction
- Global Muslim popular culture is a key medium for youth identity formation.
- It serves as a mechanism for youth to navigate intersecting national, ethnic, and religious affiliations, reconciling them into a cohesive sense of self.
Understanding Global Muslim Popular Culture
Defining Popular Culture
- Sociologically, pop culture is a set of practices, beliefs, and objects that embody the most broadly shared meanings of a social system. It manifests in media, entertainment, fashion, trends, and linguistic conventions.
The Global Dimension
- Globalization is reflected in the proliferation of digital and social media technologies, solidarity movements, and generational ties.
- Muslims of the 9/11 generation grew up under heightened securitization and Islamophobic persecution.
- These pressures forged a unique global generational identity, distinct from that of their parents, marked by resilience and activism.
Muslim Popular Culture
- Muslim pop culture manifests in various forms (dress code, hip-hop, sport, consumer ethics) expressing various causes (da‘wa, social issues, Muslim persecution).
- The Umma and the ummatic are central to much expression in Muslim pop culture.
Provincializing Islam
- Understanding the globality of Islam requires acknowledging regional and denominational differences, challenging center-periphery relationships, and probing questions of authenticity. The largest Muslim countries, with influential youth populations, are outside the Middle East.
Muslim Consumer Ethic
- Muslim youth have moved beyond a basic halal consciousness: from halal products, to halal marketplace, to a global Islamic economy.
- Boycotts serve as moral protests (especially regarding Palestine), facilitating reconciliation of piety with youth culture, responding to post-9/11 Islamophobia, and interweaving local and global identities.
Muslim Hip-Hop
- Socially conscious hip-hop has long been reflective and expressive of grassroots culture.
- Reasons for hip-hop’s resonance among black youth (legacy of segregation, discriminatory policing and criminal justice, negative media portrayal) closely parallel its resonance among Muslim youth (racism, securitization, Islamophobia).
Music and Islam
- In negotiating debates over music (use of musical instruments, female vocals, vulgar language, etc.), Muslim youth engage in contestation over artistic expression.
- This also involves navigating the fusion of hip-hop with more universally sanctioned forms of Islamic music, such as the acapella nashīd.
Speaking Truth to Power
- Hip-hop culture is adopted as a form of empowerment through appropriation of a mainstream popular aesthetic and expressive medium. Symbolisms are contextualized by groups for particular socio-political causes.
- Muslim artists like Yasiin Bey (Mos Def) take inspiration from Malcolm X in articulating a universally applicable struggle for human rights. Beyond free expression, some artists operationalize Islam by performing in support of Palestine.
“Representing” Islam
“Representing” Islam
- In line with its hip-hop use, to represent is to front or champion a cause.
- This leads to questions about who represents Islam, how Islam is represented, and whether musicians can represent Islam.
“Re-presenting” Islam
- Muslim youth seek to present Islam in new ways, reflecting a crisis in authority, the rise of digital religion, and reconciling investment in cultural crafts with personal piety.
“Muslim Cool” as Protest Culture
- Muslim youth develop ways of being Muslim that tap into mainstream popular culture, especially black culture.
- Muslim youth carve out socially relevant identities amenable to protest: anti-establishment, assertive of public piety, and accepting of ummatic plurality.
Gender
- Muslim hip-hop enables contestation over gender, including self-representation by hijabis and Muslim women critiquing representations of women by male artists.
Elite Muslim Footballers
- High profile Muslim athletes, especially in football, help change perceptions of Muslims, including reducing Islamophobic attitudes.
- Athletes’ large social media platforms enable self-representation, expressions of conspicuous religiosity, and social and political activism beyond traditional media outlets.
Concluding Insights
Youth Identity Construction
- Understanding identity construction among today’s Muslim youth is essential for understanding the present and future of Islam and Muslim societies.
- Muslim youth navigate and negotiate several overlapping identities, including loyalties (national, commercial, religious, generational), stakeholders (employers, followers, Umma), and gatekeepers (state, communities, etc.).
- Muslim youth identity embodies “primordial modernity”: on the one hand, negotiating customs, traditions, and Islamic attachments, and, on the other, developments such as capitalism and industrialization.
Digital Technologies
- The Internet has had a transformational effect on the practice of religious piety in general.
- Regarding Islam, this has manifested in a shift in religious knowledge authority, with Muslim youth increasingly seeking knowledge online.
- While empowering, the democratization of knowledge is also frequently alienating.
Rethinking Popular Culture
- An ummatic lens enables comparative analysis across diverse global Muslim youth populations, enabling the identification of parallels, the deconstruction of reductive ethnocentric analyses, and challenging unidirectional patterns of center-periphery cultural influence.
Moderator Discussion
Challenges Facing Ummatic Popular Culture
- The biggest global producers of popular culture (U.S. and India) do not center the Umma.
- Major global markets for cultural production remain in the U.S. and Europe, with ties to hegemonic mechanisms like the military-industrial complex.
- However, the production and circulation of ummatic popular culture cannot be underestimated, exemplified by Islamic media production in spite of hegemonic media and the centrality of hip-hop in Arab Spring cultural production.
Q&A Discussion
Bypassing Mainstream Media
- Social media has changed the game, leveling the playing field, enabling the bypassing of traditional forms of media.
- Challenges remain, such as the role of Silicon Valley social media companies in throttling the reach of pro-Palestinian media.
Knowledge and Socialization
- Socialization was once primarily through knowledge transmission from community elders, whereas in modernity, there is more scope for peer socialization.
- Given the centrality of tradition in Islam, an ummatic approach would not dispense with community-based forms of knowledge transmission and socialization.
- Popular culture in itself is not a source of knowledge or guidance but must be taken seriously as an important communication medium key to socialization and identity formation.
Predatory Commodification
- Globalized neoliberal media industries often demonstrate pathological tendencies, such as the commodification of sexuality and of black suffering in performance for the white gaze.
- Despite these pitfalls, the essence of popular cultural movements, such as hip-hop, may be harnessed while discarding harmful elements such as vulgarity and misogyny.
- Hip-hop may be analogized to pre-Islamic Arab poetry, which was taken seriously, studied, and engaged with by early Muslims for its linguistic and cultural value, despite being the medium that preserved and conveyed Jāhilī norms and values.
Tapping into Ummatic Potential
- Ummatic solidarity is possible in popular cultural productions across the world, from fledgling film industries in Turkey and Pakistan, to government-sponsored film productions and sporting events, to individual actors in existing industries like Bollywood, to athletes sharing expressions of religiosity on social media.
- While ummatic consumer boycotts have been successful in the context of supporting Palestine, boycotting cultural production centers such as Hollywood is more difficult to achieve on a mass scale. It requires the simultaneous development of alternatives.